Chapter 1

My husband satisficed satisficed signed the divorce papers on our anniversary, his Luna sat in my chair wearing my dress, and the entire pack watched me get dragged out like garbage.

"Remove her," Damien said without looking up.

Two guards gripped my arms. My knees hit the marble floor of the banquet hall—the same hall I'd spent three days decorating for our anniversary dinner. Two hundred pack members sat at tables I'd arranged, eating food I'd planned, under flowers I'd chosen.

None of them looked at me.

"Damien, please—" My voice cracked. "At least tell me why."

He finally raised his eyes. Cold. Empty. The same grey eyes I'd loved for three years of marriage—eyes that now looked through me like I was glass.

"Because you're useless, Aria." He said it the way someone comments on weather. "No wolf. No power. No heir. Three years, and you've given me nothing."

The woman beside him—sitting in my chair, at my table—placed her hand on his arm with practiced intimacy. Vanessa Cole. Blonde. Beautiful. And very, very pregnant.

"Don't be cruel, darling," Vanessa murmured, loud enough for everyone to hear. "She can't help what she is."

What I am. A wolfless Luna. The greatest shame in werewolf society.

I'd hidden it for three years. Smiled through every pack ceremony, deflected every challenge, found every excuse to avoid shifting. Because my wolf had never come. Eighteen, nineteen, twenty, twenty-one—nothing. A hollow space inside me where power should have lived.

And now the whole pack knew.

"The divorce is filed," Damien continued, sliding a document across the table. "You'll leave tonight. No settlement. No claim to pack assets. You brought nothing into this marriage, and you'll leave with the same."

"That's not true." My voice came out stronger than I expected. "I managed this pack's finances for three years. I tripled the investment portfolio. I negotiated the Northern Alliance treaty that—"

"Anyone could have done that." He waved his hand dismissively. "Sign."

The pen sat on the document like a loaded gun. Around me, two hundred faces stayed carefully blank—pack members I'd helped, counseled, fed, and cared for. Not one spoke up.

I signed.

The guards released me outside the pack house gates at midnight with one suitcase and the clothes on my back. No car. No phone—Damien had taken it. The nearest town was twelve miles through dense forest.

I started walking.

Halfway down the mountain road, my legs gave out. I sat on the cold asphalt, my anniversary dress torn at the hem, and finally let the tears come. Three years of pretending. Three years of being the perfect Luna while hiding the devastating truth that I had no wolf, no power, no identity in this world.

My hand went to my chest—to the locket my grandmother had given me before she died. The only thing I had left. Inside it, a tiny photograph of a woman I'd never met. "When the time comes," Grandma had whispered, "you'll understand what you are."

I'd never understood. And now, sitting alone on a dark road with nothing to my name, I wondered if I ever would.

Headlights appeared around the bend.

A black car—expensive, sleek, the kind that cost more than most houses—slowed to a stop beside me. The rear window lowered, revealing a face I recognized from every business magazine in the country.

Kael Blackwood. Alpha of the Blackwood Corporation. The most powerful—and most feared—wolf in the western territories.

His dark eyes assessed me with clinical precision. "You're Aria Voss."

It wasn't a question.

"Not anymore," I whispered. "Just Aria now."

Something flickered across his impossibly handsome face. Not pity. Something sharper.

"Get in," he said. "I have a proposition for you."

Every survival instinct screamed no. But I had no phone, no money, no pack, and twelve miles of dark forest ahead of me.

I got in.

The door closed, and the car pulled away from everything I'd ever known.

Kael Blackwood didn't look at me again. He simply opened a leather folder and placed it on the seat between us.

"I need a wife," he said. "You need to not be dead by morning. I think we can help each other."

I stared at the contract. At the top, in bold letters: MARRIAGE AGREEMENT — TERM: 6 MONTHS.

And at the bottom, a number with so many zeros my vision blurred.

"Why me?" I breathed.

His jaw tightened. "Because you're the only Luna in this territory with no wolf, no pack, and no one who'll come looking for you." His eyes finally met mine, and the intensity there made my breath catch. "Which makes you perfect."

Perfect for what? I wanted to ask.

But the car was already speeding toward a future I couldn't imagine, and behind us, the life I'd known was burning to ash.