At Draven Wolf Academy, everyone knows the Moonfall name. It carries weight, legacy and the expectation of something extraordinary. On her eighteenth birthday Elara Moonfall did not shift. No transformation, no wolf, nothing but silence and a school full of people who never once let her forget it. The wolfless Moonfall. That is what they called her and she carried it quietly because what other choice did she have. Then the blood moon rises on a forest camping trip and everything changes. Her wolf arrives like something ancient and furious that has been caged far too long and overnight the girl nobody wanted becomes the girl everyone cannot stop watching. Suddenly the boys who once ignored her cannot stay away and Kael, Draven's powerful school Alpha, makes no secret of where his attention has landed. Elara has no idea that someone else was watching her that night in the forest. Alpha Ravin Blackthorn has carried the curse his entire life. Find her the moment she shifts. Kill her or lose his wolf forever. He found her. He watched her complete her transformation under the blood moon. And then he walked away from the one thing he was born to destroy. Now he is sitting in her classroom under a hidden identity, watching his fated mate laugh with her friends, letting Kael orbit around her like he has any right to, and telling himself he is only here to understand what he could not bring himself to finish. He is lying to himself. Because the more he watches her the more certain he becomes of one unbearable truth. He was never going to be able to kill her.

"You deserve better than a man who cheats on half the school and raises his hand when you ask a simple question." I hated Wren for saying that. I hated him more for being right. I'm Vera Cole, twenty-two, final year communications student at Mapleton University. Covering the hockey team is my campus press assignment — sharp questions, match reports, player interviews I sit through with a smile even when the locker room energy tries to swallow me whole. I spent a year loving someone who needed me small to feel big. Then Wren Nico, the new Beta, the transfer nobody asked for, arrived mid-semester and irritated me from the first collision in the hallway to the last useless interview answer. Then Jace hit me and Wren was simply there, quiet and certain, stepping between me and the worst moment of my year like he had already decided I was his to protect. I did not ask for that. I did not want it. And yet here I am, completely unable to pretend that it meant nothing.