Chapter 3

Callum came for me a little after midnight.

He didn't knock. The door just banged open and hit the wall, and Callum filled the doorway, still in the armor.

I smelled him before I even turned around.

"You emptied the vaults." His voice shook.

"The gold. The jewelry. The blades off my walls. The servants say you've stripped half the keep."

I didn't look up. I was wrapping my father's old knives in a cloth, one at a time.

"Nothing on them was ever yours, Callum. It was borrowed. I'm taking it back."

"You came here with nothing."

He crossed the room in three steps. "A quiet nobody with a dead family and nowhere to go. I took you in. I gave you a name and a bed and a title---"

"You gave me a bed." I stood up. "How generous."

"Put it back." His canines had already grown long and sharp.

"Every coin. Before the elders wake up. Or I'll make you."

Then his hand shot out, claws already sliding out of his fingertips and closed around my throat.

That was his mistake.

For a whole year I'd kept it chained.

I let it off the chain and released my strength out.

It came off me like a cold wind with no sky behind it. Every candle in the room went out at once.

My own claws became long and black and I caught his wrist before his fingers could close.

Bone creaked under my grip. Callum's eyes went wide.

Then my real aura crashed into him.

My eyes burned gold and my wolf rose up behind me.

His wolf felt it first. I watched it happen on his face.

The big Alpha of the Zane Pack, and something inside him just folded.

His knees dipped. His head started to drop, the way a weak wolf gives its neck to a stronger one.

He caught himself, shaking. But we'd both felt it.

He let go of my wrist like it had burned him.

"What---" His voice came out cracked. "What are you?"

I let my claws slide back in. "I told you."

I picked my father's knives back up. "You'd find out sooner than you'd like."

That's when the horn went off.

It came up out of the valley, low and long, rolling right through the stone floor under our feet.

A war horn.

The deep kind this pack hadn't heard in three years.

Callum spun toward the black window.

Out in the halls the boots were already pounding, and somewhere downstairs a man was shouting the same thing over and over.

Wolves at the gate. Wolves at the gate.

Suddenly, every room in the castle blazed to life.

The wolf nobles burst into panicked shouts, demanding to know what had happened.

Then the mournful blast of a war horn tore through the night.

A guard skidded into my doorway, white as a sheet, too scared to even bow.

"Alpha---" He could barely get it out. "There's an army in the valley. Hundreds of them were armored, just standing there in the snow. And they're flying an old banner."

I couldn't believe my eyes.

For three years I'd believed that banner burned to ash, along with every last person who ever carried it.

"---and they wouldn't talk to the Alpha," the guard rushed on.

"They won't talk to anybody. They just keep saying the same thing. That they've come for the last daughter of the Hale Pack." He swallowed.

Callum turned around and looked at me.

I picked up my father's old cloak and swung it around my shoulders.

"You wanted to know what I am."

I walked past him to the door.

"Come down to the gate, Callum. I'll show you."