ALERIC
The day of the Moon Ball had arrived like a sentence I didn't want to serve. I had every intention of arriving fashionably late or not at all, but Axel was clawing at the walls of my mind. My wolf was acting like a compass needle locked onto a storm, and I was being dragged along for the ride.
When I first told my inner circle, Jason, Ben, and Ian, that we were actually attending, the silence in the room was deafening.
"Please tell me you’re joking," Ben had whispered, his face pale.
"Do I look like a man who tells jokes, Ben?" I’d countered. That had shut them up. They knew about the invitation left on my desk; they knew about the slaughtered messenger and the rogue we’d hunted down in retaliation. They thought the debt was settled with blood. They never expected me to actu
