Chapter 2

I met Kieran Blackwood at eighteen, at a Council summit in Denver. He walked past me, stopped dead, and turned around like someone had yanked a rope through his ribs. Mates. I felt it too—my wolf, Vesper, surging up under my skin so hard I had to grab a table to stay upright. She sang for him. I had never heard her make that sound before. For four years, he loved me the way you love a storm from a window. From a distance. Fascinated. Then he started sanding me down. My laugh was too loud. My mountain accent was “unfinished.” The way I ran barefoot through his mother’s gardens was “feral.” I fought with my hands instead of my words, and that was “common.” And I—God help me—I changed. Every single time. Like a girl chasing a grade she could never quite earn. When he finally asked me to take the mate mark, he had one condition: I give up my place in my brother’s pack, move to Silvercrest, and learn to be “a Luna worth the name.” I said yes. I was twenty-two and stupid with love. Three weeks after the mating ceremony, his mother, Rowena Blackwood, imitated my accent at dinner. The whole table laughed into their napkins. I looked at Kieran for rescue. He squeezed my hand and murmured, “Darling, get used to it. They don’t mean any harm.” That was the night I understood. I hadn’t married into a family. I’d married into a two-hundred-year-old private club with impossible standards. And I was the intruder who would never be voted in. That was also the year Rowena started bringing me tea. Every night. Warm, floral, faintly bitter. For your temper, dear. You run so hot. Vesper went quiet that winter. Not gone—muffled. Like she was howling from the bottom of a well. I stopped shifting. I told myself it was stress. To teach me “the rules,” Kieran invented a test that lasted five years: the Blood Moon Ceremony, and who would stand beside him wearing the Luna’s moonstone. Year one, it was a Council elder’s daughter. She understands our traditions better than you do, Wren. I sat at the far end of the hall, beside the third cousins. Year two, it was his childhood friend. My assignment was the kitchens. Halfway through the night a visiting wolf wandered in for water, saw me, and apologized. “Sorry—I thought you were the new house staff.” Year three. Year four. Eventually I stopped asking who had replaced me. I became the joke of the Silvercrest territory. The Luna who was never crowned. The mountain girl in the big house. When they said my name, it came out coated in pity. My brother saw it first. Rhys had never trusted old blood and their soft, smiling cruelty. He’s Alpha of Ironpine now—new power, rough edges, fifteen hundred wolves who’d follow him into fire. He made his bet with me the day I left home. Five years, Wren. If he can’t put you where you belong in five years, you come back. And when that day comes, don’t blame me for how I settle it. I laughed at him. I thought it would take one. Now it was year five, and I was standing in my dressing room with his message on my screen, and the last nerve I had left finally gave out. I lost. I took a breath and typed one line. Okay. Start it. Then I powered the phone down, walked to the safe in the wall, and entered the code. The door swung open. Inside, on black velvet, lay the moonstone pendant I had never been considered worthy to wear. Two hundred years old. Cold as a February creek. I lifted it. The chain bit into my palm. Downstairs, I could hear them laughing—Kieran and the woman who was about to wear my crown. I turned toward the door. And walking down that staircase, I finally let myself think the thought I had been swallowing for five years: I am not going to survive this house. So I’m going to bury it instead.