Chapter 2

I wanted to go three years ago, the night they took Rowan.

Before any of this, I had a life. Elara Kade, only daughter of Alaric Kade of Silverpine — the man who put up the money that turned Thorne Group from two floors and a bank loan into what it is, and who never once let anyone forget that keeping your word was a business strategy. I grew up in libraries. I painted. I had a show at twenty and sold the whole wall.

I was supposed to end up with someone soft. Someone who read. Someone who'd have argued with me about books over bad wine.

Instead I signed a sealed mate contract at twenty-one.

Kieran's father had just gone down. Kieran took the Group and the Pack in the same week, twenty-eight years old, and the Council was circling him like he was already meat. My father's stake was the only thing keeping the whole thing from being carved up and handed out. A mating — quiet, sealed, unannounced — turned an alliance into blood.

My father asked me. He didn't tell me. He aged about ten years asking.

I said yes.

And here's the part I never said out loud to anybody:

I said yes because I wanted him.

I'd been in love with Kieran Thorne since I was seventeen and a rogue pack came down on the mountain road and he came through the treeline at a dead run and put himself between me and four of them. I picked a piece of his fur out of the gravel that night when nobody was looking and kept it. I loved the way he walked into a room full of men twice his age and made every one of them sit down.

I mated him thinking: maybe. Maybe he grows into it. Maybe I can earn a corner of him.

Four months pregnant, I heard him on the terrace at midnight.

"Hey. Look at me." His voice had gone gentle, and I'd never heard that voice before. "The Goddess put one person in front of me and it's you. Elara's a signature. The trust wants blood, that's the whole reason. When it comes, it goes to you. Name, papers, all of it."

There was a pause after that. A long one.

"...Kieran? What's wrong?"

"Nothing." He sounded off. Like something had snagged. "Nothing. Give me a second."

I stood in the dark with my hand on my stomach and felt every stupid thing I'd been carrying burn down to the studs.

I hadn't mated a man. I'd been converted into an asset class.

I wanted out. But I couldn't leave, and I definitely couldn't do the other thing.

If I did, every paper in three states would eat my father alive — the man who sold his daughter into a pack contract. Sixty years of a clean name, gone in a week. If I ran, the contract collapsed, the Council went to war, and everything he built got sold off in pieces.

So I stayed. I turned myself into furniture.

The only light I had was eleven seconds of my son's voice through a door. One look at the back of his head across a lawn could keep me breathing for a week.

That's how three years went.

I gave them a son. I gave them a daughter. I held up my end of a contract that treated my body like a lease.

The Group was stable. My father was safe. The trust had its heirs.

I'd done the job.

I was free — the way a body is free once it stops fighting.

Lying in that guest room, I counted. My father's flight got in from Singapore in seven days.

Three days after that, they threw a naming ceremony for my daughter at the estate. Two hundred people. White orchids flown in from somewhere warm. A photographer from a pack journal that was going to put Selene on the cover under the words MOTHERHOOD, AT LAST.

I got an invitation. Printed. Formal.

Ms. E. Kade, of Silverpine.

Not family. Not even staff. A guest from somebody else's pack.

Mira caught me reading it a third time.

"You don't have to go, my lady."

I set it down.

"I'm going," I said. "I want to look at my daughter's face once more before I stop looking at any of them."

I didn't tell Mira the rest.

That I'd already opened the box at the back of my closet.

That I'd already looked up how much wolfsbane it takes, and how long.

That I'd already worked out that the only way out of a cage like this one is the kind they can't undo.

What I didn't know yet was that at that party, in front of two hundred people, Selene Ashford was going to do the one thing that turns a woman who wants to die into a woman who wants to win.