Chapter 4

I woke in pain and bone-deep weakness to a scene I didn't know. No shabby cabin, no knife-edged wind and snow. When I pushed myself up off the great stone bed heaped with furs, what came through the window wasn't wind — it was a low, restless swell of growling.

I shoved open the heavy obsidian door. The air was thick with something wild and damp, the musk of beasts. This was the court of Nightfell — and it was no sanctuary of mine.

The guards in the corridor, the servants, even the clan lords passing through — every one of them froze in perfect unison the moment I stepped out.

"Is that… the offering the Wolf King dragged back?" "She doesn't carry Nightfell's scent. She's an outsider."

The hostility was thick enough to touch. Someone started muttering curses; another laid a hand on the bone-blade at his hip. In those beast-bright eyes churned nothing but hatred for the intruder.

Just then a spine-chilling pressure rolled out of the depths of the great hall. Draven had come. Dressed in dark, close-cut battle-leathers, the violence coming off him now was worse than it had been on the snowfield. With every step he took, the people of Nightfell were forced to lower their heads.

"Draven, have you lost your mind?" The aged voice of the council head rang out across the hall. "For one bloodservant Ashmoor threw away, you'd cast aside the laws of Nightfell? She's that man's woman. Hand her over — buy peace on the border with her!"

Draven stood on the dais, knuckles white with the force of his grip. That senseless pull — the mate bond he both loathed and craved — was slamming through him now, wild and relentless.

"She stays in Nightfell for now," he ground out through his teeth, as though speaking to himself. "Until I know what that power in her is, anyone who touches her will find their head mounted on the wall."

I stood where I was, my heart gone to ash. I turned to go back to that cold cell of a room. If this pack wanted to hate me, then I would fold away every last expectation.

But a shrill alarm ripped open Nightfell's dark sky. That sound — I knew it far too well. It was the war-horn of Ashmoor.

"My King! The border's been breached!" A herald came scrambling into the hall, his voice warped with fear. "Ashmoor's elite. They've named the woman they've come for by name… They say they carry a forbidden weapon — one that can turn this whole land to scorched earth in a heartbeat."

The hall erupted. Draven's face went iron-gray in an instant. He whipped around to me, and in his eyes blazed the hysterical bloodlust of a mate bond that scents a threat.

"Take her down to the deepest cellar and guard her," Draven roared at his men, then wrenched the sword from his hip and leveled its point at the doors. "As for those Ashmoor fools…"

He turned his head, bloodshot eyes fixed on me, a madness in them right on the edge of snapping. "Maeve Thorne — don't you dare die."

Beyond the doors, fire climbed the sky. I stood at the center of the hall and watched that wall of flame, and for the first time I felt the true despair of the thing called fate — that no matter where I ran, they would never let me go.

I touched my belly. If this was a dead end with no way out, then before I died I would leave them a gift they'd never forget.