Every season, Thornhollow's heir climbs the hill to the mate-stone and rejects one girl in front of the whole pack. The girl is called the Reject. She takes the refusal, walks back to the scullery, and lives. That is what everyone believes. Tamsin has been the Reject since she was four — chosen young, raised for this one night, given no wolf, no name, and no way out. The pack swears she will survive it. The woman who raised her told her the truth: no Reject has ever lived two winters past her season, because the Moon does not forgive a mate refused at the stone. And there is a second truth no one in the valley knows. Every Reject ever chosen has been the heir's true fated mate. For six generations, Thornhollow has been quietly killing its own heirs' matches to keep the Alpha blood hard. Then Tamsin touches the stone, and something that has slept inside it wakes — and chooses her. The girl with no wolf of her own now carries one the old law never counted on. When Thane, the cold heir with the scar through his eyebrow, finds her alone on the hill, the bond ignites in his chest and he doesn't know what it is. Tomorrow, at the ceremony, he is supposed to end her. But Tamsin has spent eighteen years learning exactly what to say when he does. The Moon is watching. And this season, it will not stay silent.

Every wolf in the great hall went to their knees when Ronan Thorne walked in. I stayed standing. I couldn't smell him. I have lived twenty years without a single scent. In a pack where fate is decided by smell, that makes me nothing. Not cursed, not sick. Just the girl in the kitchen who can't tell rain from smoke. Then the visiting Alpha came through the doors, and his wolf turned toward me like a compass finding north. He had chased my scent for seven years. He didn't know that I have never smelled anything in my life. He refused me in front of two hundred wolves. He had his reasons, and they were good ones, and I will hate him for them until I die. He didn't know what refusing costs. In this pack, the one who turns away from their fated mate loses their sense of smell forever. By morning, Ronan Thorne could not smell his own blood on his hands.

Four hundred wolves watched my mate reject me. None of them knew I was carrying his child. I am Rhea, a herb girl from the lower village. For two years I belonged to Roman, Alpha of Blackmoor, until his healer wrote one word in the Luna ledger: barren. He chose a northern bride with forty riders and a father who holds the pass. He did not choose me. I could have told him the truth at the ceremony. I did not. If I had, he would have kept me for the child, and I would have spent the rest of my life as his duty. Instead I made his healer read the page's date aloud, and I named the witnesses who saw me miles away that day. Then I took the page in front of the hall and dared the pack to try me for it. Roman caught me at the frozen river, and the page in his hand did not match the lie in his hall. Now the pack wants a thief. I demanded the examination. Merek, the healer, has vanished with the ledger, and the postern stands open to the men beyond the wall. The full moon is twenty days away. The bond between us has gone cold. Roman says he will make it warm again. He has already rejected me once. I will not let him do it twice.

Four hundred wolves watched my mate reject me. None of them knew I was carrying his child. I am Rhea, a herb girl from the lower village. For two years I belonged to Roman, Alpha of Blackmoor, until his healer wrote one word in the Luna ledger: barren. He chose a northern bride with forty riders and a father who holds the pass. He did not choose me. I could have told him the truth at the ceremony. I did not. If I had, he would have kept me for the child, and I would have spent the rest of my life as his duty. Instead I took the page that condemned me. The ink was still wet. The date was wrong. Roman caught me at the frozen river, and the page in his hand did not match the lie in his hall. Now the pack wants a thief. The midwife has been ordered to examine me. Merek, the healer, has vanished with the ledger, and the postern stands open to the men beyond the wall. The full moon is twenty days away. The bond between us has gone cold. Roman says he will make it warm again. He has already rejected me once. I will not let him do it twice.

I have until the bell to cut the Alpha's throat. If I fail, my uncle will hang my sister at dawn. I am Maeve, a wolf who cannot shift, sent from Ashfall to serve in Dunmoor keep. For two years I have carried Alpha Kael's meals and washed his shirts and waited for the order that would buy my sister's life. Tonight it came. But Kael is awake when I enter his chamber. He opened the door for me. He knows what I am here to do, and he wants to see if I will do it. I cut him. His blood mixes with mine, and the Moon marks us with a true bond. Neither of us can lie to the other now. Every truth I have buried comes out of my mouth, and every secret he has kept from his pack is mine to hear. He knows my uncle sent me. He knows about Lark. He tells me my sister has been in his kitchen for six weeks, and that he let me reach his door to find the traitor who opened it for me. I came to kill him. The bond will not let me lie about that. But if I stay, my uncle will take Lark back. If I run, the bond drags me to Kael before the gate. And the one wolf I was sent to kill is the only one who can keep my sister alive. The full moon is coming. Merrick's pack is already at the border. And the Alpha I was sent to kill is the one man I cannot lie to.

I am human. In a pack that would kill me for it, I am pretending to be their Luna. When the Alpha's promised bride disappears the night before the Luna trials, his steward drags me out of the kitchen, puts me in her dress, and tells me to survive three trials or die. I have one plan: keep my head down, steal the Alpha's seal, and be gone before the full moon. Then Alpha Lucan touches my wrist, and the Moon marks me as his mate. The pack believes the Moon has chosen a servant girl. They do not know I have no wolf, no scent of my own, and no intention of staying. Lucan knows. He watched me paint the missing Luna's scent onto my skin, and he said nothing. He keeps me close, not because he trusts me, but because the bond is real, and a human mate is the one thing his council will never accept. If they find out what I am, they will burn me. If I run, the bond will drag me back. If I stay, I have to win three trials I was never meant to survive, against wolves who can smell every lie. Thirty days. Three trials. One Alpha who knows my secret. And a missing Luna who is not missing at all. I came to this keep to steal a seal. The Moon gave me a mate instead.

I came to Blackthorn to kill the Alpha who slaughtered my pack. I am Tilda. Three years ago, Kieran Blackthorn led his wolves into Duskhollow and left nothing standing but me and my little brother. Now I have a false story, a healer's kit, and a knife with my father's mark on the hilt. I have thirteen days to put it in Kieran's heart. Then the Moon marks me as his mate. In Blackthorn, a mate bond is a shared life. If he dies, I die. The man I came to kill is now the one man I cannot let die, and he knows I am not what I say I am. Kieran keeps me in the chamber next to his. He watches me while I dress his wound. He knows someone poisoned him, and he knows I smelled it and said nothing. He thinks I am a spy. He is right about that, and wrong about everything else. My handler has my brother. If Kieran is still breathing on the full moon, Jory will not be. But if I kill Kieran, the bond takes me with him, and Jory is left alone with the woman who trained me to be a knife. Thirteen days. One Alpha. One brother. A bond that will not let me choose.

The Moon chose me for the Alpha. He rejected me in front of the entire pack and gave my sister my place. I'm Elsie. Nineteen, a kitchen girl in Greyfall, and I have lied to every wolf I know for five years. My wolf is only sleeping, I tell them. She'll wake when she's ready. She never will. I don't have one. The full moon came through the roof and stopped on me. The Moon marked me as Kellan's mate — the strongest Alpha in three generations, a man I have watched from the shadows since I was old enough to know better. He looked at me for one breath. I felt the bond pull tight between us, warm and alive. Then he said no. He said the words, and every wolf in the hall heard them, and my sister Cora took his arm and became Luna in my place. A rejected mate dies. Everyone knows that. The wolf inside her dies first, and the woman follows. I hit the floor. I bled. Then I got up. Because there was no wolf inside me to kill. Now I owe a year of service to the woman who stole my mate. A year in his hall, under his roof, serving her while every wolf in Greyfall watches me not die. Kellan can't look at me. Cora is counting the days until the year is over. But the bond never broke. I still feel it every time he walks past me. And my sister has promised I won't survive the month. She doesn't know what I am. Neither does he. He's about to find out.

I said no at the stone, in front of both packs, to the man who killed my brother. The Moon did not accept it. I am Orla, Alpha of Farrow, twenty-four and holding a small, poor pack together with my own two hands since my father died in his bed. Three winters ago, Roan of Stormhold came down for our low pasture, and my brother Corran walked up the ridge with a spear and did not walk back down. Now the Moon has marked me, and the other half of the mark belongs to him — the strongest Alpha north of the middle river, standing on my hill with terms like a ledger and my whole pack watching. I refused him anyway. I would rather keep my pack's name than my life. I learned that night what a refusal costs. The bond did not break. It split — into a leash. Roan cannot step more than a hundred paces from me without both of us bleeding, and every night the leash draws in shorter, and there is exactly one way to end it: the taking. Both of us, hands on the stone, swearing. The one thing I will not give him. So the man who killed my brother is pinned to my village by a rope neither of us can cut. He sleeps on my floor. His pack is beginning to choose an answer of its own. And the rope between us gets shorter every night, and I am running out of ground to stand on.

I am the Alpha of Ashfell, and I will not kneel. My pack is sixty-one people on hard ground. My father is a year in the earth. My brother is eleven. Everything I have, I hold with these two hands, and I have held it alone since the day we buried him. Then the Moon marked my arm, and a rider came down the north track with the other half of the story. The mark belonged to Wilder of Kingsmoor — the strongest Alpha north of the river, a man who has never once been refused. He wanted me to come kneel at his stone. I would join his pack, and Ashfell would be a line in his ledger with a number beside it. I told him no. And I told his rider that if Wilder wanted this mark so badly, he knew where to find it. He could come kneel to me for it. In our world, whoever kneels leaves their own pack forever, and an Alpha never kneels. So he came himself, and he refused me. And I refused him back, in front of my whole village, and watched the mark on my arm turn black. A mate-mark left unsealed calls the rogues. Hunger with no pack, doubling every moon, and the full moon is eleven days out. Both of us bleeding. Neither of us kneeling. He can have me. He only has to give up everything he is.

The Alpha read my name off the register, and then he took it away from me. "A half mark is not a mate," Dain Kestrel said, in front of two hundred wolves. "No claim." The mark on my neck tore open while he was still holding the book. His mother came down off the platform with the flat knife they use on the page and cut my name out of it, slow, from the top of the B to the end of the double n. Nine years of keeping one square inch of myself hidden under a collar, and it was the four letters in front of it they came for. The collar was never the real secret. I am the last of the binder line, and binders read marks. I have known what is under mine since I was eleven and never told a soul in Grayfell. Then Corinne Vane raised her arm for the blessing, and the mark inside her wrist caught the moon. I have carried that shape since I was nine and never once seen it anywhere but on my own neck. She was wearing it. Hers has a seam in it. Every wolf in this valley is born with half a mark. The moon gives one half to each of us, and it closes on exactly one other half in the world. That is what the pack calls a fated mate. The Vane girl has been sitting at the Alpha's table for a year with my half on her arm, and somebody put it there with a needle. Dain Kestrel came to my door in the rain that night, alone, no wardens, and stood there without knocking twice. He wants the truth. He is also the man who took my name, and the only person in Grayfell with the power to give it back. In twenty days there is a clearing, when every mark in the valley gets read out loud in front of everyone. Somebody is going to have to answer for a stitch. I intend to be the one asking.

Willa Dain has known for three years that Kade Mercer is her fated mate. She has never said it out loud. He is the Alpha's heir. She is the omega who mends nets and sleeps in the cold wing with the orphans.Then the Moon Rite comes, and Kade says the words in front of the entire pack. I reject you.The bond is supposed to die.The man walks away free. His wolf doesn't.On the first full moon after the rejection, something comes to the edge of her window. His eyes, his size, the old scar down his jaw. It doesn't hate her. It doesn't leave until dawn. And by morning Kade Mercer is standing in her doorway with no memory of the night, asking her what she did to him.She has no answer. But the elders do.Because the rite Kade used to cast her out wasn't written by the pack. It was written by her grandmother. And every Alpha for four hundred years has been quietly marrying, stealing, and killing her bloodline to keep it secret.They thought they had finished with the Dains. They were wrong.