Chapter 1

I could feel myself dying, and I still got out of bed.

That was the worst part. Not the sunken, aching pull behind my ribs, or the way my fingers shook when I reached for the door, or the black spots that swam across my vision when I stood too fast. The worst part was that I still walked to the eastern ridge. Still knelt in the dead soil. Still pressed my palms flat and sang to a dying land, while nobody in the Blackthorn Pack could be bothered to notice either of us fading.

The path there had grown familiar enough that my feet knew it even in the dark, past the split oak that marked the boundary of the old orchard, down the slope where the frost gathered thickest this time of year, out to the ridge where the soil had gone the color of ash long before I ever learned what my own hands could do to help it. I'd walked it so many nights now that I no longer needed to watch my feet to know when the ground would dip or rise.

I dug my hands into the ash-black dirt. The territory magic underneath was sluggish, faint, a heartbeat from a body that had already given up. The Old Song stirred in my chest, heavy and reluctant, dragging itself up through my throat like it knew it wasn't wanted here. I opened my mouth anyway.

The melody came out thin. A hum first, then words older than the pack itself, words I'd never been taught and somehow always known. The earth warmed under my palms. A single moonpetal stalk, brittle and barely alive, shuddered. A bud formed at its tip. It cracked open, just a fraction. White. Almost visible.

Then my breath gave out, and the bud stopped. Not open. Not closed. Just stuck.

I stared at it. Of course.

From the compound behind me, drums started up, deep and cheerful. The Spring Gathering. Seraphina's festival. Kael's idea of a good time, which meant anywhere I wasn't.

I'd asked him that morning. Quiet. Careful. Making myself small the way I always did before a request.

"Will you walk the eastern ridge with me tonight? The land needs song before the frost sets."

He was already reaching for his coat. "Another time, Elara. Seraphina needs me to test the sound at the pavilion. Bad acoustics ruin a whole evening."

"The land doesn't have another time left in it."

He paused, hand on the door. Not because he'd heard me. Because he'd remembered something else. "Tell the kitchens to hold supper. I'll eat with the guests."

Then he was gone.

I stood there a beat too long, staring at the space where he'd been. And something in my chest, the part that usually ached when he left, went quiet instead. No pain. Just silence, the kind that comes after a wound has been picked at so many times it finally stops bleeding.

That silence frightened me more than any of the pain ever had. I didn't have a name for it yet. I would never get the chance to learn one.

I wiped my hands on my thighs. The ash wouldn't come off. No one looked at my hands anyway, or any part of me, except when the bond flared and he needed my body for a handful of mechanical minutes in the dark.

I pressed a palm over my sternum, where the mate bond lived. The thread tugged, a slow pull that made my ribcage feel scooped out. He was close to Seraphina right now, and the bond hummed with his nearness anyway, a dog wagging its tail for a master who never came home.

Stop, I told it. It never listened.

The memory came whether I wanted it or not.

Fourteen nights ago. His chambers. The bond screaming, my body leaning toward him before my mind had agreed to it.

"You don't have to keep coming," he'd said. Flat. Not cruel. Just tired of me.

"The bond," I'd whispered, as if that explained the shame of wanting someone who didn't want me back.

He'd crossed the room and taken my jaw in his hand, efficient, the way you hold something you intend to use and put back. My spine had curved toward him before my brain could stop it. I hated myself for it every single time.

He'd kissed me. His hand had slid to my hip and my breath had caught, not because it felt good, but because some starved, stupid part of me had thought: maybe this time he'll look at me.

He hadn't stayed. He hadn't looked.

It was over fast, bond-driven, two bodies answering a signal neither of us had asked for. When he pulled back, the space between us on the mattress had been a canyon.

"Goodnight, Elara."

I'd lain there afterward, still full of him, still aching, and hadn't cried. I'd run out of tears months before. I'd just breathed through the humiliation of it and told myself, one more year, one more song, it will get better.

It hadn't gotten better. It had gotten quiet instead.

The memory let me go and left me standing alone in the dark, the drums fading behind me with every step deeper into the woods. I hadn't brought a coat. I hadn't planned to be the kind of Luna who sang to dying flowers while her mate stood beside another woman at a festival I'd helped decorate three years running.

I found the clearing from when I was a new bride, back when I still believed he might come looking for me out here.

He never had.

I sank down onto the frozen ground, hands in my lap, and stared at nothing.

The bond tugged again, long and slow, and my whole chest contracted with it. Down at the compound he was probably laughing at something Seraphina had said, or not laughing, it didn't matter which. The bond didn't care what he felt. It only pulled, over and over, a hook woven into my lungs and my heartbeat that I couldn't rip free without tearing something essential loose with it.

One more song, I told myself. Give the land what's left.

I opened my mouth.

The Old Song rose, weaker than that morning, a pale thread of sound. The territory magic flickered beneath the soil, desperate, and when it reached for me this time it didn't ask. It took. Too fast. Too much. A starving thing that had never learned how to be gentle.

The drain hit like a rush, not the slow pull of a morning song. My vision spotted. My hands went numb. I kept singing anyway, because stopping had never once occurred to me as an option, not for the land, not for him, not for myself.

My knees buckled. I dropped forward, palms flat on the frozen earth, and the Old Song poured out of me like something I couldn't close off anymore. The land drank and I gave, and my body went light in the worst way, the kind of light that comes when you've handed over more than you had and there's no getting it back.

The last thing I saw was the moonpetal from the ridge. It had followed me somehow, or the land had carried it here, a small miracle for a small death. It opened all the way beside my hand. White. Perfect. Whole.

Oh, I thought. There you are.

The song ended, and so did I.