Five Years Too Late, Alpha

Sienna

Almost five years after he threw me out of his hall, the Alpha of Nightfang stood in my office and stared at a four-year-old boy with his exact gold eyes.

"Is he mine?" he whispered.

I'd had almost five years to decide what I would say if he ever asked. I still wasn't ready.

But to understand what I said to him, you have to go back to the night I chose him.

* * *

The night I ruined my life, I chose every second of it.

I want that on the record. Later, people would say I was drunk, or tricked, or stupid. They'd say a girl like me, Alpha Gideon Hale's eldest daughter, raised on rules the way other girls were raised on milk, could never have walked into a stranger's bed on purpose.

They were wrong. I'd had half a glass of champagne. I knew exactly what I was doing.

And I wanted him.

* * *

It started with my father tapping a spoon against his glass.

Once a year, the four packs of Ravenhollow put on masks and veil oil, three drops at the wrist and three at the throat, so no wolf can smell an Alpha from an omega. My father hated the Veiled Moon Ball. He came anyway, because power has to be seen.

"Friends," he called out, and three hundred masked faces turned. "Tonight, I have joyful news. At the winter solstice, my daughter Sienna will be joined to Brandon Cole, heir of Redwater Pack."

Applause. Across the ballroom, Brandon lifted his champagne at me with the smile of a man who'd just bought a very expensive car.

I'd met Brandon Cole four times. Each time, he talked about himself. Once, he put his hand on the small of my back and left it there after I stepped away, like my body was a door he'd already been handed the key to.

"Breathe," my little sister Lily whispered, crushing my fingers.

I couldn't.

I was twenty-two, and I still hadn't shifted. Most wolves meet their wolf at eighteen. By twenty-two, a she-wolf who hasn't gets a word whispered behind manicured hands.

Hollow.

A hollow she-wolf can't feel her mate. A hollow heir can't hold a pack. So my father had solved me the way he solved everything, with a deal. Redwater's warriors, in exchange for my body and my name.

I smiled for the photographers. I let Brandon kiss my knuckles. I lasted eleven minutes.

Then I walked out onto the terrace and didn't look back.

* * *

October air hit me like cold water. Below the terrace, lanterns hung in the bare black trees. Above them, the moon sat fat and low, close enough to scratch.

I gripped the stone railing.

"You could've just given me a mate," I told her. "Everyone else got one."

"Do you always argue with the moon?"

The voice came from the shadow of the doorway. Low, a little rough, amused.

I turned around.

He was leaning against the wall like he'd been there a while. Tall, taller than my father, in a black suit cut close enough to be custom. Plain black mask. Dark hair pushed back like he'd dragged his hands through it. A glass of something amber hung forgotten in his fingers.

And his eyes caught the lantern light and burned.

Gold.

My stomach dropped through the floor.

Only one bloodline in Ravenhollow has gold eyes. The Dravens of Nightfang. And only one Draven of the right age would be at this ball: the one my father called that Draven dog over Sunday dinner. The one who took the east docks from Silvercrest when I was seventeen. The one who supposedly broke a man's jaw across a council table for interrupting him.

Alpha Lucan Draven. Twenty-eight. The richest wolf in the city. My father's worst enemy.

He didn't know who I was. He couldn't. The oil hid my scent and the mask hid my face.

I should have gone back inside.

"Only when she's winning," I said instead.

He laughed, short and surprised, like he hadn't done it in a while. "What did she do to you?"

"She forgot me."

He came closer, slowly, the way you'd approach a deer you didn't want to spook, and stopped an arm's length away.

"Then she's blind," he said.

Inside, the orchestra slid into a slow waltz. He set his glass on the railing and held out his hand.

"No names?"

"No names."

"Then what do I call you?"

"Whatever you want."

He glanced up at the moon, then back at me. One corner of his mouth lifted.

"Little Moon," he said.

I should have hated it. I didn't.

* * *

He danced the way I'd heard he fought. No wasted movement. Total control. One hand around mine, the other at the small of my back.

That's what I remember most, even now. Brandon's hand had felt like a claim. This one felt like a question. It rested there, warm through the silk, and I knew that if I stepped away, it would let me go.

I stepped closer.

Somewhere in the second song, something rolled over under my ribs, slow and heavy, like an animal turning in its sleep. I gasped. His hand went still on my back.

"You feel that?" he murmured. He sounded almost angry about it.

"Feel what?"

"I don't know." His thumb moved once along my spine. "Like I've been looking for something for years and I just walked into the room it's in."

The music ended. Neither of us moved.

"I'm getting married in eight weeks," I said into his chest. "To a man I don't like."

"Then don't."

"It's not that simple where I come from."

"Where do you come from?"

"No names."

He breathed out slowly. Then he touched two fingers under my chin, light enough that I could have turned away, and I looked up at him instead.

"What do you want, Little Moon?" he asked. "Not your family. Not the man you don't like. You."

Nobody had ever asked me that. Not once in twenty-two years.

"One night that belongs to me," I whispered. "One choice nobody made for me."

He went very still.

"Are you asking me what I think you're asking me?"

"Yes."

"Say it plain. I don't do maybes."

My heart was slamming so hard he had to hear it.

"Take me upstairs."

He leaned down until his mouth was beside my ear, and the heat of his breath went straight through me.

"If you change your mind on the stairs," he said, "or at the door, or any second after—"

"I'll say so."

"You'll say so," he repeated, like a vow. "And I'll stop. Every time."

I took his hand. He let me lead.

* * *

The door of the suite clicked shut, and the moon poured through the window like it wanted to watch.

For a moment neither of us moved. He stood with his back against the door and his hands at his sides, and I understood that he'd decided something. If anyone was going to cross that room, it would have to be me.

So I crossed it.

I put my hands flat on his chest and found the first button of his shirt. My fingers were shaking. He didn't help. He just watched me undo it, and the next one, and the one after that, and I felt his breathing change under my palms with every single button.

"You're trembling," he said.

"So are you."

He laughed, very low, into my hair. "Yes."

Then he turned me around, gently, and took my zipper down one tooth at a time, slow enough that I could have stopped him at any one of them. Cool air touched my spine. Then his mouth did, right between my shoulder blades, and my knees nearly went out from under me.

I reached for my mask. He stopped, his hands hovering at my waist.

"Keep it on?" he asked. "Or take it off. Your call."

"On," I said. "For now."

"Then I'll learn you this way." His mouth found the place under my jaw where my pulse was going wild. "I don't need your face to know you."

He did learn me. Slowly. Asking. Here? against my collarbone. Like this? when his hand found the curve of my waist. And when I didn't answer fast enough, he stopped, and waited, his breath hot against my skin, until I said it out loud. He wanted the words, every single time. So I gave them to him.

Nobody had ever wanted to know what I wanted badly enough to wait for the answer.

I found old scars across his back, raised and silver, and when I traced them, his whole body shuddered like nobody had ever touched them gently before. A growl rose out of his chest that wasn't a man's sound at all. It should have frightened me. Instead it lit me up like a struck match, and I pulled him closer, and the growl broke into something I felt more than heard.

At the very last edge, with nothing left between us but moonlight, he stopped. Held himself above me, shaking with the effort, and looked down at me through the black mask.

"Still yes?"

"Yes." I pulled him down by the back of his neck. "Don't you dare stop."

He didn't.

And for the rest of that night, the only name either of us needed was the one he'd given me, breaking apart on his lips until the sky outside went gray.

* * *

I woke at five to the sound of the shower.

The bathroom door stood half open. Through the steam I could see him at the mirror, mask gone at last, dragging a hand over his jaw. Without it he looked younger. There was a small scar through his left eyebrow. He was humming something under his breath, and whatever he was thinking about made him smile, and a dimple appeared in his left cheek.

Across his ribs, inked in black, a wolf's fang wrapped in thorns.

The Nightfang crest.

I'd known. But seeing it on his skin in the bathroom light, with my body still humming from him, turned my blood cold. If my father ever found out, he'd kill me. Then he'd start a war to kill him.

I dressed in the dark in under a minute. Gown. Shoes. My hand flew to my ear. One of my grandmother's silver crescent-moon earrings was gone, lost somewhere in the black sheets. I was still feeling for it when the shower shut off.

I left the earring.

I left him.

In the elevator, my phone lit up with eleven texts from Lily. The last one said: Brandon's mother is telling everyone you left with a waiter. WHERE ARE YOU.

One night. One choice. Nobody would ever know.

The Moon Goddess must have laughed herself sick.

* * *

Six weeks later, I knelt in front of both our packs for the Bride's Blessing.

It's an old Redwater custom. Before a wedding, their healer lays her hands on the bride and asks the Moon Goddess to bless her womb. Brandon's mother insisted. My father agreed, because he agreed to anything that sealed the deal.

So I knelt on a white cushion in the Redwater hall, in a white dress, with sixty wolves watching, and their old healer put her dry, papery palms flat against my stomach.

And stopped.

She frowned. Pressed harder. Then she snatched her hands back like I'd burned them.

"There's a heartbeat," she said.

Nobody breathed.

"A second heartbeat," the healer said, louder, and her voice cracked like a whip across the hall. "This girl is already carrying."

I had been throwing up for nine days. I had told myself it was nerves.

The hall exploded.

Brandon's mother screamed. Brandon himself just stared at me, his face going from white to red to something ugly. Somebody's chair crashed over. And through all of it my father walked toward me, very slowly, and the crowd split to let him through.

"Who?" he said.

Redwater counts a bride's purity the way bankers count gold. Silvercrest isn't much better. A she-wolf who carries a pup before she's mated has a word waiting for her, and I heard somebody in the crowd hiss it.

Moon-cursed.

"Who?" my father said again.

If I said Draven, the city would burn.

"It doesn't matter," I said.

"No," he agreed, and the calm in his voice was worse than shouting. "It doesn't."

He reached down and pulled the Silvercrest ring off my finger. The silver band I'd worn since my sixteenth birthday, his crest on it. He did it slowly, so everyone could watch.

Then he turned his back on me.

That's the old way. You don't banish a wolf with words first. You do it with your back.

One by one, the Silvercrest wolves in that hall turned around. The Beta. The Gamma. The aunties who used to braid my hair. My own mother, her shoulders shaking, her hand pressed over her mouth. She turned too.

All except one.

Lily stood in the middle of the hall, facing me, tears pouring down her face.

"Turn around," my father said without looking at her.

"No."

"Turn around."

It was the Alpha command. I watched it hit my little sister like a slap. Her whole body jerked. She fought it for three full seconds, sobbing, her feet dragging on the floor, and then it took her, and she turned.

My father spoke to the wall.

"I have one daughter," Alpha Gideon Hale said. "And her name is Lily. I, Gideon Hale, cast this woman out. She is pack-less. She is nameless. She is rogue."

I felt it happen.

The pack bond, that warm gold thread I'd carried in my chest since the day I was born, tore. Like someone had hooked a finger under my spine and pulled it out of me in one long rip. I folded over on the white cushion and screamed.

Sixty wolves stood with their backs to me and listened.

* * *

I left Silvercrest that night with one bag, three hundred and twelve dollars, and a secret that belonged to the most dangerous man in Ravenhollow.

He didn't know my name. He didn't know my face. He had no idea what he'd left inside me.

When I was four months pregnant, I'd beg him to find out.

And he would laugh.

Sienna

The Night Owl Diner sits on the Neutral Mile, the strip of streets down the middle of Ravenhollow that belongs to no pack. It's the only place in the city where a rogue can legally rent a room, sign a lease, or get a job.

It's also the only place that would hire me.

"Can you carry four plates?" Sal asked, the day after my father turned his back on me. He was sixty, bald, and had a cigarette burn on every knuckle.

"I can learn."

"Four bucks an hour. Rogue rate." He didn't look sorry about it. "Cot in the back room's free if you mop up after close."

I took it. I didn't have a choice.

The back room was a storeroom with a mop sink, a window that didn't open, and shelves of ketchup cans stacked to the ceiling. I hung my one good dress on a nail. I put the cot under the window so I could see a strip of sky. And I learned to carry four plates.

That's where I met them.

Jade Torres worked the counter. She was twenty-six, with a shaved undercut, a nose ring, and black roses tattooed down both arms. She'd been born rogue, which she told me in the first five minutes, the way other people tell you their star sign.

"Never had a pack to lose," she shrugged, refilling ketchup bottles with a speed I'd never match. "So I don't miss it. Who threw you out?"

"Nobody."

"Okay, Nobody."

A month later, she eyed my stomach, which had just started to curve under the apron. "Nobody's got a bun in the oven."

Nina Brooks washed dishes. Nineteen, so quiet you forgot she was there, with a cloud of brown curls and enormous careful eyes. She threw up in the staff bathroom every morning and didn't talk about it at all. Once I found her crying in the walk-in fridge, holding a picture on her phone of a grown man in an expensive suit. When she saw me, she deleted it.

The three of us shared cigarette breaks we didn't smoke, and leftover pie, and the long ugly hours between two and five a.m. when the only customers were drunks and shift workers. I don't think I'd have survived those months without them.

* * *

At four months, I called him.

Lily got the number. She'd stolen it out of Dad's phone, the private line that went straight to Nightfang's Alpha, and texted it to me with two words: Good luck.

I sat on the edge of my cot for two hours before I dialed.

It rang four times.

"Draven."

I'd forgotten how deep his voice was. It went down my spine and settled low in my stomach, and for a second I couldn't make a sound.

"Hello?"

"Hi. I need to tell you something. It's about the Veiled Moon Ball, in October. On the terrace."

He laughed.

It was low and tired and cruel, and it went through me like a nail.

"Let me guess," he said. "Silver mask. We danced. I took you upstairs. And now you're pregnant."

I froze. "How did you—"

"Because you're the forty-third woman to call this number with that exact story." His voice went flat. "My Beta keeps a list. Some of you even bought crescent-moon earrings. That part's almost impressive."

My hand went to my bare ear.

He'd kept it. He'd kept my earring, and he'd been looking for me. So hard and so publicly that forty-two other women had lined up to pretend to be me.

And now that the real one had finally called, I was just number forty-three.

"Please," I whispered. "I'm not lying. When the baby's born you can do a test, any test, you'll see—"

"Whoever's paying you," Lucan Draven said, "tell them it didn't work. Don't call this number again."

"My name is—"

Click.

I called back. Voicemail. I called the next day, and the next. By the end of the week, the number had been disconnected.

I sat on the cot with the dead phone in my lap until Jade came looking for me.

"Who was that?" she asked from the doorway.

"Nobody."

She looked at my face for a long moment. Then she came in, sat down beside me on the cot, and put her tattooed arm around my shoulders, and didn't say anything at all.

* * *

My water broke at 9:10 on a Monday night, in the middle of the late rush, while I was carrying four plates of hash browns.

I didn't drop them. I'm still proud of that.

Jade drove me to Ravenhollow General in Sal's delivery van, running every red light on the Mile. Nina sat in the back with me, holding my hand so tight her knuckles went white. Between contractions, I could hear Jade swearing at the windshield.

At the emergency entrance, a nurse in pale blue scrubs looked up from her screen.

"Pack?"

"She doesn't have one," Jade snapped. "She's in labor. Look at her."

"Pack sponsor, then." The nurse didn't look at me. "Any registered pack member who'll guarantee the bill."

"We're rogue. All of us. You know that."

"Then I'm sorry." She turned the payment screen around so we could see it. A number with a lot of zeros. "Rogue admissions require a deposit up front. Or a sponsor."

Another contraction hit. I grabbed the edge of the counter and made a sound I didn't know I could make.

"She's going to have this baby on your floor," Jade said.

The nurse picked up her phone and pressed a button. "Security to front intake."

* * *

So I had my son in the storeroom of the Night Owl Diner.

On a cot under a window that didn't open, between the ketchup cans and the mop sink, with Jade at one end and Nina at the other, and Sal standing guard outside the door so no customers wandered in.

Thirty-one hours.

Wolves are supposed to be good at pain. That's what I'd been told my whole life. But my wolf had never come out, and whatever was in me had gone quiet and far away while the pup grew, like someone waiting behind a closed door. So there was no wolf to help me. There was just me.

Around hour twenty, I started begging the Moon Goddess to just let me die.

"Nope," Jade said, wiping my face with a cold dishrag. "Not on my shift."

Around hour twenty-six, Nina, nineteen and seven months pregnant herself and terrified, climbed onto the cot behind me and held me up against her so I could push. She sang under her breath the whole time. Some old song, off-key, the same three lines over and over. I've never asked her what it was.

And at 4:12 in the morning, it was over.

Jade lifted him up under the bare bulb, red and furious and screaming like he wanted the whole Mile to know he'd arrived, and laid him on my chest.

He was so small. A full head of dark wet hair. The angriest little face I had ever seen.

Then he opened his eyes.

My breath stopped.

Newborns' eyes are supposed to be cloudy blue. His were gold. Clear, bright gold, staring up at me like he already knew every secret I'd ever kept.

"Oh," I whispered. "Oh, baby. Oh, no."

Jade leaned over to look. And went completely still.

She looked at his eyes. Then at me. Then at his eyes again. Her mouth fell open.

"Si," she breathed. "There is only one family in this city with eyes like—"

"Don't."

She stared at me for a long beat. Then she shut her mouth and nodded slowly.

"Okay," she said. "Okay. Not my business." A pause. "But damn."

* * *

The rogue registry office on the Mile opened at nine. I went at ten, with my son in a sling Nina had made out of a tablecloth, because if he wasn't registered in his first week, he didn't legally exist.

"Name?" the clerk asked.

I'd made lists for eight months. I'd crossed them all out.

"Asher."

"Surname?"

Not Hale. Hale was my father's name, and my father had one daughter, and her name was Lily.

"Hart," I said. My grandmother's maiden name. The woman who'd given me the earrings.

"Asher Hart." The clerk typed it in. "Pretty. What's it mean?"

"Happy," I said. "Somebody in this story ought to be."

On the walk back, my phone buzzed. My heart jumped, stupidly, the way it still did every time.

It was Lily.

Dad told the pack you died. A fever, down south. They held a moon service for you last night. Mom hasn't stopped crying. I'm so sorry, Si. I love you. I'll find a way to see you. I promise.

I read it three times, standing on the sidewalk with my son asleep against my chest.

Then I put the phone in my pocket and walked back to the storeroom.

* * *

Asher was seventeen days old when the fever started.

It came on in the night. One minute he was fussing, the next he was burning up against my skin, too hot, way too hot, and he'd stopped crying. That scared me more than anything. He just lay there in my arms, breathing fast and shallow, his gold eyes dull and half closed.

The rogue clinic on Fourth Street had one doctor, an old man named Pruitt who'd lost his own pack forty years ago. He listened to Asher's chest. Felt his tiny burning forehead. And then he sat back on his stool and looked at me with something that was almost worse than pity.

"Unbonded fever," he said.

"What does that mean?"

"It means he's a wolf pup with no pack." He took his glasses off and rubbed his eyes. "Pups aren't meant to come into the world alone. In the first month, their bodies reach for a pack bond, for other wolves, the way their lungs reach for air. If nothing answers, they burn."

I couldn't breathe. "Then fix it. Please. Whatever it costs—"

"There's nothing for me to fix, honey. It's not an infection." He looked at Asher. "He needs a bond. His mother's wolf could give him one, but you've never shifted. I can feel that on you." His voice went gentle. "Or a pack. An Alpha who'll lay a hand on him and claim him. Your friends can't do it, honey. Rogues can't give a pup what they don't have themselves. His father's pack would be best."

"And if no one does?"

Dr. Pruitt didn't answer.

He didn't have to.

* * *

That night, I sat on my cot with my burning son against my chest and a cold cloth on his forehead, and I looked at the Ravenhollow Herald that Sal had left on the counter.

There was a small notice on page six. The same notice that ran every month.

THE ALPHA'S COURT OF NIGHTFANG will be held this Monday at the Black Hall. All petitioners welcome, pack and rogue alike.

Once a month, by ancient law, the Alpha of Nightfang opens his doors to anyone in the city who wants to beg.

Lucan Draven had hung up on me. He'd laughed at me. He'd called me a liar and disconnected his phone.

But he couldn't hang up on me if I was standing right in front of him.

And he couldn't call me a liar if he was looking straight into his son's eyes.

On Monday morning, I wrapped Asher in every blanket we owned, tied Nina's tablecloth sling tight across my chest, and walked out into the rain to go and beg.

Sienna

The Black Hall stands just inside the Nightfang border, on a hill above the Mile, and it looks exactly like its name. Black stone. Black doors twice as tall as a man. A roof of black slate that shines like a beetle's back in the rain.

The line of petitioners went all the way down the hill.

I joined the end of it at seven in the morning. By ten, I'd made it to the doors. By noon, I was inside, in a hall so huge the rain on the roof sounded like distant applause, standing in a roped-off lane with two hundred other wolves who'd come to beg for something.

A farmer whose land had been flooded. A widow whose son was in a Nightfang jail. A boy with a bandaged arm. Rogues, mostly. You could tell by the way we stood. Like we were waiting to be told to leave.

Asher hadn't opened his eyes since dawn.

I kept two fingers on the side of his neck under the blanket so I could feel his pulse. Fast and light, like a bird's. His skin was so hot it burned my hand through the tablecloth sling.

Hold on, I told him. Hold on, baby. Just a little longer.

At the far end of the hall, up a short flight of stone steps, there was a dais. And on the dais, a high-backed chair carved out of a single piece of black wood.

And in the chair, him.

* * *

I felt him before I saw him.

The moment I stepped through those doors, something in my chest woke up. The thing that had been rolling over in its sleep for nine months, locked down by the pregnancy, suddenly sat bolt upright and slammed against my ribs so hard I staggered.

MATE.

I grabbed the velvet rope to stay on my feet.

MATE, my wolf howled. I'd never heard her voice before. It was wild and young and furious. MATE. HIM. HE'S HERE. MATE. MINE.

I looked up the length of that hall, past two hundred heads, and found his eyes.

Gold. The terrace. The black mask.

Him.

Of course. Of course the Moon Goddess had done this to me. Of every male in Ravenhollow, she'd tied me to the one who'd laughed at me down the phone.

He looked different in daylight. Harder. He wore a black shirt open at the collar and no jacket, and he sat sideways in that big chair with one ankle on his knee, like a king who was bored of his kingdom. He wasn't drunk. His eyes were sharp and clear and cold, moving over the petitioners without stopping on any of us.

Theo Marsh stood at his right shoulder. I knew the face from the papers. Sandy hair, a nose that had been broken at least once. Lucan's Beta and oldest friend.

On his left sat a woman.

Platinum hair. A cream-colored dress that probably cost more than the Night Owl made in a month. A face so perfect it looked carved. She sat close enough that their shoulders touched, and every so often she leaned over and murmured in his ear, and he tipped his head to listen.

"Celeste Moreau," the old farmer in front of me muttered to his wife. "Elder Moreau's girl. They say the Council's picked her for his Luna."

My wolf snarled so loud I was afraid the farmer would hear it.

* * *

They called my number at 2:51.

"Petitioner one hundred and twelve."

My legs carried me up the aisle between the ropes. My heart was slamming so hard I could hear it in my ears. A Nightfang clerk at a little desk at the foot of the dais looked up at me without interest.

"Name?"

"Sienna."

"Surname?"

"I don't have one anymore."

He wrote it down. Then he lifted a small black camera from his desk and snapped my picture, the way he'd done for every petitioner before me. The flash left a white spot in my eyes.

"State your petition to the Alpha."

I looked up.

Lucan Draven looked down at me. Into my face. For the first time.

And nothing happened in his eyes. Nothing at all.

I'd thought about this moment for nine months. I'd thought he'd know. That something in him would feel what I was feeling, this enormous, terrible pull, like a hook in my heart with him holding the line. But I hadn't shifted. My wolf was awake, but she'd never come out, and until she did, the bond only caught on my side. On his, it was a tug, maybe. A feeling he could ignore. I didn't know that then.

All he saw was a thin, wet rogue in a borrowed coat with a tablecloth tied around her chest.

"Go on," he said. His voice was quiet. Bored. "I don't have all day."

"You're my mate," I said.

The hall went silent.

I made myself keep going. "We met at the Veiled Moon Ball, in October. I called you while I was pregnant and you hung up on me. This is your son." I put my hand on the bundle at my chest. "He's nineteen days old, and he's sick, and he needs a pack, and I'm asking you to claim him. Please. That's all I'm asking."

Somebody near the back laughed.

Then somebody else. Then it rolled through the whole hall like a wave, and I stood there in the middle of it with my face on fire and my son burning against my chest.

Lucan didn't laugh.

He just closed his eyes for a second, like a man with a headache. When he opened them again, they were colder than before.

"Forty-four," he said.

Theo shifted behind him. "Lucan—"

"That's forty-four, Theo. You keep the list." Lucan looked back at me, and his voice was very calm and very tired. "Do you know what I hear every month, sweetheart? Silver mask. Garden terrace. You're not even the first one this year to bring a baby."

"Because it's true—"

"Rogue rings rent them," Celeste said lightly, to no one in particular. She didn't even look at me. She examined her nails. "Sick ones especially. They get more sympathy."

"He's not rented. He's yours. If you'd just come down here and look at him—"

"Lucan," Theo said again, lower. He was staring at the bundle on my chest with a frown cutting between his eyebrows. "The pup's sick. You can smell it from here. At least come down and—"

"Touch that pup in front of two hundred wolves, darling," Celeste murmured, "and you've claimed it. That's the law. You'd be giving your name to whatever she's selling."

Lucan's jaw tightened. He looked at the bundle on my chest for one long second.

Then he chose.

"Have our healer meet her at the gate," he said to Theo, flat and quiet. "I don't accept her claim. That doesn't mean a child goes untreated."

I stared at him. My mate. My son's father. The man who had held himself above me in the moonlight, shaking, and asked me Still yes?

"He doesn't need a healer," I whispered. "He needs you."

For a second, something crossed his face. His nostrils flared. His head tilted a quarter inch to one side, the way a wolf's does when it catches something on the wind.

Then Celeste laid her hand on his arm, and it was gone.

"Get out of my hall," Lucan Draven said.

* * *

He didn't touch me. He didn't need to.

He lifted two fingers, and two Nightfang guards came down the steps and took me by the elbows. Not roughly. Just firmly, the way you'd steer a cow through a gate. I twisted between them.

"He's dying," I shouted up at the dais. "Do you hear me? He's dying, and he's yours—"

The guards turned me around and walked me down the aisle. Two hundred wolves watched me go. Some of them were still laughing. Some of them looked away, ashamed, which was almost worse.

At the doors, I looked back.

I don't know why. I should have kept walking. But I looked back, and I saw Celeste Moreau lean over and press her lips to the side of Lucan's jaw, and I saw him let her.

He didn't kiss her back. He didn't even move. He was staring after me with that frown still on his face.

But he let her stay.

The pain hit me so hard my knees went out.

The guards caught me before I hit the floor. I barely felt them. It started in the center of my chest, a white-hot spike, and spread out along every nerve to the tips of my fingers. My wolf wasn't howling anymore. She was screaming, a thin, high, animal sound inside my skull, the sound of something that has just been told no by the only one it was ever made for.

I bit down on my lip until I tasted blood, because I would not make a sound. Not in front of her. Not in front of him. I would not give either of them that.

The guards carried me the last few steps and set me down outside on the wet black stone, and the great doors swung shut behind me with a boom I felt in my teeth.

There was no healer at the gate.

I waited there in the rain for forty minutes. Nobody came.

* * *

Asher's sock was gone.

I noticed it at the bottom of the hill. One tiny foot had worked its way out of the blankets, bare and burning, and the little blue sock Nina had knitted for him was nowhere. Lost somewhere on the floor of the Black Hall.

I tucked his foot back into the blankets and pressed my mouth to his hot forehead and started walking.

It was a real storm now. Rain came sideways in gray sheets. The road down to the Mile cut through the edge of the Nightfang reserve, through old dark trees bent over in the wind. The farmer's wife from the line had pressed a plastic rain poncho into my hands on the steps without a word, and I pulled it over both of us and walked, because I didn't know what else to do.

Dr. Pruitt's words went around and around in my head.

His father's pack would be best.

And if no one does?

I couldn't go back to the storeroom. Going back meant sitting on that cot and waiting for him to stop breathing. So I walked. Past the clinic on Fourth Street, dark and locked. Past the diner's lit window, where I didn't let myself stop. Hours later, I turned up the reserve road toward the Nightfang ridge. If he wouldn't come down three steps, I'd climb the whole hill to his door. It was after two in the morning. The road was empty. Somewhere far off, thunder rolled across the hills.

Asher's breathing had gone slow.

Not fast and light anymore. Slow. A long pause between each tiny breath, so long that every time, my own heart stopped, waiting for the next one.

"Stay with me," I begged him. "Baby, stay with me, please. Please. I'm right here."

He didn't cry. He didn't move.

Then, under the noise of the rain, I heard something else.

A low, wet growl. From the trees on my left.

And another one, on my right.

I stopped walking.

Three pairs of eyes opened in the dark between the trees. Yellow and sick and wrong, too close to the ground. The Starved. Wolves who'd been rogue so long, without pack or mate or anything at all, that they'd forgotten how to be anything but hungry.

I'd heard stories about them my whole life. About what they did to anything small and weak that wandered into the reserve at night.

They'd smelled the fever.

They'd smelled my son.

Sienna

The first one came out of the trees on all fours.

It had been a wolf once. You could still see the shape of it under the matted fur, the long jaw, the ears. But its ribs stuck out like the bars of a cage, and half its coat had fallen away in patches, and its eyes were the dull sick yellow of a dying streetlight. It came toward me low to the ground, head swinging from side to side, sniffing the air with long wet breaths.

Sniffing him.

The second one stepped out on my right. The third circled behind me. I heard its claws click on the road.

I backed up until my shoulders hit a tree trunk. I had nothing. No weapon. No phone signal. No pack to call. Just my two arms wrapped around a burning bundle inside my coat, and a scream stuck in my throat that nobody would hear.

The first one stopped six feet away and grinned at me. There is no other word for it. Its lips peeled back from its yellow teeth, and a long string of drool swung from its jaw.

It crouched to jump.

And something inside me said, very clearly, No.

* * *

Nobody tells you what a first shift feels like with your baby lying in the leaves between your feet.

It didn't feel like changing. It felt like exploding.

Four years late, she came out all at once. My spine bowed. My bones cracked, all of them, a long grinding roar like a tree coming down. Fire poured under my skin. My coat split down the back. I had just enough time to drop to my knees and lay Asher in the leaves at the foot of the tree, gently, so gently, and then my hands weren't hands anymore.

And then it stopped hurting, all at once.

I was standing on four legs over my son.

The rain was still falling. But I couldn't feel the cold. I could hear everything. Every drop hitting every leaf. Three ragged heartbeats in front of me. And under me, between my front paws, one tiny, slow, stubborn heartbeat that belonged to me.

I looked down at my paws.

They glowed. Silver-white, bright as frost under a streetlight, so pale the rain looked dark against them.

The first of the Starved saw me and stopped mid-crouch.

I lowered my head. And a sound came out of me that I'd never made before. Not a growl. Something deeper and older, from the bottom of my chest, that shook the rain off the leaves above us.

The Starved flinched.

Then something happened that I didn't understand for five more years.

It dropped. All three of them did. They flattened themselves on the road, bellies in the mud, ears pinned back, and whimpered like puppies. The one that had grinned at me rolled onto its back and showed me its throat.

They were bowing.

I stood over my son with my lips peeled back from my teeth, shaking, and three starving monsters lay in the road and bowed to me.

Then they turned and fled into the trees, and they didn't make a sound as they went.

* * *

I curled around Asher in the leaves.

I didn't know what else to do. I put my whole body around him like a wall, my tail over his feet, my muzzle against his tiny burning head, and I let all my warmth pour into him. And from somewhere deep in my chest, my wolf reached out to him. I felt her do it. Like a hand stretching out in the dark, searching.

And something in my son reached back.

It was so small. A thread. A flicker. The first gold thread of a bond, the kind I'd lost when my father turned his back. It caught between us, and held, and pulled tight.

Asher sneezed.

Then he opened his mouth and screamed. Loud and furious and absolutely alive.

I had never heard a better sound in my whole life.

His forehead was cooling under my muzzle. Already. Just like that. I lay in the rain and listened to him scream at me and I howled, I couldn't help it. I threw back my head and howled at the black sky until my throat hurt.

* * *

"Well, I'll be damned."

A flashlight beam swept over me. I lunged to my feet, snarling, over my son.

At the edge of the road stood an old woman in a yellow rain slicker with a shotgun broken open over one arm. She was somewhere past seventy, with a long silver braid down her back, and a pair of reading glasses shoved up into her braid like she'd forgotten them there.

"Easy," she said. "Easy, honey. I'm not here to hurt either of you. I heard that howl from my back porch. Half the Mile probably did." She lowered the flashlight, very slowly, until it pointed at the mud. Then she looked at me, properly, and I watched the color go out of her face.

"White," she whispered. "Lord help us."

She looked over her shoulder at the dark road. Then back at me.

"Shift back," she said, low and urgent. "Right now, honey. Shift back, before anyone else comes. And don't you ever let anybody in this city see that wolf again. Do you understand me?"

* * *

Her name was Ruth Delaney, and she owned a falling-down inn three hundred yards away, at the very end of the Mile where it backed onto the reserve.

THE LANTERN HOUSE, said a faded sign hanging from one chain over the porch. Underneath, in black marker on a piece of cardboard: ROOMS. CHEAP. ROGUES WELCOME.

She sat me down at her kitchen table wrapped in two quilts, and put a mug of tea in my hands, and held my son while I drank it. Asher had fallen asleep the moment we were indoors, cool and pink and snoring. Ruth didn't ask me a single question about him. She didn't ask where I'd come from, or who'd put that look on my face.

She asked, "Can you balance a till?"

I blinked at her. "Yes."

"Night clerk quit on me Tuesday. Room and wages, if you want the job. Rogue rate's a crime, so I don't pay it." She jerked her chin at the ledger lying open on the counter, a mess of crossed-out numbers. "That's six months of my bookkeeping. Don't laugh."

I looked at the ledger. I looked at my son asleep in her arms.

"Show me the till," I said.

Ruth smiled for the first time. Then the smile went away, and she set a little brown glass bottle on the table between us. The liquid inside was dark green and smelled like crushed mint with something bitter underneath.

"Veilroot tonic," she said. "Same thing they put in the oil at that fancy ball, only stronger. A spoonful every morning, and your scent goes quiet for a day. Not gone. Quiet."

"Why would I need that?"

"Because a white wolf has a smell, honey. I smelled it on that road from three hundred yards, through the rain." She leaned forward, and her old eyes were dead serious. "I'm seventy-three years old, and I've only ever seen one other wolf that color, when I was a girl. The Elders came for her, and nobody ever saw her again."

My hands had gone cold around the mug.

"Anybody who catches that scent is going to want you," Ruth said. "The Council. The packs. Whoever put that baby in you." She pushed the bottle toward me. "So you drink this every morning. And you don't let anyone find you until you can stand on your own two feet. Not one day before."

I picked up the spoon.

* * *

Lucan

3:07 a.m.

I came awake in my bed with my wolf howling a word I'd never heard him say in twenty-eight years.

MINE.

Something was happening in my chest. Something tearing open, like a fist punching up through my breastbone from the inside.

MINE, Kane roared. My wolf was throwing himself against the inside of my skull. SHE'S OUT. SHE'S AWAKE. SHE'S OUT THERE. FIND HER. FIND HER NOW.

"Find who?"

He didn't answer. He just howled.

I stumbled to the window. The storm was beating itself against the glass. Somewhere out there, southwest, toward the reserve, toward the Mile, something was pulling at me. Like someone had tied a line around my ribs and was hauling on it hand over hand.

On my nightstand lay a tiny blue knitted sock.

I'd picked it up off the floor of the Black Hall after court, when everyone was gone. I don't know why. I'd stood there holding it, frowning, while Theo watched me from the doorway without saying anything. Then I'd put it in my pocket and brought it home.

I looked at it now. And I heard her voice again, as clearly as if she was standing in the room.

You're my mate.

Every hair on my arms stood up.

I called Theo at 3:15. He picked up on the first ring, like he hadn't been sleeping either.

"The woman from court," I said. "One-twelve. Find her."

A long silence on the line.

"Lucan," Theo said quietly. "What did you feel?"

"Find her, Theo. Now."

Then I asked him about the healer.

Another silence. "Celeste said she'd handle it," Theo said slowly. "You'd already called the next petitioner. She told me she'd sent ours down to the gate herself. Then she sent up a note: the girl had left before he got there."

I should have gone down to the healer myself and asked him. I didn't. Celeste said it was handled, and that night I needed one thing to be handled.

We searched for nineteen days.

Theo pulled her photo from the court records and took it everywhere. But the Mile looks after its own, and nobody on it talks to a Nightfang wolf in a good coat. The old doctor on Fourth Street swore she'd never set foot in his clinic. The rogue registry told us it didn't answer to packs. At the Lantern House, at the bottom of the reserve, an old woman with a shotgun met Theo on her porch and told him she'd put a young mother and a baby on the morning bus south.

We followed that lead for a week. It went nowhere.

My trackers found the place on the reserve road where the storm had washed everything away. Nothing left but three of the Starved, dead in a ditch a mile south. They hadn't been bitten. They'd lain down in the mud and just stopped.

"Darling," Celeste said, on the twentieth day, curled on my couch with a glass of wine. "Rogue rings rent babies. You know that. She got paid, and she left town. That's all."

The pull in my chest had faded to something faint and far away. A radio station drifting out of range.

On the twentieth day, I stopped looking.

Somewhere in those twenty days, I'd decided that the pull in my chest and the girl from court were two different things. One I could keep looking for. The other I could forget.

That's the part I'll never forgive myself for.

But I didn't throw the sock away. I put it in the inside pocket of my jacket, the left one, over my heart, next to a silver crescent-moon earring I'd carried there every single day since October.

I didn't know why I kept either of them.

I just knew I couldn't let them go.

* * *

Sienna

Almost five years.

That's how long it took.

Years of four rogue women and a handful of babies doing what every bank, every inspector, and every pack wolf in Ravenhollow said was impossible.

The first bank manager slid my loan application back across his desk with two fingers, like it was dirty. "We don't lend to rogues, Ms. Hart." So did the second. So Ruth put up the deed to the Lantern House, and I put up everything I had, which was a dress, a phone, and the last of Sal's back pay, and the four of us opened three rooms with our own hands.

I learned to fix a boiler from a library book. I had to. Our first paying guest was a trucker named Hal, and ten minutes after he checked in he was back at the desk with his bag in his hand. "No hot water," he said. "I'll take my twenty back." I went down to the basement with a flashlight in my teeth, found a loose wire in the boiler, and tightened it. When I came back up, Hal was standing at the sink in Room 3 with steam rising around his face. He put his bag down.

Jade learned to paint ceilings standing on a ladder with her daughter Mia strapped to her back. Nina, who'd had her son Leo two months after Asher, turned out to have a genius for numbers that nobody had ever bothered to notice.

Hal stayed one night and left a twenty on the pillow and a note that said Best sleep I've had in ten years. Jade framed it. It still hangs behind the front desk.

The first month we made a profit, I paid Jade and Nina before I paid myself. Every month since, too.

Jade handled every interview and every photograph. No pictures of me, ever. No names or faces of the children. The Mile understood; the Mile always does.

Now the Lantern House has twenty-two rooms. A garden with three working fountains. A ballroom with a crystal chandelier Ruth swears she won in a card game in 1979. It's rated 4.8 stars, the highest of any hotel in Ravenhollow, and every single person on our staff is a rogue who'd once been told she was worth nothing.

And Asher is four.

Four and a half, he'll tell you, very seriously. The half counts.

He has dark curls and a dimple in his left cheek when he scowls. He taps two fingers on the table when he's thinking hard. He lines up his crayons by color and loses his mind if anyone moves them. He has the best nose of any pup Ruth has ever seen. When I have nightmares, he climbs into my bed, sniffs my hair, and tells me they smell like cedar and cold rain.

I've never told him whose scent that is.

And he has gold eyes.

Every morning for almost five years, I took a spoonful of Ruth's tonic.

Every night, I felt it, a faint pull from somewhere east, like a hand on a rope in the dark.

I never once let myself look east.

* * *

Then, on the last Monday in February, Jade walked into my office and slapped the Ravenhollow Herald down on my desk so hard my coffee jumped.

"Tell me," she said, "you've seen this."

The headline took up half the front page.

NIGHTFANG HOLDINGS TO BUY THE NEUTRAL MILE. DRAVEN: "IT'S TIME TO CLEAN UP THE ROGUE QUARTER."

Under it, a photograph.

Him. Older. Harder. A dark suit, a shadow of beard along his jaw, that scar through his eyebrow. Staring straight into the camera like he could see me through the page.

I put my cup down before I dropped it.

"Every building on the Mile," Jade said. "Bulldozed. Luxury condos." She jabbed a finger at the second paragraph. "Including us."

"We're not for sale."

"Keep reading."

Draven is expected to personally visit the remaining holdouts this week, beginning Thursday with the Lantern House, whose owner has refused every offer to date.

Thursday.

Three days.

I had spent almost five years hiding from Lucan Draven.

And on Thursday, he was going to walk through my front door.

Sienna

I'd asked to move the meeting.

His lawyer refused. Mr. Draven's schedule is fixed. Thursday at two, or the offer is withdrawn and we proceed through the Council. Proceeding through the Council meant a compulsory purchase order. It meant twenty-two rogue women losing their jobs with ninety days' notice.

"I'll handle him," Jade said on Wednesday night. "You stay out of sight. Let me be the face."

"No."

"Si—"

"Almost five years, Jade. We built this place with our hands. I'm not making you stand in that lobby and take it for me." I'd been practicing in the mirror for three days. My voice barely shook anymore. "I'll take the tonic in the morning like always. He'll smell one more she-wolf in a building full of them. I'll tell him no to his face, and he'll leave."

It was a good plan.

I changed it at 7:15 on Thursday morning.

* * *

I was making Asher's pancakes in our little apartment behind the garden when he climbed onto a chair, stretched up to the top shelf, and came down with the brown bottle held in both hands like a trophy.

"Your green medicine, Mommy! You always forget."

"Thank you, baby."

I poured a spoonful. Dark green, smelling of mint and something bitter underneath. I'd swallowed it every morning for almost five years. Every single morning, so that nobody would ever find me.

I held the spoon over the sink for a long time.

I thought about a girl in a tablecloth sling, standing in a line of two hundred wolves, begging. I thought about the doors of the Black Hall booming shut behind her. I thought about how many years I'd spent making myself small and quiet and unfindable, because of him.

Ruth would call me a fool. The Elders have noses too, she'd say, and a white wolf smells like nothing else in this city. She'd be right.

So I did it carefully. Ruth had the car waiting by the garden gate, engine warm. Nina would keep Asher in our apartment with the doors locked and the dinosaur movie on. Jade knew the signal to end the meeting: one word, pencil, and she'd have Draven's people out the front door in ninety seconds.

I'd spent almost five years being small enough to hide. I was done being small.

I tipped the spoon and watched it run down the drain.

If I was going to tell Lucan Draven no, I'd do it smelling like myself.

* * *

At 2:04 p.m., three black SUVs pulled into the circular drive.

At 2:06, he walked into my lobby.

I watched him on the security monitor in my office, and every cell in my body came alive at once.

He was bigger than I remembered. Broader through the shoulders. Charcoal suit, no tie, the top button undone. He walked into the Lantern House like he already owned it. Two Nightfang warriors flanked him, and a thin man with a briefcase trailed behind. The lawyer.

Jade met him at the front desk with her best customer-service smile and a clipboard she was clearly thinking about hitting him with.

"Mr. Draven. Welcome to the Lantern House. I'm Jade Torres, general manager. Ms. Hart will be with you in a moment. Can I offer you—"

He wasn't listening to her.

He'd stopped in the middle of my lobby, on the checkered floor we'd scraped and sealed by hand. His head had lifted. His nostrils flared once, slowly. The hand at his side curled into a fist.

"Mr. Draven?" Jade said. "Everything all right?"

He turned his head.

He looked directly up into the security camera above the front desk.

At me.

Through a lens and a screen and two closed doors, his eyes found mine like there was nothing between us at all.

Then he started walking. Straight across the lobby toward the staff hallway, Jade hurrying after him saying Sir? Sir, that's staff only—

I stood up.

I could lock the door. I could go out the window. I could hide in my own office like a rabbit in a hole, the way I'd hidden for almost five years.

No.

I had walked out of his hall with my son dying in my arms. I'd built this hotel out of rotten wood and nothing else.

I was done hiding.

I opened the door and walked out to meet him.

* * *

We met in the middle of the hallway.

The bond hit us both like a bolt of lightning.

I actually heard it. A crack in the air, like ice breaking on a lake. The lights flickered. A vase on the side table rattled against the wall. Behind me, somewhere, a guest gasped. The Alpha aura rolled off him so heavy that both his warriors dropped back three steps without meaning to.

And my wolf, my silver wolf, who'd been kept under a spoonful of bitter tonic every morning for almost five years, came roaring up to the surface of my skin.

MATE, she sang. HE'S HERE. HE CAME. HE CAME FOR US—

Shut up, I told her. He threw us out of his hall.

His eyes had gone completely gold. Not just the irises. All of them, swallowing the whites. His chest rose and fell hard.

"You," he said.

It wasn't a question.

I lifted my chin. "Welcome to the Lantern House, Mr. Draven. I'm Sienna Hart, the owner. I understand you've made us an offer." Polite. Calm. Three days in the mirror. "The answer is no. To all of it. Have a nice day."

I turned around.

"Ms. Hart."

His voice was rough. Barely controlled. But when I looked back, he hadn't moved a single step closer.

"Is there somewhere we can talk privately?" he asked. "Please."

I'd never heard him say please. Not on the phone. Not in his hall.

Jade was staring at me over his shoulder, her eyes saying say the word and I'll tackle him.

"Five minutes," I said. "My office. The door stays open."

Something flickered across his face. "All right."

* * *

He stopped just inside the open doorway and stood there and breathed.

He did it with his eyes shut, slowly, deeply, like he'd been holding that breath for five years and only now remembered how to let it go. His shoulders shook, once.

"Five years," he said, without opening his eyes.

I said nothing.

"Since October, five years ago, I've been looking for a girl in a mask. And one night that next summer, I woke up at three in the morning and something in my chest ripped open. My wolf hasn't stopped calling for you since. Every night." He opened his eyes. "I've felt you, Sienna. Like a second heartbeat under mine. And I could never find you. Do you know what that does to a wolf?"

"I have some idea," I said.

It came out so bitter he frowned.

He took one step toward my desk, and stopped himself, and I watched him do it. His hands opened and closed at his sides.

"May I come closer?"

I didn't answer.

He stayed where he was.

That was the worst part. Not the pull, though the pull was brutal. Every inch of my skin had gone hot and tight. My knees had gone loose. The bond stretched between us like a string drawn so taut it hummed, and some wild, traitorous part of me wanted to cross the room myself. Just to find out if his hands still felt like a question.

My body remembered before I let it. A zipper going down one tooth at a time. His mouth between my shoulder blades. Here? Like this? His voice in the dark, waiting for my answer. Heat climbed my throat and spread under my skin, and I knew, I knew, he could smell it on me.

His nostrils flared. His hands curled into fists at his sides. He didn't move.

The worst part was that he waited.

In his hall, he hadn't waited for anything.

"We've met," he said quietly. It wasn't quite a question. "Before today."

I laughed. I couldn't help it. It was the most bitter sound I've ever made.

"Once," I said. "You didn't look very hard."

His brow furrowed. His eyes moved over my face, slowly. My mouth. My eyes. My bare ears.

Under my blouse, on its thin silver chain, the other crescent earring lay warm against my skin. If he looked any lower, he'd see the outline of it.

"Look at me," he murmured. "Look at me, Little—"

He stopped.

Just stopped, mid-word, like the next one had caught in his throat and he didn't know where it had come from.

Little Moon. Five years, and the name still lived in his mouth.

"Get out of my hotel," I said. My voice was shaking now, and I hated it. "Take your lawyer and your offer and get out."

He went very still.

"Say that again," he said softly.

"Get out."

"You say it like you've been practicing."

"I have," I told him. "You taught me how."

Something happened to his face then. I watched it happen. He'd just heard his own words come back to him.

"My hall," he said slowly. "You were in my hall."

"You remember the room," I said. "Try remembering what I asked you for."

The color drained out of him all at once. "You said—" His voice cracked. "You said the pup was—"

And the door, the open door, banged against the wall.

"Mommy!"

My heart stopped.

"Mommy, Mommy, I heard Aunt Jade tell Ruth a king was coming and I want to see his crown—"

Asher came charging into my office in his dinosaur pajamas, curls flying, one sock on and one sock off, Nina running behind him with her face white as paper. Asher, no! I'm so sorry, Si, he pulled the bolt and went right under my arm—

He skidded to a stop in the middle of the rug.

He looked up.

Lucan looked down.

Nobody moved.

Gold eyes met gold eyes. The exact same shade, like someone had poured it from the same cup. Asher frowned up at this enormous stranger, and the dimple appeared in his left cheek, in the exact place it had appeared on the face of a man smiling at a fogged-up mirror five years ago, while I pulled on my shoes in the dark.

Then my son lifted his hand and tapped two fingers against the doorframe, thinking hard.

Tap, tap.

I watched Lucan's eyes drop to those two little fingers. I watched his own hand twitch at his side. Two fingers, against his thigh.

Tap, tap.

Asher sniffed the air. Wrinkled his nose. Tilted his head.

"You smell like cedar and cold rain," he informed the most powerful Alpha in Ravenhollow. "That's what my mommy's bad dreams smell like."

Lucan made a sound I'll never forget.

His breath caught like he'd been hit. One hand lifted toward my son, then stopped in midair, shaking, as if he wasn't sure he was allowed.

He didn't look at me. He couldn't seem to look anywhere but at Asher. And when he spoke, his voice was so quiet I almost didn't hear it.

"Sienna."

The bond pulled so tight between us I could hardly breathe.

"Is he mine?"