Chapter 2

Miss Neighbor.

He calls me that like it's a pet name. Like it's a joke we're both in on.

I drop. Not off the ledge — to my knees, on the freezing stone, and I slam my forehead into the roof until the skin splits and blood runs into my eyes.

"Please." My voice doesn't sound like mine. "Please, I'll do anything. Anything you want. Money, the pack accounts, I have access to all of it—"

"I don't want money."

"Then what?" I grab his pant leg with both hands. "Tell me what you want and it's yours, I swear on the Moon Goddess, just don't—"

"You already swore on the Moon Goddess." He looks down at me, and his eyes are wet. Actually wet. "Eleven times."

"I don't know what that means!"

"I know." He crouches down. He wipes the blood off my eyebrow with his thumb, so tender it makes me sick. "That's the part I can't survive anymore."

"Please. Please. I don't want to die."

"Neither did I."

His hand touches my shoulder.

He pushes.

The wind takes my dress first. Then the ground takes everything else.

I don't feel the impact. What I feel is the strange, quiet, floating second afterward, where I'm lying on the cobblestones outside my own wedding, and every bone in my body is in the wrong place, and the whole pack has poured out of the chapel to stand in a circle around me.

Tristan is at the front.

He doesn't come closer. His mother whispers something in his ear and he turns and walks away from my body without ever looking at my face.

Someone else drops into the blood.

Ryder.

He hits his knees so hard I hear them crack. He gathers my broken body up into his chest like I'm made of glass instead of already shattered, and his tears fall on my cheek, hot, one after another after another.

"No," he says. Over and over. "No. No. No."

He lowers his head and presses his mouth against my bloody one.

Twenty years. Twenty years of I'm your uncle, Isla. Twenty years of don't look at me like that, Isla. And he kisses me for the first time when I'm already gone.

I try to say his name.

The dark eats me.

Then light. Blinding, gold, screaming light.

Music.

Music?

I blink and there are strobe lights swinging across a ceiling, and two hundred people screaming, and a champagne tower, and the smell of expensive cologne, and my own voice in my throat making a sound like a dying animal.

I know this room.

I know this night.

The VIP floor of Lunar, six months before my wedding. And on one knee in front of me, holding out a diamond the size of a molar—

"Isla Vaughn." Tristan grins up at me, high on his own performance. "Will you be my Luna?"

I reach out and pinch his cheek. Hard.

"Ow — what the hell—"

It's real. His skin is warm. He's alive. I'm alive. Six months alive.

I take the ring out of the box. The crowd screams. Someone throws rose petals in my hair.

Then I turn and I run.

I run out of the club, out into the rain, in four-inch heels, all fourteen blocks to my building, until my lungs are full of knives and my mate-mark is burning on my shoulder like it knows something I don't.

The elevator doors open.

I step in.

And the smell hits me — rot, wet copper, something sweet underneath it, the exact smell that was in my hair when I hit the ground.

A man is standing in the back corner. Black hoodie. Hair over his eyes. Skinny in a way that looks like starvation.

I know that mouth.

In six months, this man is going to put on a white tuxedo and throw me off a bell tower.

And right now, he's standing between me and the buttons.