Chapter 2

I made it home before I fell apart.

I locked my bedroom door, slid down against it, and cried the way you cry when your father is asleep down the hall and he's already lost enough.

Twelve years he'd raised me alone. Twelve years of driving me to the training grounds before dawn and falling asleep in the truck.

So I cried silently. Which is somehow so much worse.

Rhett's voice kept looping.

She can't fight without me.

Like I was a leash he'd politely outgrown.

I thought about my first shift at fourteen. The pain, the bones cracking, the terror. Rhett's wolf had lain beside mine in the snow all night, nose pressed to my shoulder. I've got you, he'd said when we turned back. I've always got you.

I looked at the moonstone ring in the dark and felt like a girl holding a receipt for something she'd never actually bought.

He hadn't just chosen another Luna.

He'd erased eighteen years in a fifteen-minute conversation with a girl who cried prettily about her father.

And he hadn't told me.

That was the part I kept circling like an open wound. Not the choice. The silence.

He could have come to me. Wren, I'm doing something selfish, and here's why. I would have shifted and torn the porch apart. But I would have known.

Instead, he decided I wasn't worth three days.

He decided my whole future was a line in a book he could rewrite without me.

Somewhere around eleven, I stopped crying and started thinking.

Sienna Vale came to Ironpine two years ago. Beautiful, breathless, always one tremble away from tears. Her father had sold pack secrets to hunters. Her whole bloodline was disgraced. I genuinely felt for her.

Then Rhett started staying late to help with her shift control. Then walking her home. Then smelling like her.

Every time I said something, he'd pull me close. Stop it. She's packmate. Her life's in ruins and I'm being decent. You know I've never lied to you.

And he hadn't. Not once in eighteen years.

So I believed him, again and again, until believing him became its own kind of stupidity.

The Ironpine moon-ledger sat on my desk, a copy every pack member could read. I didn't open it. I didn't need to see her name beside his.

Instead, I opened my drawer and took out a letter. Twelve years old. Sent the week of my mother's funeral.

Wren. Your mother was the finest wolf I ever trained. The offer stands. Always. — Marek of Frostfang

Beside it, a second parchment. Delivered three days ago by a gray wolf who'd crossed three territories to bring it.

Frostfang Luna Pact. Alpha heir: Kael Thorne.

Kael Thorne. The Northern Ghost. The wolf nobody had ever pinned in a sanctioned fight. I'd watched every clip of him a hundred times on my phone and never told a soul.

Two oaths would close at midnight.

One said Ironpine Second.

One said Frostfang.

I sat there and felt something strange and clean and cold settle into my chest.

My wolf lifted her head for the first time in years.

Then my phone lit up.

Rhett — Video Call.

I answered.

And the first thing I heard wasn't his voice.

It was a girl's. Close to the mic. So close I could hear her breathing.

"Is that her? Rhett... tell her I'm sorry I'm wearing your shirt."