Chapter 1
There were only three full moons left before the crimson eclipse, and Alpha Oberon’s golden eyes were already bleeding black at the rims. In seventy-two hours, the ancient madness running through the Wraithwood bloodline would claim what remained of his magnificent mind. His commanders prowled the perimeter, sharpening their fangs to challenge him for the mantle the second he slipped. But Oberon locked the fortress doors against his own savage sons and summoned me alone into his private solar. “Your fingers don’t tremble, Rosalind,” he whispered, sliding a bone-hilted dagger into my soft palm. “Good. When the third moon rises, don’t let anyone else into this room.”
The blade felt heavier than it looked, its balance tuned with lethal precision. The bone of the hilt was smooth, carved from the rib of some great beast Oberon had slain in his youth, polished to a dull ivory sheen by decades of callous palms. It was warm from his grip, but against my skin, it radiated an icy promise of finality.
"Not even Fenris?" My voice was barely a thread of sound, swallowed by the cavernous shadows of the high solar.
Oberon let out a low, dry chuckle that ended in a rattling cough. When he raised his head, the candlelight caught the wet, ink-black threads spidering outward from his pupils. They crawled through the amber of his irises, staining the whites, pulsing in time with the unnatural thunder of his heartbeat.
"Especially not Fenris," the Alpha said, his tone dropping an octave into that terrifying resonance that made the stones beneath our boots hum. "My firstborn smells carrion before the flesh has even cooled. He has spent thirty winters waiting for my blood to turn. If you open that latch for him, child, he will not wait for the eclipse. He will open my chest while I can still feel the frost on his knuckles."
A violent shudder ran through me, starting in my chest and coiling down into my gut. In the fortress of Wraithwood, that was not an exaggeration. It was the law.
I stepped back, the hem of my wool skirts sweeping the flagstones, clutching the dagger against my ribs. To anyone watching from the high gallery, I was what I had always been: a stray sheep shivering in the wolf’s den. A fragile, scentless human girl with breakable bones and thin skin, plucked from the burning ruins of a border hamlet fifteen years ago and kept like an exotic songbird in a gilded cage.
For fifteen years, the pack had debated why Oberon had spared me. The elders whispered that I was an omen, a token of mercy meant to stave off the moon-god’s wrath. Fenris openly mocked me as the old man’s pet, a pathetic vanity project to prove an Alpha could tame even the weakest creatures of the dirt. I had spent every day of my adolescence believing I was nothing more than an emotional shield—a convenient buffer Oberon paraded before his vicious, snarling sons to demonstrate his absolute control. *Look how close I keep this useless creature,* his silence had always seemed to say. *Look how easily I could crush her, yet choose not to, because my will alone dictates life and death in this keep.*
Now, the will that held this mountain kingdom together was coming apart at the seams.
"Hide it in your sleeve," Oberon commanded softly, turning his broad, fur-draped back to me.
His shoulders were massive, a landscape of scars earned in territorial wars that had painted the northern pines red. But under the heavy mantle of black wolf pelt, the line of his spine bowed just a fraction. A tremor seized his left arm, sharp and involuntary, causing his clawed fingertips to dig into the polished oak of his map table.
I slipped the dagger beneath the deep cuff of my tunic, the cold steel biting into my forearm. "Fenris has three hundred warriors camped in the lower courtyard. The war-horns have been sounding since dusk. The scent of blood in the wind... they know, Oberon. The whole territory knows."
"Let them gather," Oberon rasped. He did not look at me, but his reflection in the dark glass of the arched window was monstrous—the shadow of a man standing eight feet tall in his spirit, battling the primeval predator tearing its way out from his marrow. "Wolves do not mourn an Alpha, Rosalind. They salivate."
He was right. In seventy-two hours, the crimson eclipse would crest directly over the jagged crown of the Ironcrag peaks. For any other pack, an eclipse was a night of communion, a sacred tide of raw lunar power. But for the bloodline of Wraithwood, it was a hereditary curse.
Every Alpha of Oberon’s line possessed an unmatched, terrifying strength that allowed them to dominate the northern wastes. But that power demanded an exorbitant tax. By their fiftieth winter, the beast within grew too wild, too ancient to be contained by mortal sanity. The Frenzy took them. It began with the eyes turning black, progressed to violent hallucinations and uncontrollable bloodlust, and ended when the Alpha turned entirely feral—a rabid, unthinking behemoth that would butcher his own mate, slaughter his pups, and reduce his ancestral home to ash.
And there was only one way the Wraithwood pack had ever cured it.
The Rite of the Living Heart.
Pack lore dictated that an Alpha could not simply die of sickness or pass peacefully into the earth. If the madness claimed him completely, his spirit would linger as a malevolent wraith, poisoning the land for generations. To cleanse the bloodline, the mantle had to be torn away by force. The rightful successor was required by blood-law to face the rabid Alpha in single combat, carve the still-beating heart from his open chest, and consume it raw before the assembled pack elders.
Only by swallowing the heart could the heir absorb the Alpha’s ancestral power while putting the ancient frenzy to rest.
It was barbaric. It was demonic. And Fenris had been sharpening his ceremonial curved blade for the last five years.
*Thump.*
A heavy impact rattled the thick ironwood doors of the solar. The iron bands groaned against their hinges.
My breath hitched, my hand flying instinctively to the hidden dagger at my wrist.
"Father!" The voice that tore through the heavy timber was rough, grating, dripping with the arrogance of a predator who already tasted victory. Fenris. "The elders have assembled in the Great Hall. The eclipse draws near, and the pack demands council. Open the doors!"
Oberon didn’t move. His head remained bowed over the tactical maps of our borders, his breathing shallow, wet, and ragged.
"Father!" The wood shuddered again as Fenris slammed his fist—or perhaps his half-shifted shoulder—against the grain. "You insult the council by barring the threshold! Or are the rumors true? Has the black rot taken your sight already? Are you hiding in the dark like a sick hound waiting for the shovel?"
I watched the corded muscles in Oberon’s neck bunch. The black veins were creeping higher now, reaching his jawline like frost climbing a winter pane. An unearthly growl built in the depths of his chest, a sound so ancient and vibrationally dense that the silver goblets on the sideboard began to chime against each other.
