Chapter 2

I became Caden Blackwood's Luna because he bled all over my infirmary.

I was the pack healer's apprentice. Twenty-two, an orphan, a wolf so small and quiet that most of Silvercrest forgot I existed. He was dragged in at midnight with a rogue's claws torn through his ribs and two warriors growling at me to hurry.

I told them to get out of my healing room.

Caden laughed through the pain. "Do what she says."

I stitched him. He brought wild roses to my door every morning for a month. He sat with me the night my grandmother died, and stood between me and the whole pack like a wall.

"You'll never be alone again, Sera," he told me under the full moon when he marked me.

He meant it.

Right up until Lila Crane came home from the southern packs.

His first love. The girl he'd been promised to at nineteen, before her father sent her away. She came back beautiful and grieving, and Caden decided she was his responsibility.

"She's pack, Sera. She has no one."

I had no one either. He just never noticed.

Late nights. Closed doors. Dinners I cooked and ate alone at a table set for two. His warriors stopped meeting my eyes. The pack house got bigger and quieter every month.

And tonight, at the Moon Court I'd spent six weeks preparing, he'd stood beside her during the oath.

He'd never once stood beside me.

Now I sat in a guest room in the Lycan King's keep, in a borrowed wool sweater, holding a phone they'd let me keep. The mate-link in my head was a locked door.

At two in the morning, the phone finally buzzed.

Caden.

My heart jumped like a fool.

Behave. Don't provoke him. Lila's in shock, I'm staying with her tonight. We'll talk in a few days.

A few days.

I read it four times. Then I put the phone face-down and pressed both hands over my mouth so nobody would hear what came out of it.

A knock.

"Luna." Kael's voice. "May I come in?"

I wiped my face. "It's your keep."

"It's your room."

He opened the door but didn't cross the threshold. He was in shirtsleeves, cuffs rolled to the elbow, holding a steaming mug.

"Ginger and mint," he said. "Healer Wren says it helps with the sickness."

"I'm not sick."

"You've been in the washroom three times in an hour." A pause. "Lycan hearing. I apologize."

Heat crawled up my neck. He set the mug on the dresser by the door and stepped back, as if he knew exactly how much space a frightened woman needed.

"Why are you being kind?" I asked. "I'm tribute."

"You are a guest under the old law. No one touches you. No one raises their voice to you. If any wolf in this keep so much as looks at you wrong, you tell me."

"And after thirty days?"

"That depends on your mate."

We both knew what that meant. Silvercrest was rich. Caden could pay the blood debt tomorrow if he wanted.

He hadn't even asked the price.

Kael watched me understand that. He didn't say anything cruel.

Somehow that was worse.

"At the Moon Court," I said. "You asked, 'Which her?' Why?"

He leaned against the doorframe.

"I've watched Alphas trade land. Gold. Their own brothers." His jaw tightened. "I've never watched one walk past his Luna like she was furniture."

My breath caught.

"Drink the tea, Sera," he said quietly. My name. The first time. "And bolt your door if it helps you sleep."

"Why bother? It's your castle. You have every key."

"Not that one." He nodded at the iron bolt. "There's no lock on the outside. Only yours."

He closed the door.

I stared at the bolt.

For three years I had lived in a pack house where I wasn't allowed to close my own door.

My enemy had handed me the only lock in the first hour.

I lay awake until dawn, one hand on my stomach, listening to the wind howl over the mountains.

At six, my phone lit up.

Not Caden.

A photo from an unknown number.

Caden in the kitchen I had built, pouring coffee into the mug I'd carved for him.

And Lila, barefoot, wearing his shirt.

One line underneath:

He never needed you. Now he knows it too.