Chapter 4

By dawn, they had stopped calling him a prisoner. They were calling him my treason.

They came down together, the way families do when they have decided something ugly and want it to look like justice.

Cassian. Two warriors with silver spears. My foster father. Maris, still in her Luna crown, tears already loaded.

The warriors did not look at me first. They looked at the man behind me. At the broken chain. At the smoke still curling from the silver burns in his skin.

Then they lowered their spears. Not to warn him. To aim.

My foster father unfolded a strip of parchment and did not even pretend his hands were clean.

"By order of Lord Vale and the elders," he said, "the rogue beneath this hall is to be executed before sundown. The girl who claimed him will answer for sheltering a threat to the pack."

A girl. Not his ward. Not the bride they had dressed in white last night. A girl.

Maris stepped closer to Cassian. "First she fails as a mate," she said, soft enough to sound sorry. "Now she hides a monster under our house. How much lower can she fall?"

"Step aside, Elowen." My foster father did not shout. He never had to. "You have embarrassed this family enough."

The man stood behind me, chained, silver still eating into him. He could barely hold his own weight. One clean spear through the bars, and it would be over.

I stepped in front of him. "No."

The word landed in the cell like a dropped blade. My father blinked. In twenty-two years, I had never given him that word.

"Move, Elowen," Cassian said. Low. A warning.

I looked at him — my fated mate, the Alpha heir who had rejected me under the Blood Moon, the man who had slapped me in front of the whole pack.

"You rejected me before the whole pack," I said. "So I'll answer you before witnesses."

Something crossed his face. Not anger. Fear.

"Don't," he said. "Elowen—"

"I accept your rejection, Cassian Veyr."

The bond snapped.

I felt it tear free behind my ribs. For the first time since the Blood Moon, the pain went out of me instead of into me. It did not break me. This time, it let me go.

It did not let Cassian go so kindly.

He dropped. One knee. Then one hand. Stone cracked beneath his palm as the breath was torn out of him.

Not for Maris. Not for the crown. For the bond he had thrown away, and never once believed I would dare to hand back.

Maris grabbed for him. "Cassian—?" He couldn't answer her.

The warriors stared. Nobody had told them what to do about a future Alpha on his knees in a dungeon.

Behind me, the chains went still.

The man I had pulled out of the dark drew one slow breath. And when he opened his eyes, they were not the dull red of a cornered animal anymore.

They were burning. Ancient. Awake.

He said nothing. He did nothing. He only looked at the wolves who had come to kill him.

One by one, every wolf in the room lowered its head.