Bile tasted like rusted copper.

Bryion swallowed it down, forcing her lips to hold a fractured smile as the priest bound her sister’s hands to the man who carried Bryion’s soul.

The scent of pine and rain his scent choked her.

Then the heavy oak doors splintered inward.

The wool of Brian’s bridesmaid dress was dyed a deep bruised plum.

It scratched relentlessly against her collarbone.

She focused on that irritation.

She clung to the harsh prickly weave of the fabric because it was real, and the alternative was listening to the sound of her own wolf tearing itself apart inside her chest.

The great hall of the river valley pack was stifling.

200 bodies packed tight between damp stone walls, radiating body heat, and the nervous, oily sweat of wolves forced into a confined space.

Heavy beeswax candles burned on iron sconces, melting fast, their sweet, thick smoke mingling with the heavy grease of roasted bore.

It was meant to smell like a feast.

To Brian, it smelled like an open grave.

Up on the deis, Cesaly was radiant.

Of course she was.

Cesaly wore bleached linen spun so fine it looked like milk poured over her shoulders, lined with gold thread that caught the torch light.

She looked exactly like the Luna this pack demanded.

Soft enough to be loved, bright enough to be woripped.

Beside her stood Roland.

Bry stared at the side of his jaw, the sharp, familiar cut of his cheekbone.

Just 3 days ago, those same lips had been pressed to Bry’s ear in the damp, mouldering shadows of the haloft.

She remembered the smell of the damp straw, the frantic, terrifying pulse of the mate bond clicking into place, snapping tight around her ribs like a steel band.

She remembered the way he had pulled away, the slow, horrified dawning in his amber eyes.

“You’re too quiet, Briion,” he had whispered, stepping back, putting physical space between their souls.

“The pack needs a force.

They need a queen.”

Cesily, the elders already agreed.

I can’t undo the politics of a year for a spark in the hay.

A spark.

That’s what he called the fundamental agonizing tether of the goddess.

A spark.

Now the pack elder stepped forward, holding the ceremonial binding cord.

It was woven from red wool and soaked in wolf spain and rose water, a smell that made the back of Bry’s throat close up.

Do you, Roland of the River Valley, take Cesily to be your bound, your Luna, your equal in the hunt?

The Elers’s voice rasped, echoing off the high timber beams.

Roland didn’t hesitate.

He didn’t look back into the shadows where Briany stood, pressed against a cold stone pillar.

I do.

The words felt like a physical blow, a dull, heavy ax sinking into Brion’s sternum.

Her wolf whimpered a pathetic high-pitched scrape of sound that only she could hear.

The creature inside her curled into a tight, shivering ball, burying its nose under its tail, preparing to die.

When a faded mate rejects the bond, the rejected doesn’t just grieve.

They wither.

It is a slow, rotting fever that cooks the brain and hollows out the marrow.

And do you, Cesily?

Take Roland.

Cesily smiled.

A brilliant, flawless thing.

I do.

Did Cesaly know?

Bryion watched her sister’s face, searching for a twitch of guilt, a flicker of hesitation.

Nothing.

Cesily only saw the crown.

She only saw the strong, handsome alpha who would give her the life she had been groomed for.

The elder looped the cord around their wrists.

He pulled it tight.

The moment the knot caught, the air in the hall shifted.

A collective exhale from the pack.

The binding was complete.

The ambient magic of the pack structure snapped into a new hierarchy, settling over Cesily like a heavy golden mantle.

Brieny tasted blood.

She realized she had bitten straight through her bottom lip.

The crowd erupted into cheers.

Fiddlers in the corner immediately struck up a loud frantic jig, their bows sawing violently across catgcut strings.

Men slammed heavy wooden tankards of ale against the long trestle tables, sloshing foam onto the rushes covering the floor.

The ceremony was over.

The agony was permanent.

Brieny turned away.

She needed air.

Her skin felt too tight.

Her blood thick and hot, running like sludge through her veins.

The rejection fever was starting.

She stumbled toward the back of the hall, keeping to the edge of the room where the torch light didn’t quite reach.

An older woman, Martha, the pax baker, caught her eye.

Martha’s gaze was heavy with pity.

The scent of sour milk and sorrow drifted from the old woman.

Brieny looked away, her cheeks burning.

She didn’t want pity.

She wanted to vanish.

She made it to the heavy al cove near the main doors.

The draft here was freezing, slicing through the chinks in the masonry.

She leaned her forehead against the freezing, damp stone.

It offered a fleeting, miserable comfort.

She closed her eyes, trying to regulate her breathing.

Inhale, dust and wet wool.

Exhale, stale ale and roast meat.

She was supposed to fade away now.

That was the unwritten rule for the rejected.

Move to the edge of the territory.

Live in a small drafty cabin, fade into a ghost while the alpha and Luna reigned supreme.

Behind her, the cheers grew louder as Roland kissed his new bride.

Rion’s stomach rolled violently.

She clamped a hand over her mouth, fighting the nausea.

Then the ambient noise of the hall changed.

It wasn’t a gradual dying down.

It was a violent, sudden sensation of sound, as if the air itself had been sucked out of the room.

The fiddlers stopped midnote, the strings screeching in protest.

A wooden tankered hit the floor, the thud echoing like a gunshot in the absolute silence.

Brion opened her eyes.

The temperature in the al cove dropped 10° in a single second.

The torches lining the walls flickered wildly.

The flames shrinking down to blue frightened embers.

A new scent rolled under the heavy oak doors.

It wasn’t a smell.

It was a physical weight.

It smelled of crushed frost, dark overturned earth, and the sharp metallic tang of ozone right before lightning strikes a tree.

It bypassed Brian’s human senses and slammed directly into her wolf.

The dying, whimpering creature inside her chest didn’t just wake up.

It slammed into the cage of her ribs, teeth bared, hair standing on end, feral and violently alert.

The heavy iron latch on the great oak doors began to rattle.

Nobody moved.

200 wolves stood paralyzed among the spilled ale and halfeaten pork.

The doors didn’t open.

They burst inward.

The heavy iron hinges shrieked, tearing half out of the ancient stone, raining mortar dust onto the floor.

The cold night wind howled into the hall, blowing out half the candles in an instant.

Standing in the archway was a nightmare, clothed in black leather and heavy furs.

Valyan, the alpha king of the northern reaches.

He didn’t announce himself.

He didn’t need to.

The aura bleeding off him was so suffocatingly dominant that Brioni saw three grown warriors near the tables involuntarily dropped to their knees, their throats bared in instinctual submission.

He was a massive man, built like a siege engine.

His hair was dark, falling to his shoulders in rough waves, damp from the rain outside.

His face was a brutal geography of sharp angles and old violence, marred by a pale, jagged scar that cut through his left eyebrow and ended at his cheekbone.

But it was his eyes that stopped Brian’s heart.

They were a pale, piercing silver, unnatural, cold as a frozen lake.

He stepped into the hall.

His boots hit the stone floor with a heavy, deliberate rhythm.

Crunch, crunch, crunch.

Behind him, four of his royal guard filed in massive, silent brutes whose eyes glowed with barely suppressed predatory intent, but they were mere shadows compared to their king, Alpha Euan.

Valyrian’s voice was a low rumble that vibrated against the soles of Brian’s shoes.

It wasn’t loud, but it cut through the silence like a serrated blade.

Brian’s father, the pack leader, stepped down from the deis.

He was a proud, capable man.

But right now, his hands were trembling.

The scent of his fear, sour and sharp like rotting lemons, flooded the front of the room.

“My king,” Euan choked out, bowing low, exposing the nape of his neck.

“We we did not expect you.

We are honored.

You arrive upon the wedding of my daughter and are new.

I don’t care about your local pageantry,” Euan Valyrian interrupted.

He didn’t even look at the alpha.

His silver eyes were scanning the room, cutting through the crowd.

I am passing through to the mountain pass.

We require fresh mounts and 50 lb of salted meat.

Have your men fetch it.

It was a demand, blunt and disrespectful.

Delivered in the middle of a sacred ceremony.

Yet Euan merely nodded frantically.

At once it will be done, my king.

Valyrian finally stopped walking.

He stood in the center of the hall, an immovable pillar of dark, terrifying energy.

Brieny pressed herself harder against the stone pillar in her dark al cove.

She wanted to be invisible.

Her wolf was acting insane.

The fevered rod of rejection was gone, completely eradicated, replaced by a hypervigilant electric terror.

Her skin crawled with goosebumps.

Every hair on her arm stood up.

Look away, she told herself.

Don’t draw his attention.

But she couldn’t stop looking.

The sheer predatory grace of him was mesmerizing.

Up on the deis, Roland shifted.

The newly bound mate Bond gave him a surge of false courage.

Or perhaps he simply couldn’t stand the absolute subjugation of his pack.

He stepped slightly in front of Cesily, puffing his chest out.

If the king requires hospitality, Roland said, his voice ringing out a little too loudly, a little too desperately, we would be honored to seat him at the high table.

Valyrian turned his head slowly.

He looked at Roland.

The silence that followed was thick enough to drown in.

Valyrian’s gaze swept over Roland, dismissing him entirely in a fraction of a second before drifting to Cesily.

He cataloged her perfect hair, her gold threaded dress, her trembling hands.

Bryion saw Valyrian’s lip curl into a microscopic sneer.

He hated weakness.

“I don’t break bread with boys playing at being wolves,” Valyrian said softly.

Roland’s face flushed a dark, angry red.

He opened his mouth to reply.

“A foolish, prideful mistake.”

But he never got the words out.

Valyrian’s head snapped to the left, his silver eyes locked directly onto the dark al cove.

Directly onto Briany.

The air vanished from Brian’s lungs.

A physical shock wave hit her chest, so hard she actually staggered sideways, catching herself against the rough wall.

The king went perfectly still.

His nostrils flared once, twice.

He inhaled the air of the hall, sifting through the grease, the ale, the fear, and the clawing scent of rose water.

He found the source.

He found her.

Briion’s wolf didn’t cower.

For the first time in her life, the creature inside her stood up on its hind legs, slamming its paws against the bars of her ribs, howling a silent, desperate song of recognition.

Mate.

The word echoed in her mind, not as a sweet promise, but as an absolute, undeniable threat.

A second chance with an alpha king.

It was a myth.

A legend whispered to pups to keep them hopeful.

But the terrifying, crushing weight of his gaze was real.

Valyrian started walking again.

He ignored Euan.

He ignored Roland and Cesily on their deis.

He walked straight toward the back of the hall, toward the shadows.

The crowd parted for him like water for a falling stone.

People scrambled backward, knocking over benches, tripping over each other to get out of his path.

Bioni couldn’t move.

Her legs felt like lead.

Her hands clamped tight into fists.

Her short nails digging into her palms, drawing blood.

The metallic tang of her own blood cut through the heavy air.

Valyrian stopped less than a foot away from her.

Up close, he was even larger.

He blocked out the torch light, casting her entirely in his shadow.

The scent of ozone and frost wrapped around her, suffocating and intoxicating all at once.

It burned away the lingering scent of Roland’s pine and rain like fire eating through dead leaves.

He stared down at her.

His face was unreadable, a mask of cold, hard stone, but a muscle ticked in his jaw.

Bryion was trembling.

Not a delicate feminine shiver, but a violent, ugly shaking that rattled her teeth.

Her bruised plum dress felt ridiculous under his scrutiny.

She looked up at him, her chest heaving, her eyes wide with a mixture of terror and an infuriating instinctual submission.

Slowly, deliberately, Valyrian raised a large hand covered in a scarred leather gauntlet.

Bioni flinched.

She couldn’t help it.

It was a jerky, defensive movement, tucking her chin, expecting a blow.

Valyrian’s hand paused in midair.

A flash of something dark and dangerous passed behind his silver eyes.

He didn’t lower his hand.

Instead, he reached out and grabbed her chin.

His grip wasn’t gentle.

It was firm, possessive, calloused leather scraping against her soft skin.

He tilted her face up, forcing her to look him in the eye.

“Yours,” Valyrian said.

The word wasn’t a question.

It was a decree.

A murmur of shock rippled through the hall.

Upon the deis, the scent of the room changed violently.

Jealousy, acrid, burning jealousy.

Roland’s wolf, recognizing what was happening, suddenly revolted.

The mate he had rejected, the quiet, easily discarded Brioni, was being claimed by the apex predator of their world.

A sick, twisted sense of ownership flared in the local alpha.

My king, stop.

Roland barked, stepping off the dis, abandoning his new bride.

She is.

She was mine.

Valyrian didn’t even look at him.

He kept his eyes locked on Briy’s wide, terrified gaze, his thumb stroked roughly over her jawline.

Was Valyrian rumbled, his voice dripping with lethal intent.

He finally turned his head just a fraction to address the boy across the hall.

She is nothing to you now.

She is my queen.

He turned fully to Briany, stepping into her space, crowding her against the cold stone wall.

Aren’t you, little wolf?

Briion opened her mouth, but no sound came out.

She was trapped between a past that had broken her and a future that looked ready to consume her hole.

Roland didn’t stop.

He crossed the floor, his heavy boots kicking aside the fresh rushes and trampling the spilled ale into a sticky paste.

The scent of him pine and rain was now soured by the sharp metallic tang of injured pride.

He had rejected her.

He had chosen power, politics, and a beautiful, unblenmished Luna.

But male wolves were inherently territorial, and seeing his discarded claim scooped up by an apex predator, cracked his ego right down the center.

“She is pack blood,” Roland growled.

He stopped 10 ft away.

It was exactly as close as his self-preservation instincts allowed him to get to the northern king.

“You cannot simply walk in and take.”

Valyrian moved.

It wasn’t a charge.

It wasn’t a heroic leap.

It was a blur of dark leather and kinetic violence.

One second, he was standing over Briany, the warmth of his hand still a phantom weight on her jaw.

The next, his fist was wrapped around Roland’s throat.

Valyrian didn’t shift into his wolf form.

He didn’t even bear his teeth.

He simply lifted the newly appointed alpha off the floor with one arm.

Roland’s boots kicked empty air, the metal caps scraping desperately against Valyrian’s heavy ironplated greaves.

The sound of Roland choking was wet and pathetic, accompanied by the horrible popping of cartilage struggling to hold under immense pressure.

“I can take whatever I please,” Valyrian said softly.

His tone was casual, like a man discussing the depth of the snow, which made the violence infinitely more terrifying.

“But I did not take her.”

The goddess presented her.

You threw her away to play at being a king.

I am merely collecting what is mine.

Up on the deis, Cesily screamed, a thin, greedy sound that graded against Briion’s ears.

Let him go.

Father, do something.

Euan, their father, stood entirely paralyzed.

To interfere was a death sentence for the entire river valley.

He kept his eyes fixed firmly on the muddy floorboards.

The heavy gold chain of his alpha office suddenly looking very much like a leash.

The smell of his fierce sour rotting lemons flooded the space.

Bion pressed her cold hands against her stomach.

Her wolf was thrashing, energized by the display of dominance.

But her human mind felt detached.

She watched the violence with a cold, numb horror.

She expected to feel a vindictive thrill seeing the man who broke her being humbled.

Instead, she only felt a heavy, hollow exhaustion.

This wasn’t a romantic rescue.

This was a hostile takeover.

Valyrian opened his hand.

Roland hit the stone floor in a heap of fine bleached linen and bruised pride.

He gasped frantically for air, clutching his rapidly swelling throat, coughing up spit and bile onto the stones.

The acrid scent of urine suddenly hit the air.

Someone in the front row had lost control of their bladder.

Valyrian turned his back on the gasping man, a gesture of absolute dismissive contempt.

He walked back to Briany, his boots crunching methodically in the silent hall.

The king unclasped the heavy iron brooch at his shoulder.

He stripped off his travel cloak.

It fell from him, a massive weight of black bear pelt and oiled leather, and he threw it roughly over Brian’s shoulders.

The heavy fabric nearly drove her to her knees.

It smelled intensely of him, crushed frost, dark wet earth, and that sharp ozone.

It swallowed her completely, hiding the scratchy, bruised plum wool of her dress, trapping his residual body heat against her shivering, clammy skin.

“Walk,” he ordered.

He didn’t wait to see if she obeyed.

He turned and stroed toward the ruined double doors, his royal guard falling into a tight, brutal step behind him.

Briy looked at the hall one last time.

At her father, who still wouldn’t meet her eyes, at Cesaly, whose perfect goldthreaded wedding was ruined, her face twisted in an ugly, splotchy mask of humiliation.

At Roland, wheezing on the floor, weak and visibly diminished.

There was nothing left for her here.

She gathered the heavy folds of the king’s cloak, clutching the thick fur in her numb, bloody fingers, and followed the scent of ozone out into the dark.

The cold outside the great hall hit like a physical wall, stealing the breath from her lungs.

Sleet drove down in sharp diagonal sheets, turning the courtyard dirt into a thick, sucking mud.

Brian’s thin velvet slippers soaked through immediately, the freezing slush seeping between her toes and numbing her feet.

Five massive warh horses stamped impatiently near the heavy oak hitching post, their breath pluming in thick white clouds under the weak light of a single lantern.

They were beasts bred for the harsh northern mountains, broad-chested, thickcoated, and meaneyed.

Valyrian stepped up to a towering black stallion.

He didn’t look back to check on her.

He simply expected her to be there.

Brion dragged herself through the mud, the hem of the bear pelt cloak growing heavy and waterlogged, dragging like an anchor.

She stopped beside his horse, shivering violently.

Her teeth clicked together in a rapid, uncontrollable rhythm.

The adrenaline of the great hall was draining away, leaving behind the cold reality of her situation.

Valyrian swung up into the saddle with an easy terrifying grace that completely belied his massive size.

He looked down at her.

The sleet plastered his dark hair to his forehead, highlighting the pale, jagged line of his scar.

He reached down, extending a heavy leatherclad hand.

Bry stared at it.

The leather was worn smooth over the knuckles, stained dark with old rain and older blood.

This was the precipice.

If she took his hand, the river valley, her family, her pathetic, broken past had all vanished.

She would belong to the ice.

She would belong to a monster who strangled alphas for sport and claimed women like spoils of war.

I Her voice cracked, ruined by the cold.

The wind stole the sound immediately.

She swallowed hard and tried again, forcing the words up through her frozen throat.

I don’t even know you.

Valyrian’s silver eyes narrowed against the driving sleet.

He didn’t offer a reassuring smile.

He didn’t spout poetic nonsense about destiny or soulmates.

“You know my scent,” he said.

His voice a deep rumble that cut clearly through the howling wind.

“And your wolf knows mine.”

The rest is just details we will hammer out in the dark.

“Take my hand, Brownie.”

It was the first time he had spoken her name.

It sounded different in his mouth, heavier, sharper, not a soft, delicate flower, but a thing with deep, stubborn roots.

She reached up.

Her pale, trembling hand looked absurdly fragile as his scarred fingers closed around it.

He didn’t pull her up gently.

He hauled her off the freezing ground in one sharp, powerful motion, dragging her across the saddle to sit sideways in front of him.

She slammed against his chest, hitting a solid wall of muscle and hardened leather armor.

The impact knocked what little breath she had left completely out of her.

He wrapped one heavy arm tightly around her waist, anchoring her against him and gathered the thick leather res in his other hand.

“You’re shaking,” he noted, his breath hot against the cold shell of her ear.

“It’s cold,” she lied, her voice vibrating against his breastplate.

It wasn’t the fleet.

It was the terrifying, overwhelming surge of the mate bond.

It was violently repairing itself, stitching her fractured soul to a man who felt like a walking thunderstorm.

The sheer sensory overload of his proximity was making her dizzy.

“You’ll adapt,” Valyrian rumbled.

“He spurred the stallion forward.

The small contingent of guards closed in around them, forming a tight, protective diamond.

They rode out of the muddy courtyard gates, not looking back.

No one from the pack came out to stop them.

No archers appeared on the walls.

No one dared risk the wrath of the north for a rejected, invisible sister.

The rhythmic, heavy thud of the horse’s hooves against the mud felt like a metronome counting down the end of her old life.

The scratchy, bruised, plum wool of her bridesmaid dress was soaked and ruined beneath the king’s heavy cloak.

Good.

She hated the color anyway.

She leaned back marginally, allowing her dead weight to rest against Valyrian.

He didn’t flinch or adjust to accommodate her.

He remained a stone pillar behind her, absorbing the shock of the ride.

“He broke you,” Valyrian stated quietly.

Over an hour into the ride, the warm yellow lights of the river valley were long gone, swallowed entirely by the black pines and the raging storm.

It wasn’t a question.

He could smell it on her.

The lingering sour tang of rejection mixed with her natural scent.

Briany closed her eyes.

The urge to cry was thick in her throat.

A heavy lump that tasted like salt and old copper.

“Yes,” she whispered, hating her own honesty, hating her weakness, hating that this terrifying, violent stranger could read the absolute ruin inside her.

Valyrian’s arm tightened around her waist.

It wasn’t a comforting hug.

It was a possessive bruising pressure that promised violence to anything that tried to take her from that saddle.

“Good,” the alpha king murmured, turning his scarred face into the biting wind.

“I have no use for soft things that have never been tested.

Only broken bones heal strong enough to survive the north.”

Briany opened her eyes to the dark, freezing woods ahead.

She was terrified.

She was deeply, profoundly exhausted.

But as the heavy scent of frost and ozone completely drowned out the last fading memory of pine and rain, the whimpering creature inside her chest finally stopped crying, curled up against the warmth of the alpha king, and went to Sleep.