Chapter 2

"Torin," I rasped. My voice sounded like gravel grinding in a dry creek bed. "The brook has never smelled like this. Even during the great drought ten years ago, the spring ran sweet."

"Shut your mouth," he hissed, shoving the butt of his spear hard between my shoulder blades.

The blow sent me sprawling onto the rotting moss. Sharp pebbles bit into my palms, splitting the skin. I didn't bleed red—or at least, it didn't look like the vibrant, iron-rich crimson of a shifter's vitality. It was pale, thin, oozing sluggishly like melted wax.

Behind us, boots crunched on the dying needles.

"Is the cripple stalling?"

The voice was Ronald's.

My stomach dropped, a Pavlovian knot of fear and longing tightening around my throat. I turned my head, still on all fours in the dirt.

Alpha Ronald walked down the trail, flanked by four elite guardians. Astrid was at his side, wrapped in an ermine cloak lined with silver silk. She looked radiant, glowing with the borrowed warmth of a pack that had just celebrated its newest union. But Ronald's face was dark, irritation carving deep grooves beside his mouth.

"Alpha," Torin said instantly, dropping his head and exposing his throat in greeting. "She claims the brook is foul. She’s dragging her feet."

Ronald stopped five paces from me. He didn't look at my bleeding hands. He looked at the water, his brow furrowing for a split second before his features hardened into disgust.

"Eleven fifty-four," Ronald said, checking the silver pocket watch pinned to his lapel. "You have six minutes to put your feet on the Outland stones, Sariyah."

"Ronald, look at the water," I whispered, lifting one trembling hand toward the scum-covered brook. "Look at the canopy. The needles are falling. The trees are dying."

"The trees are shedding," Astrid chimed in, her tone light, melodic, dripping with venom. "They are casting off the dead weight, just like Ronald is casting off his. Do you truly think so highly of yourself, wolfless thing? Do you think the earth weeps because you are leaving?"

"I don't think it weeps," I said, my teeth chattering as another wave of that inexplicable, icy fever ripped through my spine. "I think... something is breaking."

"The only thing breaking is your hold on my people," Ronald said coldly. He took two slow steps forward, towering over me until his shadow blocked out the sickly red light of the moon. "For four years, since my father died and left you a sickly ward under my roof—and for two humiliating years since you reached adulthood and the Moon Goddess cursed me with your bond—I have endured the whispers. An Alpha whose fated mate cannot even sprout claws. An Alpha whose unwanted shadow whimpers on a cot beside his hearth from imaginary chills, who cannot bear an heir, who drains the vitality of every room she enters."

He leaned down slightly, his voice dropping to a low, savage growl that set every nerve in my human flesh vibrating with terror.

"You were a parasite, Sariyah. A defect born to an outcast mother who died of shame. I kept you fed. I kept you sheltered. I gave you the chance to leave with dignity, and you cowered in my halls like mold in the baseboards."

"I loved you," the words slipped out of me before I could choke them down. Pathetic. Small. The absolute truth. "I bore the cold because I thought... I thought if I stayed quiet, if I endured the aches, it would keep you safe."

Ronald let out a harsh, dry bark of laughter.

Astrid joined him, a silvery tinkle of genuine amusement. "Keep *him* safe? You? A girl who couldn't outrun a blind badger? Oh, Ronald, darling, she really does live in a fairytale."

Ronald straightened, his face shuttered, devoid of a single flicker of memory. Not the nights when his pack had gone to war against the Ironwood raiders and he had returned soaked in blood, his wolf wild and murderous, and only my small, fragile hands on his temples had been able to coax his eyes back from red to gray. Not the winters when the fever took the elder wards, but whenever I sat with the dying pups, they miraculously broke their sweats while my own joints swelled with excruciating, fiery throbs that kept me bedridden for weeks.

He remembered none of it. To him, I had simply been there—a miserable, silent fixture in the shadows of the hearth, shivering under three wool blankets while the rest of the pack ran naked through the snow.

"Three minutes," Ronald said, turning his back to me. "Cross the creek. Cross the perimeter. If you are on Sunriver soil when the clock strikes twelve, Torin will cut your hamstrings and leave you for the crows."

"Ronald—"

"Cross," he barked, and the Alpha Command slammed into my skull like a lead bar.

My body moved against my will. My knees straightened. My feet, bloody and numb, carried me into the curdled water of the brook.

The moment my skin broke the surface, a terrible hiss rose from the creek bed.

It wasn't an animal. It was the sound of cold water hitting white-hot iron. The scum parted around my ankles, bubbling gray, and for an instant, a flash of pure, agonizing heat flared through my veins, so intense that I nearly cried out. But my vocal cords were locked by Ronald's command. I couldn't scream. I could only stumble forward, through the thick, unnatural mud of the far bank, dragging my feet toward the white line.

The perimeter was marked fifty paces ahead.

It was an ancient border, established before the Sunriver pack had even taken their name. A wide trench, six feet across, filled with pulverized silver ore and consecrated salt, stretching for miles across the mountain pass. Inside the line lay the lush, sacred territory of the Sunriver Pack—the territory that had known no famine, no disease, and no military defeat for eight hundred continuous years.

Outside the line lay the Outlands.

A jagged, sun-scorched, moon-blighted expanse of black slate, cracked earth, and skeletal canyons where no prey ran, no streams flowed, and only feral, mindless things scraped a living out of the dust. To be banished to the Outlands was not a sentence of exile; it was a slow, agonizing execution. Wolfless humans did not survive three nights out there. The elements alone would strip the skin from their bones.

"Look at her crawl," Astrid said, her voice floating across the graying trees. "She really does walk like an old woman."

"Let her crawl," Ronald replied, his tone indifferent, already looking away toward the high road that led back to the banquet hall. "The feast is waiting. The alliance with your father’s house begins tonight, Astrid. By morning, the territory will be stronger than it has ever been in our history."

As if in answer to his words, a sound tore through the night sky.

It wasn't thunder. The sky was cloudless, dominated by the blood-tinged moon.

It was a groan. A deep, subterranean shriek of tearing stone, echoing from the belly of the mountains behind them. The ground beneath our feet bucked slightly—a tremor so sharp that two of the border guards stumbled, catching themselves on their spears.

Readers also like

Rejected by the Heir, Bound to the Exile Rowan Vale · Werewolf & Shifter The Alpha's heir rejected her before the whole pack. She chose the scarred exile—and a mate bond neither of them expected. The Widowed Luna and the Alpha King Elena Ashwood · Werewolf & Shifter Her Alpha is gone, her mate bond still hurts, and the enemy at her border may be the only man willing to answer her questions.