Chapter 1

I woke up with dirt in my throat and no heartbeat in my chest.

That was the first thing I noticed. The second was the screaming.

It took me a moment to understand the screaming was mine, buried under six feet of grave

soil, choking my lungs with every jerk of my body. My hands shot upward. My nails caught

on something wet and thin. A shroud. They had wrapped me in cheap linen before they

threw me away.

Justin’s voice, fading: “You always said you’d die for the pack, Lawl.”

My brother’s laugh: “Thanks for the sacrifice, sis.”

The memory hit like a gunshot. I tore upward, ripping the shroud apart with fingers that felt

wrong, too cold, too strong, the nails gone black at the edges like they had been left out in

frost. I clawed through earth that should have been frozen solid. It gave way for me. Soft.

Waiting.

The grave gave me back.

My skull broke the surface at midnight. The air tasted of sulfur and burnt sugar, the curse

wind Gravesend was known for. I pulled it into my lungs anyway, even though my chest sat

still and dead beneath my ribs. No heartbeat. No warmth. Just a low hum behind my

sternum, like a string plucked on an instrument no one plays anymore.

I dragged myself out of the ground, hand over hand, muscles singing with a strength that

did not feel like mine. My wedding dress clung to me in wet rags. The white silk Justin had

chosen, the color of pack purity, was stained black by the dirt of the pit. Good. Let it rot with

the rest of me.

I stood.

The pit stretched around me in every direction, a valley of shallow graves and bent, leafless

trees, blue fire crawling low over the fresh mounds. In the distance, Gravesend’s skyline cut

the dark like a row of broken teeth. Gaslight and neon. Smoke and music. The city that

watched me die and kept right on breathing.

I looked at my hands.

The ring was gone. They had probably sold it before my blood dried. But the scars stayed.

The knife calluses. The burn on my left palm from the night I pressed it to Justin’s chest and

swore I would die for him before I let anyone else touch what was his.

I had meant it. That was the part that made me sick.

Something moved inside me. Not a pulse. Something older, coiled behind my ribs like a held

breath. It did not use words. It did not need them. Hungry. Take. Burn.

I pushed it down. Not yet.

First, I needed a face that was not a corpse’s.

I found a camp on the edge of the pit, men who picked through the graves for scraps of

cursed metal and dead wolves’ fangs, passing a bottle of rot-gin between them, laughing at

nothing. I took a coat. I took a revolver, half rusted, still good enough to fire. I took a pair of

boots two sizes too big.

I did not take their lives.

That surprised me. The old me would have killed them for the insult of being alive so close

to my grave. But the thing wearing my skin now was patient. It counted. It understood that a

ghost with a body count was only a killer, and a ghost with a plan was something worse.

I found a shard of mirror in one man’s pocket while he slept off the gin.

The face looking back at me was almost mine. Same sharp cheekbones. Same mouth, the

bottom lip split and healed crooked. But my eyes, my plain brown eyes, the ones Justin used

to say he could read like a book, were gone. In their place sat two rings of silver around

black so deep it looked like it was still falling.

I was pretty now. The way a blade is pretty. Clean. Done arguing with anyone.

I tore a strip from the stolen coat and tied it over the lower half of my face, leaving only the

silver rings of my eyes showing.

Then I started walking toward the city.

The gate was watched by Vodeywood raiders, men I had trained myself, men who had eaten

at my table, men who had stood in the crowd and watched me die and done nothing but

lower their eyes. They stopped me at the tree line, noses working, hunting for a scent.

They found none.

“Name,” the taller one said, hand on his belt.

I tilted my head. My voice came out low, like gravel dragged over glass. Not my voice. Not

quite. “Lawl.”

He frowned like the name meant something and didn’t. “Business?”

I let my hand rest on the revolver at my hip, the one I had loaded with grave dirt and shaved

silver before I even reached the gate, working by feel in the dark like my hands already knew

what they wanted to be for.

“Murder,” I said.

He laughed, the kind of laugh men use when they are not sure if they should be laughing,

and waved me through.

I walked into Gravesend’s neon throat, and something under my ribs turned over, slow and

pleased, like it already knew the way home.

Thirty days.

Thirty days until Justin Vodeywood stood under the Blood Moon and bound himself to the

Sanguine Syndicate’s princess. Thirty days until my brother stood at his right hand, wearing

the smile he wore when the knife went in.

I passed a board near the market square, notices pinned three deep. My own face looked

back at me from the top layer, gone soft with rain. Laura Roal. Beloved enforcer of the pack.

Lost to us too soon. Under it, fresh red ink, the paper still stiff.

THE BLOOD MOON WEDDING. THIRTY DAYS. ALL GANGS WELCOME. ALL ENEMIES HANGED.

I pulled the red notice down and folded it into my coat.

Let them have their countdown. Let them dress their bride in silk and crown their Alpha in

gold.

I was going to give Gravesend a wedding it would never stop talking about.

Behind me, one of the raiders at the gate was still watching. Not with suspicion. With

something closer to grief, the way a man looks at a shadow shaped like someone he misses.

He turned back to his post before I could decide whether that meant I was safe, or already

found.

I kept walking anyway. There was no version of tonight where I turned around and climbed

back into the dirt. Whatever was left of Laura Roal had already made that choice for me,

somewhere between the shroud and the surface. All I had to do now was not waste it.

The city swallowed me whole, gaslight sliding over my stolen coat, the crowd parting a half

step wider than it needed to, the way people move around something they cannot name but

do not trust. Good. Let them not trust me. Trust was for the living.

Behind my ribs, the hum kept time with my footsteps, patient, counting down the same

thirty days I was.