Chapter 1

My mate rejected me in front of the entire pack.

My father didn't growl.

My mother looked up at the moon.

My three brothers let him walk away.

Then my family cut me out of the pack link for a whole year.

Tonight, I'm cutting myself out for good.

I pushed my old pickup down the gravel road with the engine off and the lights dark. I rolled it past the guardhouse and past the patrol path. My brother Wyatt planned that route himself, and he never once checked it.

At the border stones, I stopped and looked back at the packhouse.

Thirty windows. Every single one glowing gold.

Not one of them looking for me.

"Goodbye," I whispered. "You won't miss me. I'll miss you anyway. That's the pathetic part."

Then I turned the key.

My name is Nora Blackwood. Only daughter of Alpha Garrett Blackwood of the Ridgeback Pack, the biggest pack in Montana. Three older brothers. A mother who used to call me her moonbeam.

Used to.

One year ago tonight was my eighteenth birthday. The night every wolf meets their fated mate under the full moon.

My mother had planned it for months. Silver lanterns in the pines. A cake shaped like a crescent moon. My grandmother's moonstone necklace around my neck. She got every detail right.

Then Caleb Thorne stepped into the circle.

Caleb was the Alpha heir of Iron Creek. He was the boy I'd loved since I was fourteen. The moment the moon hit us, I felt it. That pull. That golden snap in my chest that said mine.

He felt it too. I watched it hit him.

And then he smiled at me, cold as creek water. He said it loud enough for three hundred wolves to hear.

"I, Caleb Thorne, reject you, Nora Blackwood, as my mate and my Luna. I want someone worth more than a girl who can't even shift."

I was eighteen and I'd never shifted. No wolf. Not even a whisper of one.

The bond tore out of my chest like a hook. I fell to my knees in the dirt in my silver dress.

Here's the part I still can't explain.

Nobody moved.

Not my brothers, who once threw a rogue through a barn wall for whistling at me. Not my father, the Alpha who has stared down hunters and rival packs and never blinked. Not my mother.

Three hundred wolves watched an Alpha's daughter get thrown away like garbage. My family stood there like stone.

The next morning, I reached for the pack link. That warm hum in the back of every wolf's mind. Our family's voices. My mother's goodnight. My brothers' dumb jokes.

Silence.

They'd blocked me. All of them. Overnight.

I walked into the kitchen. "Morning, Mom."

She looked straight through me like I was a window.

"Dad? Do you want me at training?"

His office door closed.

I told myself it was a bad week. Then it was a bad month. Then it was two hundred breakfasts alone at a table set for seven.

Once, I dropped a mug at my father's feet. On purpose. Just to see if he'd look up.

He stepped over the pieces and kept walking.

That was the night I stopped being a daughter and started being a ghost. And a ghost learns everything. I know every patrol shift on this land. I know which border stone has no sentry. I know the exact minute the night guard sneaks off to smoke.

That's how I'm getting out right now, with one duffel bag holding everything I own.

I'm not running away.

I'm reporting for duty.

Eleven days ago, a black envelope arrived at a post office box my family doesn't know exists. Inside was one card, sealed with a silver crescent moon.

Three lines.

Applicant N. Wilde: accepted.

Report to the Moon Court, Silver Hollow.

Tell no one.

The Moon Court. Home of the Lycan King.

I hit the gas and didn't look in the mirror.

By sunrise, my family would have a house with one empty room.

It would take them nine days to notice.