Chapter 3

The summons drags me the whole way to the pack house — box hard in my apron pocket, Dot's last words still ringing in my ears. Don't you dare open it inside that house.

That's the part nobody warns you about a pack.

You can hate every stone in it, every face in it, and it still keeps a leash knotted around your body. Rogue blood, empty stomach, split cheek and all — the Alpha calls, and you go.

I got no vote in my feet. But I've got one in my face, so I set it hard, the way Dot told me to. Like my daddy's watching every step.

The pack house is packed wall to wall.

Word travels fast when the Warden's leftover kid is finally about to get what half these people figure she's had coming. Nobody's bothering to whisper.

"There she is," somebody says. "Took him long enough."

"Ten bucks says she cries."

Somebody laughs. Somebody else picks it up. It rolls back through the crowd like a wave, and I walk straight into the middle of it.

I keep my chin up walking through them.

Partly because Dot told me to. Mostly because the second I look at the floor, they win — and I've spent twenty-one years not handing these people the satisfaction.

Silas stands at the head of the room, an elder at each shoulder.

He won't look at me. That's how I know exactly what's coming.

"Just say it," I tell him under my breath, once I'm close enough that only he can hear. "Whatever they wound you up to say. Say it and let me out of here."

"I'm trying to keep you alive," he says, barely moving his lips.

"In front of your whole pack? Hell of a plan."

"They have to believe it."

For half a second his eyes cut to mine, and Dot's words float back up. A hand up his back, working his mouth like a puppet.

Whatever's about to come out of him, some part of it was never his. It doesn't make me hate him one ounce less.

Then he lifts his head, and his voice changes — fills the room, climbs the rafters, doesn't leave a single soul out.

"I, Silas Vane, Alpha of Coldwater, reject you as my mate and my Luna."

The bond doesn't snap clean.

"I sever the tie between us. Before the Goddess, and before this pack—"

It tears.

"—you are nothing to me."

I've been hurt plenty. Slapped, starved, stepped on, stepped over.

This is none of those.

This is a fishhook dragged back out through everything soft in me, slow, with the barb still set. My knee cracks against the boards.

Something only a night old — something I never asked for, never wanted — rips loose at the root. And God help me, the wolf in me lunges for him even as he throws me away.

And the whole room lets out one long, satisfied breath at the exact same second. Like this is the show they bought the ticket for.

So I get up.

I get up — and every last one of them stops breathing.

"That it?" My voice comes out level. Don't ask me how, because I don't know.

"Then you'll hear mine."

I straighten all the way up, blood on my cheek, and I let Bly rise up into my eyes — gold, and mean.

"I, Frankie Mercer, I'm done with this pack. I'd sooner run rogue and starve in a ditch than sleep one more night under a man who does his elders' killing for them."

I take one step toward him.

"I let you go first, Alpha." I watch it land. "Choke on it."

The room stays dead silent.

A rogue doesn't talk to an Alpha like that. A rogue for damn sure doesn't stand there gold-eyed and whole after a rejection that should've dropped her like a sack of wet sand.

Here's the thing not one of them knows. I've always healed wrong. Bones that should've stayed broke, knitting up clean by morning. Something in my blood that runs hotter than it's got any business running.

I've spent twenty-one years making myself small so nobody'd ever clock it. And somewhere in the last thirty seconds, I just quit trying.

Let them see.

On Silas's face, under all that horror — God help me — there's something that looks almost like pride.

But it's the old men behind him I can't look away from.

Every face in the crowd is drunk on watching me break. Up on the dais, the elders aren't. Ambrose has gone the gray of dishwater.

He's staring at me like I'm a door that just swung open in a house he'd have sworn was empty for years.

And he's not the only one. It moves down the row of them like a draft. One old elder grabs the arm of his chair and hauls himself up onto his feet. Another's lips are going fast and silent — the way you pray when you forgot you still knew how.

Whatever they see when they look at me, not one of them looks glad anymore.

Ambrose's mouth moves. I only catch the tail end of it.

"...it's awake."

And out past the walls — past the town, past the county road, way back in the deep timber where the trees stop having names — something answers him.

Something howls.

It's not a wolf.

Every wolf in that hall knows it in the same half-second. The whole room goes rigid at once, every hair standing up, because we were all raised on the sound our own kind makes, and this is not it.

This is older. This is wrong. This is a sound that has no business coming out of a throat.

Silas's head snaps toward the window.

When he turns back to me, every scrap of that cold Alpha mask is gone. What's left under it is something I've never seen on a man like him.

It's fear.

"Run," he says. "Frankie. Right now. Run."