Victor once taught me how to recognize his scent. Pine, cold rain, and the lingering dust of a battlefield. On the night of my eighteenth birthday, that scent finally moved toward me. I thought the Moon Goddess had finally reached down to pull me from the very bottom of the Ash Pine Pack. The next moment, his fingers threaded through Stella’s, and he stood before the bonfire, his gaze pinning me in place. "I, Victor, reject Cecilia as my fated mate and future Luna." My bones started to ache. Blood bubbled up my throat. He watched me collapse. "A Beta isn't fit to stand by my side." Three months later, silver poison ravaged his veins. The Pack Elders dropped to their knees outside the border healing tents, begging me to return. "Cecilia, only your blood can save him." I wiped the herb dust from my wrists. A dark smile curved my lips. "Fine. I'll save him." "And when I'm done, I'll send him to hell myself."

I have already died once. In my past life I stood paralyzed at the Moonstone Altar, begging Kael Blackwood to choose me—and he used our secret mate bond to drain my life force dry, keeping his "pure-blooded" Fina alive while I withered into a husk and watched her son torment my pup. Now the Moon Goddess has spun the wheel of time and dropped me back at the exact moment of my execution. This time, when Kael names me a defective, wolfless omega and rejects me for my adopted sister, I don't beg. I drive a silver dagger through the mate mark on my own palm and sever the bond myself—and the backlash sends the mighty Alpha staggering, coughing blood. "I'm done being your stepping stone," I tell him, and hurl my dead parents' wolf-bone relic at his face. Then a dark chuckle rolls out of the shadows. Blake, the Rogue King who built an empire from castaways and killers, crushes Kael's aura to nothing, pulls my battered body against his chest, and smiles at my ex-mate. "From this moment on, she is my Queen." This life, I'll bury them all.

On the eve of our engagement party, my fiancé suddenly left the banquet. The youngest Capo in New York's underworld left behind only a cold, indifferent instruction. "Miss Valentina's safe house was attacked. I have to go." I stood there in the echoing silence of the grand hall, staring at the bulletproof suit I had painstakingly prepared for him as a gift. This was the third time this month he had broken the Omertà—the sacred vow of silence and rules of the Mafia—just for her. In front of me, Dante always emphasized the rules of the family, maintaining an icy, impenetrable facade of a ruthless mob boss. Yet, he gave all his impulses, all his exceptions, to another woman. I didn't cry. I didn't make a scene. The chill in my chest had frozen over any tears I might have shed. With terrifying calmness, I slid the heavy diamond engagement ring off my finger and dropped it into the towering champagne fountain. The crystal chimed, a small, insignificant sound that drowned in the bubbling golden liquid. Then, I turned around and walked out into the torrential rain of Manhattan. Three days later, he came to my gallery. He looked exhausted, his eyes bloodshot, carrying an apology that felt more like a patronizing handout. "Have you thrown your tantrum long enough? Come back to the safe house with me." He thought I would lower my head and follow him obediently, just like I had done for the past five years. Instead, he froze. The Capo, who ruled the lower city with an iron fist, stared in absolute horror. The Don—the supreme godfather he worshipped and feared—was currently down on one knee in my small gallery. The terrifying man's eyes were lowered in rare tenderness, gently wiping a smudge of blue paint from my fingertips with a silk handkerchief. "Signora," the Don's deep, gravelly voice echoed in the quiet room. "Can this painting be our wedding gift for tomorrow?"

Alpha Arthur didn't kick me out immediately after rejecting me as his fated mate. Instead, he tossed a crumpled parchment at my feet—a Mate Reassignment Decree. He flicked a speck of invisible dust from his tailored suit jacket, his tone dripping with boredom. "You want to stay in the Silver Pine Pack so badly, Winnie? Fine. Marry my brother. The half-crippled runt." The entire pack laughed. From a Luna candidate to the crippled wolf's bride. On the day I signed the decree, Lydia—Arthur's chosen mate—sat curled in his lap, swirling a glass of blood-red wine. "Do you think she'll hate you for this?" Lydia had purred. Arthur's fingers tightened possessively around her waist. His eyes never even flicked my way. "She's wolfless. Her hatred is as useless as she is." Three years later. The Council Enforcer from the werewolf Alliance arrived at Silver Pine to audit the Alpha's reign. I walked into the grand Pack Hall, my fingers tightly interlaced with Aiden's. The heavy wooden doors slammed shut behind us. Every gaze in the room snapped to us, thick with mockery and disbelief. I stopped right in the center of the hall, lifting my chin. "Arthur," I said, my voice cutting through the suffocating silence. "According to pack law, you should be calling me sister-in-law."

For three years I ran the Dark Moon Pack at Dion's side as his un-Shifted mate, surviving famine and rogue attacks—and tonight, at the Mating Ball, we were finally supposed to make it official. Instead he stood on the dais and rejected me before the entire pack. "Why would I want a wolfless piece of trash as my Luna?" Then he dragged sweet, delicate Selena up beside him and sank his teeth into her throat—a claiming mark, right in front of me, while the people I'd bled to protect laughed. I ran into a raging blizzard and collapsed in the snow, ready to let the cold take me. Then a tiny weight pressed against my chest: a half-frozen wolf pup, thrown away just like me. I couldn't leave him. For three nights I fed him, cleaned his wounds, and let him nuzzle my neck. Until the werewolf world exploded with two truths at once—a pup scent-marking a female for three nights completes a Luna Binding Ritual, and this was no stray. He was the missing little brother of the Alpha King of the North. When his monstrous brother shatters my window, the boy throws himself in front of me. "You made her cold!" The wolfless healer everyone discarded has just been claimed by a king.

"You're only fit to spend the rest of your life with this pathetic Rogue. A piece of trash who won't even survive the night." When my fated mate, Cedric, the arrogant future Alpha of the Silver Moon Pack, publicly humiliated me and rejected our bond for my scheming half-sister, Elara, everyone expected me to break. They expected the wolfless, weak Healer to fall to her knees and beg. Instead, I calmly handed over the Luna necklace and accepted his rejection. Cedric threw me to a dying, crippled Rogue, thinking he was condemning me to a life of misery. He thought I was powerless. He thought I was just a lowly herb-brewer. But what my treacherous ex-mate didn't know was the real reason I had never shifted into a wolf. I wasn't weak. My blood was a lethal venom capable of slaughtering any werewolf in existence—the ancient Venenum bloodline. And the dying, crippled Rogue sitting in the rusted wheelchair? The moment I touched him, those dark gold eyes snapped open, radiating the terrifying, bone-crushing pressure of a high-ranking predator. He wasn't a Rogue. He was Kael, the ruthless Alpha King of the Northern Packs. Cedric and Elara thought they had won. But when the Alpha King finally stands, the entire Silver Moon Pack will drown in winter's wrath—and my venom.

Before seven assembled packs, Alpha Rayne of Frostpine tossed my mate ring into the flames and crushed my hand under his boot when I reached for it. "A wolfless, lowborn Omega who hasn't shifted at eighteen? You think you're fit to be my Luna? Pick it up on your knees." On his throne sat my stepsister Nasha, draped in my Luna dress, my dead mother's necklace at her throat, weeping crocodile tears. But as the crushed silver band seeped my black blood, a bell that hadn't rung in a century tolled through the pack house: the Luna's Trial bell. The Moon Goddess herself had woken. Three men descended from the dais to stand between me and Rayne's fury—Beta Cole, who wrapped me in his cloak and knelt; Gamma Samuel, the border's Lead Warrior; and Eli, the Pack Healer. "If Rayne doesn't want you," Cole said, "I do." The Alpha who humiliated me built his coronation on a fake Luna and a stolen throne. He has no idea the wolfless Omega he threw into the coals is the Goddess's true chosen—and that his rejection will become the biggest regret of his life.

Five years ago, on the night of the Alpha's coronation, I stole a beat-up truck and fled the Silver Moon Pack territory. Tossed in the backseat were three pregnancy tests. All positive. He didn't know what he left behind that night. He didn't even know my real name. Five years later, I stood outside a kindergarten in a human city, waiting to pick up my kids. Three of them. The teacher looked at me, shifting her weight awkwardly. "Ms. Green, Luca bit someone again today. And..." She swallowed hard. "The other parent is inside." I pushed the door open. The man sitting in a tiny child's chair was entirely out of proportion with the room. His sleeve was rolled up, revealing the royal crest of the Silver Moon Pack inked into his forearm. And my youngest son, Luca, was riding on his shoulders, tugging at his dark hair. "Mommy!" Luca cheered. "This man smells just like us!"

Alpha King Cole rejected me before all Thirteen Packs at my own Luna Ceremony. He ripped the moon-silver mantle from my shoulders and pronounced me unfit—"Eve has no wolf"—while the hall erupted in laughter and I was dragged off to be exiled to the Dead Mines of the Northern Border. As a parting insult, he tossed two low-born guards at my feet like garbage: one mute, one feral and lost to bloodlust. "A fitting pair for a wolf-less mate." Three years later, on the eve of his royal wedding, his envoy arrives at our ragged mine fortress with a decree—not a pardon, but a blood contract demanding I return as a "shadow mate," a glorified breeder and blood bank to heal his rejection backlash. Behind me, Sion sharpens his blade in silence while Rick bites the knot of my cloak loose with a lazy, feral smirk. "Tell Cole," Rick growls, "she's busy tonight." I toss the King's decree straight into the fire. The two broken men Cole threw away have become mine—and when the King who discarded me comes begging, he'll learn what the mute and the feral will do for their queen.

For ten years I devoted my life to Leon Warwick, certain that at his Alpha Ceremony he would mark me as his Luna before the whole territory. Instead I walked in to find his arms wrapped around my stepsister Viola—and a fresh claiming bite on her throat, black veins spiderwebbing beneath the skin. Dark magic. A witch's spell forged to mimic a true mate's bond. I screamed that she was faking it, but Leon called me a wolfless liability and rejected me before the entire pack. The bond snapped; I hit the marble coughing blood while they cheered. Then he ripped my mother's Moonstone from my neck, fastened it around Viola's throat, and banished me to the Northern Lycan Ruins—a frozen wasteland where sending a wolfless female isn't exile, it's execution. But I didn't cry. I wiped the blood from my chin and warned him: "You have no idea where your strength actually came from. Let's see how long your pack survives without me." Because my dormant wolf is no ordinary wolf, and the Ruins they threw me into hide a truth that will crown a white wolf and bring the Warwick Pack to its knees.

On the night of my eighteenth birthday, at the Ash Harbor Pack's coming-of-age ceremony, I breathed in the crisp cedar scent of Ray and heard the sound of my destiny shattering. The bonfire illuminated his handsome face as he stood on the high altar, holding Ivy’s hand. He didn't even spare me a single glance. "Mia, an Omega is not worthy to stand beside me, let alone be the future Luna of Ash Harbor." My inner wolf trembled in my chest, yet my body betrayed me, burning with an instinctual fever, dragged forward by his intoxicating scent. But Ray left me with absolutely zero dignity. "I, Ray Carlton, reject you, Mia Vale, as my fated mate and Luna." When the violent backlash hit and blood spilled from my throat, the entire pack watched me like a pathetic joke. Only Luke broke through the crowd. He dropped to one knee before me, gathering my broken body into his arms. Ray’s crushing Alpha command instantly bore down on him, ordering him to let me go. But Luke just looked up, his arms locked securely around me. "She has already accepted your rejection. From this moment on, you have no right to touch her."

They call me the stable Omega—the girl with the cursed birthmark, born to haul manure and be forgotten. On the night of my coming-of-age bonfire, I dared to pray for just one person who wouldn't look at me with disgust. Then the wind shifted, and the Moon Goddess gave me the cruelest gift of all: my fated mate was Colin Ashford, the Alpha Heir himself. But he took one look at my scarred face and rejected me before the entire pack. "She's a stain on the Ashford name," he sneered, while the girl on his arm smiled. The bond snapped. I coughed blood onto the ceremonial stones, and he ordered them to throw me in the stables like an animal. I accepted his rejection. I will not beg. But the Goddess isn't finished with me—and neither is the one man in the Ashford bloodline who never once looked at me with contempt. My ex-mate's brother. When the pack that discarded me comes crawling back, they'll learn exactly what they threw away.