Chapter 1

"Since you loathe me this much — your bloodservant wife—" My voice carried clear and steady through the dead-silent hall as I knelt at its center.

"Then sever the bond yourself. With your own hands."

Cassius's face darkened like a storm about to break.

He came down off the dais in long strides, and there was no mercy in his eyes — only the fury of a man who believed he'd been insulted.

Behind him, Ophelia drifted toward me in a gown white as untouched snow. She stopped at his side, trailing one slender hand across his chest, her gaze sharp as a poisoned needle where it raked over the torn hem of my dress.

"Maeve, drop the wounded act," Ophelia said with a soft laugh — delicate, and yet pitched to reach every corner of the room. "After all these years, do you honestly still think you're the Luna of Ashmoor?"

Then, all at once, she leveled a glare at me and bit out each word: "You're nothing but a bloodservant." A little laugh. "You were never fit to stand in this hall."

She turned to the gathered pack and lifted her voice. "Isn't that right?"

"Get out!"

"Filth belongs in the stables!"

"Don't foul the Alpha's sight!"

The jeering broke over me like a tidal wave.

Cassius wasted no more time. He raised his hand, gray wolf-power coiling at his fingertips, and drove it into the bond-mark at the nape of my neck.

Agony. My soul felt like it was being sawed apart with a dull blade. A choked sound escaped me as my whole body was flung against the marble.

"Look at you. You don't even have the strength to stand." Ophelia sauntered over on her jewel-studded heels and ground one down onto the back of my hand. "This cheap gray dress suits you. Just like your worthless little life — not worth a second glance."

I curled in on myself, palms pressed to the cold seams of the stone, nails splitting until blood welled beneath them. And the thing inside me — the thing I'd chained down for so long — woke to the humiliation and began to roar through my veins, wild and without warning. Silver lines crept up from my wrist, inch by inch.

If I let it loose now—

But I couldn't. I fisted my hands in the lining of my skirt and held on to the faint, burning life low in my belly. That was my line. The one I would never cross.

"Drag it out." Cassius turned away without another glance, took Ophelia's hand, and started for the throne. "Don't let garbage soil the rite." Then, almost as an afterthought, mocking: "Anyone who lets her back in tonight is cast out of the pack with her."

They hauled me out the doors like a dead dog and threw me into the teeth of the blizzard.

When the heavy doors boomed shut behind me, I clawed my way toward the distant tree line. The snow swallowed everything — everything but one gaze that pierced me like a needle.

Deep in the black tangle of the trees, a pair of silver-gray eyes was fixed on me.

And a voice — low, cold, as though it had crawled up out of some ancient hell — threaded through the shrieking wind and into my ear:

"So the fools of Ashmoor threw this away as garbage."

Those eyes glittered with a predator's cruelty and delight, locked on the curve of my belly.

"How interesting…"