Chapter 1 · Fangs in the Blizzard

The silver net hit me before I heard the shot.

It dropped out of the white sky like something God threw, and the barbs went straight through my coat, through my shoulder, and the burn started eating me alive. Silver does that. It doesn't cut you. It drinks you.

I went down in the snow eighteen feet from the border fence. Eighteen feet. I'd walked four hundred miles in two years for those last eighteen feet.

The blizzard screamed sideways and I couldn't see anything but white, and then I could see boots. Black boots, crusted with ice, planted in front of my face like he had all night.

I didn't have to look up. My body already knew. Two years of running and the dead thing in my chest — the place where the mate bond used to live — woke up and started clawing to get out.

"Get up."

That voice. Low, wrecked, scraped raw at the edges. Vane Kaelen. The Alpha of Frostveil. The man who stood on the Severed Ridge in front of three hundred wolves and cut me out of his soul like I was rot in a beam.

I spat blood into the snow. "Shoot me instead."

He crouched. Slowly, the way men do when their hands aren't steady and they don't want you to see it. Snow caked his beard. His eyes weren't gray anymore — they were ringed in red, the whole iris drowning in it, and that's when my stomach dropped all the way through the ice.

Feral. He'd gone feral.

He leaned close and breathed me in like a man who hadn't eaten in a month, and a sound came out of him that wasn't human at all.

"There you are," he said.

I tried to crawl. The net cinched tighter. Behind him, through the whiteout, I counted six more shapes coming up the ridge.

"Don't touch me."

It came out smaller than I wanted. My teeth were chattering, and the silver was cooking the meat of my shoulder, and I could smell my own blood.

Vane smiled. It wasn't a nice smile. It was the kind a wolf wears right before he picks which part of you to start with.

"You ran," he said.

"You threw me out."

"I did." His thumb dragged through the snow beside my cheek. Not on my skin. Right beside it. Like he was fighting his own hand. "And you ran anyway."

I almost laughed. Almost. Because what kind of sick logic is that?

Two years ago he stood on that ridge with the whole pack watching. He held my wrist up in the torchlight and said the words. *I, Vane Kaelen, Alpha of Frostveil, sever what the moon has joined.* Then he took a ceremonial blade and cut the mark off my neck.

Not cut it out. Cut it *off*. In front of my mother's friends. In front of the girls I grew up with.

Nobody looked away. That's what I remember most. Three hundred wolves, and not one of them looked away.

The bond didn't die quietly, either. It burned. Every single night for two years, a phantom brand under my jaw, like somebody pressed a hot coin into the scar and held it there.

And now he was kneeling in front of me, breathing like I was water.

"Alpha."

A new voice, close, smooth as a knife handle. The shapes had reached us. Six wolves in winter gear, spread out in a half ring, all of them keeping about ten feet back from their own leader.

The one in front pushed his hood off. Garrick Thorn. Beta. Sandy hair, frostbitten ears, and a pair of calm brown eyes I'd never once trusted.

"Alpha, the storm's turning," Garrick said. "We can't carry her through the pass in this. Finish it here and we'll bring the body back for the Elders."

Finish it.

My heart kicked. I looked at Vane. I looked at the wrecked red in his eyes and thought, *okay. This is it. He's going to do it himself.*

Vane didn't turn his head.

"Step back, Garrick."

"Sir, with respect, you're not—"

"*Step back.*"

The snarl rolled out of his chest and I felt it in my ribs. Garrick's whole line flinched. Two of the younger wolves actually dropped to their knees in the drifts, necks tilted without thinking. Alpha aura. Raw. Uncontrolled. It rolled over the ridge like a wave and my lungs locked up.

Garrick didn't kneel. But his jaw went tight, and something moved behind his face. Quick. Cold. Like a man doing sums.

Then he nodded, too politely. "As you command."

I saw that look. I filed it away. If I lived long enough to use it.

Vane cut the net with two claws, not one wolf allowed to come near it. The silver still hissed against my coat and I bit down on a scream. He got one arm under my knees and one behind my back and just lifted me. Like I weighed nothing. Like it was nothing.

His chest was furnace-hot through the wet wool. Fever hot. Sick hot.

"Put me down!"

"No."

"I'll bite you!"

"Good." His voice cracked straight down the middle. "Try."

I shoved at his shoulder with my good hand, and that was the mistake. My palm landed on bare skin above his collar, and the whole world went white.

Not the snow. Inside me.

The dead place in my chest *snapped*. The way a rope snaps when it's been stretched for two years and somebody finally lets go. Heat poured through the old scar, the brand under my jaw lit up like a struck match, and I heard myself make a sound I'd never heard before. Low. Wanting.

Vane heard it too.

His whole body locked. His arms tightened until I thought my ribs would crack. He turned his face into my hair and dragged in a breath so deep it shook.

"Seraphina," he said. Like a prayer. Like a curse.

The six wolves behind him went dead silent.

So did I. Because I'd felt it. For one half-second, through that open door in my chest, I'd felt *him*. Not the Alpha. Not the monster. Something frantic and starved, throwing itself against a cage.

He wasn't hunting me.

He was drowning, and I was the only air for a hundred miles.

No. *No.* I didn't care. I wasn't going to be his medicine. I wasn't going to be his anything.

"You *cut me off,*" I said, and I was crying now, furious hot tears freezing on my face. "You stood there and cut me off, and now you want me to... what? Come home?"

He didn't answer. He started walking. Away from the fence, away from the wire, back up the ridge, and every step took the south further out of reach. I could see the razor wire shrinking in the whiteout over his shoulder. Eighteen feet. I could have spit on it from here.

The wind dropped for a breath. The snow thinned. And his mouth came down beside my ear, hot, rough, his beard scraping my skin.

His fangs dragged along my throat, right over the scar. Barely a touch. Enough that every nerve I owned stood up and begged.

"Two years in hiding," Vane whispered, "just to die on my fence?"