Chapter 1
At the rejection ceremony, Cain Blackwood gritted his teeth and spoke with deliberate force. "I, Cain Blackwood, formally reject Nora Greystone as my fated mate."
The moment the bond snapped, I collapsed before the moonstone, my chest ripped open as if by savage claws.
Blood trickled from my lips.
Everyone was watching.
His first love, Sienna Silvermoon, held onto his arm, a flicker of triumph in her eyes.
I should have cried, but I didn't.
Because deep inside me, something that had slept for eighteen years finally woke up from the agony.
My wolf whispered, 'They will drop to their knees.'
*****
My name was Nora Greystone, and everyone in the Blackwood Pack knew I was a "waste".
On my eighteenth awakening night, nothing happened. There was no whisper from my wolf, no agony of shifting, and no rush of power flooding my veins.
The healer shook her head and said to my parents, "There's no trace of wolf energy in her. I'm afraid she's an ordinary human."
A werewolf without a wolf was worse than an Omega. In the Blackwood Pack's hierarchy, I was meant to keep close to the walls, unseen.
But the Moon Goddess played a cruel joke on everyone. I was Cain's fated mate.
Cain was the heir to the Blackwood Alpha, born of the Blackwolf Lineage, with those crimson eyes and golden gaze.
By twenty-one, he'd won three territory wars. Everyone said he was destined to be the strongest Alpha of our time.
On the night of my eighteenth pairing, when he walked through the crowd by the bonfire toward me, the whole square went silent.
His nostrils flared, his pupils shrinking, and he hesitated for a heartbeat. I knew he'd caught my scent.
I caught his, too. It was cedar and caramel, so intense that it felt like the whole forest was flooding my lungs. My heart pounded so hard that I thought it might explode.
But his first words weren't "I found you."
Instead, he spat out a curse and turned on his heel.
It was his father, Edmund Blackwood, the Elder Alpha, who used his authority to force him to complete the marking ritual.
The moment his bite landed on the back of my neck, his fangs pierced my skin, and I felt his rage pour into my veins like molten lava. The mark burned hot, but the first thing I felt from him was coldness.
"It's merely going through the motions." He pulled his mouth away, wiping my blood from the corner of his lip with the back of his hand, without so much as a glance in my direction. "Don't think this means anything."
For the next three years, I lived in the most remote guest room of the Alpha Manor.
I learned to manage his schedule, memorize the exact ratio of his black coffee, and prepare herbal compresses with moonvine and silverpine leaves whenever he got injured during training.
Sometimes, when the mark bond picked up on my emotional fluctuations, he'd come over with a frown. "What is it now?"
His tone was never gentle, but at least he came.
I took that as hope.
Until that late night, at 2:17 a.m., I was jolted awake by a sharp pain.
It wasn't ordinary pain. The mate mark on my neck was searing, like someone branded me with a hot iron all over again, and a weird, sticky heat pulsed from the other side of the bond.
Cold sweat soaked my pajamas.
Grace Whitlock, the healer, once told me this kind of agony only happened when one's mate cheated on one.
I refused to believe it.
The door swung open.
Grace stood in the doorway, her white hair a mess and her gaze sharp.
She glanced at me as I sat slumped on the bed, one hand pressed to the back of my neck, and fell silent for a long while.
Then she closed the door, walked over to my bedside, and pulled a small glass vial from her medical kit. "Nora, I pulled this out of your herbal brew."
The bottle held a few shriveled, dark purple leaves.
"It contained wolfsbane, administered in small, consistent, precise doses, not enough to kill, yet sufficient to permanently suppress an unawakened wolf," she added.
Grace took my cold hand, her voice heavier than I'd ever heard. "Someone doesn't want your wolf to wake up."