Chapter 2

For a terrifying second, I thought he would lose control right there. I thought he would shift into his nine-foot dire form and rip the ironwood doors off their mountings, tearing his son to shreds. If he slipped now, before the eclipse, there would be no trial, no honor. The fortress would devolve into an uncontrolled slaughter, and I, a scentless human with no pack bond to protect me, would be ripped apart in the crossfire within minutes.

"Go away, Fenris," Oberon’s voice cut through the room, deceptively calm, cold as mountain glacier water. "The solar remains closed until the eclipse hour. You will hold the borders as you were ordered, or I will strip your command before the sun sets."

Silence hung heavy on the other side of the door. A thick, suffocating silence that made the tiny hairs on my arms stand on end.

Then came Fenris’s low, mocking laugh.

"Enjoy your silence, old man," Fenris sneered through the wood. "Breathe it in. But remember—when that moon turns red, the doors will not keep me out. And when I take your chest apart, I’ll feed that little human rabbit you keep at your heels to the curs in the kennel."

Footsteps receded down the spiral stone staircase, heavy and deliberately slow.

I closed my eyes, leaning my back against the cold stone pillar behind me, trying to steady the frantic rabbit-kick of my pulse. Fenris meant every word. He had hated me from the day Oberon brought me home wrapped in an oversized fur cloak, coughing smoke from the ruins of my village. To Fenris, my presence was an insult to their pureblood lineage. I took up space, I ate their meat, and worst of all, Oberon had forbidden anyone from laying a finger on me under penalty of death.

Once Oberon was dead, that protection died with him.

"He will kill me," I whispered into the dim room, not caring if Oberon heard the raw truth in my voice. "The second you fall, Fenris will hunt me through these halls like game."

Oberon turned slowly. The blackness in his eyes had receded a millimeter, held back by sheer, agonizing willpower, but the effort left him pale beneath his weathered bronze skin.

"He will try," Oberon said, his gaze fixing on me with an intensity that pinned me to the floor. "Which is why you will stay in this room. You will bar the doors from the inside. When the eclipse begins, you will not look at what I become, Rosalind. You will keep your hand on that blade."

"What am I supposed to do with a dagger against a pack of wolves?" Desperation cracked my composure. I stepped toward him, my hands trembling despite his earlier praise. "You gave me a toy! If Fenris breaks through those doors in his shifted form, this silver won't even pierce his hide before he snaps my spine!"

"You will not fight Fenris," Oberon said, his voice flat, resolute, carrying the weight of a decree chiseled into stone. "You will not need to."

"Then what is this for?" I drew the blade, the silver catching the dying amber light of the hearth fire. "Tell me, Oberon! If I am to die here as your pet, at least tell me what script I am supposed to follow!"

Oberon stared at the blade in my hand. For a fleeting fraction of a second, an expression flickered across his weathered, ferocious face that I had never seen before. It wasn’t the pride of an Alpha, nor the cold cruelty of a warlord.

It looked almost like grief.

"You are not a pet, Rosalind," he murmured, so softly I almost thought I imagined it. "You never were. But you are the only one in this cursed fortress whose soul is not choked with the taste of blood."

Before I could demand an explanation, the heavy brass bell in the fortress watchtower began to toll.

*One. Two. Three.*

The changing of the guard. Seventy-one hours remaining.

Oberon’s jaw tightened, the moment of strange vulnerability vanishing behind the impenetrable mask of the Alpha. "Leave me now. The sun is sinking, and the madness is louder at dusk. Go to the lower archives. Return to me tomorrow at midnight. And Rosalind..."

I halted with my hand on the heavy iron latch of the side servant's exit.

"Do not let my second son corner you in the dark," Oberon warned, his golden-black eyes narrowing. "Lucian has returned from the western frontier."

The breath caught in my throat, hot and sharp.

*Lucian.*

I didn't answer. I didn't dare. If Oberon saw the sudden flush creeping up my collarbones, if he smelled the spike of adrenaline and forbidden longing that flared in my blood at the mere mention of that name, he would know the one secret that could get me executed long before the eclipse ever arrived.

I slipped out into the cold, drafty corridor, pulling the heavy oak door shut until the latch clicked into place.

The air in the western corridor smelled of damp granite, tallow candles, and the perpetual, suffocating scent of wet pine and wolf musk. The mountain fortress of Wraithwood was carved directly into the living rock of the Ironcrags, an impenetrable labyrinth of vaulted arches, narrow arrow slits, and endless stone stairwells built to withstand a siege of giants. But right now, it didn't feel like a stronghold.

It felt like a tomb waiting to be sealed.

I walked briskly, my soft leather slippers making no sound against the flagstones—a habit born of fifteen years of survival. To survive in a den of apex predators, you learned to be invisible. You learned to suppress your breathing, to hide your heartbeat, and to mask your scent with the bitter lavender and dried wolfsbane oils I kept constantly rubbed into the cuffs of my sleeves.

To the wolves, I was practically a ghost. A scentless, harmless wraith.

Except to one.

As I turned the corner into the lower colonnade that led toward the archives, a sudden, suffocating wave of heat washed over me. It wasn't the warmth of a brazier. It was a searing, magnetic current that wrapped around my ribcage, pulling so hard toward the shadowed alcove beneath the stairs that my feet almost stumbled.

The air shifted, the musk of the fortress instantly overwhelmed by a scent that made my knees weak: ozone, crushed wintermint, and the dark, intoxicating tang of freshly turned earth after a thunderstorm.

A hand shot out from the gloom.

Long, calloused fingers wrapped around my bicep, firm but devoid of claws, pulling me effortlessly into the deep recess behind the heavy velvet tapestries. Before a scream could escape my lips, my back met the solid stone wall, and a broad, muscular frame stepped into my personal space, blocking out the light from the torchieres.

"You're shaking," a deep, velvety voice murmured in the dark.

My breath shuddered out of me. I looked up into a pair of smoldering, storm-gray eyes that possessed none of the bloodline's black rot, but burned with an intensity far more dangerous.

Lucian.

Oberon’s second son. The exiled prince.

Unlike Fenris, whose frame was thick, brutish, and coated in bristling brown fur even in his half-human form, Lucian was built like a shadow given lethal purpose. Tall, broad-shouldered, with raven hair that brushed his collar and sharp, aristocratic cheekbones that looked as if they had been chiseled by a sculptor who only understood war. He wore dark leather brigandine stained with travel dust, the silver clasps of the western patrol still pinned to his shoulders.

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