Chapter 1

I lost our pup at 11:47 p.m.

At 11:52, the mate mark on my neck began to burn.

Every she-wolf knows that burn. It means one thing.

My mate was inside another woman.

So I stopped calling him. Instead, I called the one man he'd sell his soul to meet. My father. The Lycan King.

But that came later. First, there was the blood.

I was alone in the pack infirmary when it happened. Eleven weeks along. The healer said stress, exhaustion, a body running on nothing. I hadn't been eating. It's hard to eat when your Alpha hasn't come home for dinner in three months.

I reached for Caleb through the mind-link. Nothing. A wall. He'd blocked me.

I texted him instead. I lost the baby.

Read at 11:49 p.m.

No reply.

Three minutes later, the burning started, a white-hot brand sinking into the skin where he'd marked me three years ago. I clutched my neck and folded over on the cot, and the healer looked away. She knew. Everyone in the infirmary knew what that pain meant.

I still told myself it was a mistake. I walked home barefoot through the forest, still bleeding through my dress, telling myself it was grief playing tricks on my body.

The Alpha house door was unlocked. Red-soled heels sat in the foyer. Vanessa Cross's perfume hung in the air like a taunt. And from our bedroom came her moans, and his low growl, the one he used to save for me.

The man who'd sworn before the Moon Goddess and four hundred wolves to protect his Luna was worshipping another she-wolf on our mating bed. While our pup died.

I didn't scream. I didn't cry. Something inside me didn't break.

It hardened.

I turned around, walked out, and drove to a motel on the edge of pack territory.

People think the worst part of betrayal is the pain. It isn't. It's the clarity. Five years together, two courting and three mated, and every lie suddenly rearranged itself into the truth.

The "border meetings" that came home smelling of jasmine. The trips to other packs where he'd "lose signal." The way he introduced me at every Gathering. Never "my Luna." Always just "Seraphina." As if the title embarrassed him.

Vanessa, the pack treasurer's daughter, had been at his side since before our ceremony. Beautiful. Ambitious. Always one step too close. I told him once that it hurt me.

He laughed. "She's useful. Don't be that kind of Luna."

So I wasn't. I swallowed every doubt. I ran his pack house, fed his warriors, smiled for his allies, and hosted his mother every Sunday. I erased myself to fit the shape he wanted.

Caleb Ravenwood chose me because I was a stray. No pack. No father. No one to challenge him if he got bored.

Or so he thought.

He never asked why I had no scent of my own. He never wondered about the moonstone pendant I never took off, not even in the shower.

My mother clasped it around my neck when I was twenty-one. It does one thing. It hides what I am.

My real name isn't Seraphina Grey.

It's Seraphina Valemont. Only daughter of Aldric Valemont, Lycan King, ruler of every pack on this continent.

I walked away from the crown to be loved for who I was, not what I was. Caleb had seemed so different from the cold-eyed Alphas my father paraded before me.

What a joke.

In that motel room, I made two calls. The first was to the Moon Court, to request a formal Rejection Hearing against my mate.

The second was to my father.

"Papa," I said, my voice steady. "I'm coming home."

Three seconds of silence. Then a growl so deep it rattled the line.

"I'll send the Royal Guard. And Seraphina. If he so much as touches you again, I'll bring the whole Lycan army."

I hung up and touched the pendant at my throat.

Beneath it, for the first time in five years, my wolf opened her eyes.