Chapter 1

My mate outbid three packs for the last moonpetal in the country, which was the only thing left in the world that could have saved my father's life. Then he handed it to Sable Winter, and she fed it to her rabbit.

I found out from a photograph.

She posted it at two in the morning, a white rabbit in her lap with silver petals scattered across its paws, and underneath she had written that Clover was eating better than she was these days.

Nine hundred thousand. Three bids. A flower that opens once every ten years under a blood moon, and it went down the throat of a rabbit named Clover.

I sat on the floor of the hospital corridor and looked at that photograph until the screen went dark, and then I woke it and looked at it again. Down the hall my father's monitor was making the sound it makes when a body has stopped negotiating.

My wolf pushed up under my ribs, low and hurting.

Ask him. There has to be a reason. Ask him.

Vesper had been saying that to me for six years.

Let me tell you how Cassian Rourke became Alpha of the Emberfell Pack.

He did not win it and he did not fight anyone for it. He came to our territory at seventeen with a rogue's brand burned into his shoulder and an accusation of stolen blood trailing behind him, and every pack from here to the coast had already shut the door in his face.

Except for my father.

Gideon Halloway was Alpha then and my mother was his Luna, and when the Silver Council came up our road demanding the rogue boy be handed over, my father stood on the steps of the Warden's House and told them the charge was a lie and that he would put his own title behind it. He was right but It cost him four years and most of his standing with the other Alphas to prove it, and he never once asked Cassian for anything in return.

Emberfell passes through blood and always has. So when my mother died and my father began to fail, the pack came to me, because I am the last Halloway and the line runs through my veins and nowhere else. Elder Kane told me plainly that I could hold it alone, a Luna's seat with no Alpha beside it, and that it had been done before.

I chose Cassian instead.

We were never fated. I need that understood, because everything else in this turns on it. There was no bond and no pull and none of what the older women get misty about when they talk of the moon picking somebody out for you. I met him in my father's study when I was nineteen, arguing with a map about a border he had no authority over, and I decided I did not need the moon to tell me a thing I already knew.

A chosen bond is a real bond. It is spoken, and it is marked, and it holds.

I marked him at the summer gathering in front of four hundred wolves, and his mark still sits on my collarbone. The title went with it. That is the law in Emberfell and every wolf standing in that clearing understood exactly what they were watching. Cassian Rourke did not become Alpha because he was the strongest of us. He became Alpha because I said his name.

For six years I let everyone forget that. I stood behind him at council and let the border packs call him Alpha Rourke and call me nothing much at all. I ran the trade lines and the winter stores and the border rotations and let him take the credit for all of it, because he had been a branded rogue and I knew what being respected meant to him.

I thought that was what a good mate did. I have had a great deal of time since to think about what I was actually doing.

My father took 2 silver rounds in the rogue raids eleven years ago, and one of them sits too close to the spine to cut out. Silver does not leave a wolf the way lead leaves a man. It stays, and it burns, and it eats through you a little at a time for a decade until one winter your body simply stops trying.

The healers managed it for years. In the autumn they stopped being able to manage it.

Moonpetal is the only thing that draws silver back out of the blood. It is not a treatment and it is not a maybe, it is the one answer there is, and the last confirmed bloom in the country was going to the Ashvale Highmarket in November. I had been putting money aside for it since I was 23 years old.

I told Cassian about the auction in October, and I told him twice.

He was leaving for the coast to sit with the Council delegation and I could not go, because my father cannot be left alone anymore. I gave him the account and the lot number and the ceiling I had set, and he told me he would handle it.

He did handle it. He handled it beautifully. He went three bids deep against Ashvale and Larkmoor and carried that flower home like a trophy.

He simply never once asked me why I wanted it.

The night my father crashed, I reached for the mind-link first.

Every mated pair has one. It is not words exactly, it is closer to knowing which room the other person is standing in, and I had been able to find Cassian through it since I was nineteen years old.

I reached, and I hit a wall.

It was not muffled and he was not asleep. It was shut, the way you close a door with your shoulder behind it. Vesper made a sound I had never heard out of her before.

I called him eleven times. I counted them afterward, so I know the number. It was raining, and they do not let you use a phone on the ward, so I stood out in the parking lot with the rain running down the back of my collar and called my mate eleven times.

He picked up on the twelfth, except that it was not him.

"Maren." Sable's voice, warm and unhurried, with water running somewhere behind her. "Cassian is in the shower. Do you want me to pass on a message?"

I stood there with my father's blood pressure still burning behind my eyes.

Sable Winter grew up with Cassian in the northern territories and they were together two years before I ever met him, and it ended badly enough that he has never once told me how, and she left the country for six years afterward. She came back in the spring. Since the spring she has had a bedroom in the Warden's House, which is my house, the house my mother died in, because Cassian said she had nowhere else to go and it would be cruel to put her in the inn.

"Maren? Is it urgent?"

"No," I said.

Behind her the water shut off and I heard him say her name. He did not say it sharply and he did not sound surprised. He said it easily, the way you say a name to somebody who is already in the room with you.

I do not remember going down. I remember wet gravel through my jeans and the phone against my ear and my own voice coming out flat and level, which shocked me, because nothing else in my body was.

"Sable, my father is dying tonight. I am asking you wolf to wolf. Put him on the phone."

There was a pause exactly long enough for a woman to make a decision.

"He has had such a long week," she said. "Can it wait until morning?"

Something in my chest went quiet. It was not loud and nothing shattered. It went quiet the way a room does when somebody finally shuts off a machine that has been humming so long you had stopped hearing it.

I gripped that phone until my knuckles went white.

"It can wait," I said. "It is nothing urgent. Just the rejection."

Then I hung up.

My father did not die that night. I guess he is stubborn in a way I have inherited and it has cost us both a great deal. He held on until dawn and then he leveled out, and the healer took me into the corridor and told me we might have six weeks and might have three, and that if there was any way on this earth to get moonpetal, I should get it.

Cassian came home four days later. He did not come to the hospital.

He went straight to the Warden's House, and by the time I got back that evening the whole pack already knew what he had done, because he had done it on the council floor in front of thirty people.

The Council delegation seat. Emberfell gets one and only one, it goes to the coast for two years, and it is the single most valuable thing a border wolf can ever put a name to. My father sat that seat at thirty. I had been named to it in the spring and my paperwork had been filed for months.

He gave it to Sable, and he announced it as a kindness. She had come home with nothing, he said, and she had lost six years abroad, and Emberfell owed her the chance to start again.

Bree told me everything of it in the corridor with her fingers clamped around my wrist, and I listened to every word, and somewhere in the middle I noticed the floor had begun doing something strange.

I had not slept in four days and had not eaten properly in longer. I had been carrying my father up and down three flights because the hospital elevator has been broken since August, and every night I had been folded into a plastic chair listening for a machine to change its tone.

I made it as far as the top of the stairs.

Here is the part I told myself for a long time that I had imagined.

The council doors were standing open. There were thirty one wolves in that room and every one of them heard me hit the stone, because a body going down is not a quiet thing and because we hear everything.

Bree screamed my name. Elder Kane came out and two of the young trackers came out, and somebody pushed a jacket under my head while somebody else shouted for a healer, and from where I was lying I could see straight through that doorway into the chamber.

Cassian did not turn around. He was at the head of the table with his hand resting on Sable's shoulder, telling her which of the coastal Alphas she ought to meet with first, and he did not turn around.

I lay on that floor looking at my mate's back and understood the thing that six years of being reasonable had kept me from understanding. He had heard me fall. Of course he had heard. He had heard, and he had decided it was not worth interrupting the sentence he was in the middle of.

Enough, Vesper said.

She had not spoken since the parking lot.

I went to Elder Kane in the morning.

Rejection is not a private thing in Emberfell. There is a form of words and it must be spoken aloud under a full moon in front of witnesses, and before any of that it goes into the pack record under the Elder's seal, and once it is entered there is a 14 day grace period in which either party may withdraw it.

Kane read what I had written. Then he took his glasses off and looked at me for a long moment.

"Maren. You know what this does to him."

"I know exactly what it does to him."

"He does not only lose you." He laid his hand flat across the page. "He is Alpha of this pack because you are a Halloway and because you spoke the words. Unsay them and he is not Alpha of anything. He is a rogue with a brand on his shoulder again, and there is not a pack between here and the coast that will have him."

"I know what he is," I said. "I am the one who gave him the alternative."

He sealed it. His hands were not steady while he did it and he asked me twice whether I wanted to wait, and I told him no both times.

The next full moon is in thirty one days.

I went out through the side door because I could not stand to walk past that chamber, and I sat in my car in the lot with the healer's estimate folded in my coat pocket, and I looked at my phone.

Three weeks earlier I had received a message from a number I did not know. I ignored it at the time, because that is not the kind of message I answer, and because I still believed my mate was going to come home with a flower in his hand.

I opened it again and read it twice. Then I called.

He picked up on the second ring, and he did not sound remotely surprised to hear from me, which told me a great deal about how long he had been sitting there waiting.

"Maren Halloway."

The rain started up again on the windshield.

"I speak the rejection at the next full moon," I said. "Thirty one days. After that I will take your mark and your name in front of whatever witnesses you want, and my father's connections come with me, all of them, which is what you actually want."

There was a beat of quiet.

"You have thought about this."

"I have thought about nothing else for four days." My voice did not shake once, and I was almost proud of it. "So I am going to ask you one question, and then I am going to hang up, and if you lie to me I will find out and I will make it expensive."

"Ask."

"When do I get the fucking moonpetal?”