Chapter one
Elara's POV
The morning Cassian was due to return, I woke before the sun and could not make myself go back to sleep.
I lay still for a long moment, staring at the carved ceiling beams of the Alpha's chambers, listening to the pack grounds stir awake below the window. Somewhere near the training yard a rooster called, too early and too proud of itself. Somewhere closer, in the corridor outside my door, I heard the soft clink of the tea service being set out by the kitchen girls, a sound so familiar after four years that my body had learned to wake to it the way other people woke to their own heartbeat.
Four years. Today he was coming home.
I sat up slowly, careful not to jostle the sheets too much, though there was no one beside me to disturb. There had not been anyone beside me in this bed for the better part of eight months, not since Cassian rode out at the head of the Blackthorn war host to answer the call of the Alliance against the rogue packs pressing the northern border. Eight months of empty linens on his side of the bed, of me sleeping curled small in the middle of a mattress built for two, of nights where I pressed my palm flat against the cold sheets and told myself that distance did not mean absence. That a mate bond did not require proximity to be real. That somewhere out there, tethered to me by something older than either of our wills, Cassian Blackthorn still belonged to me, whether he wanted to or not.
I had spent eight months telling myself a great many things.
I rose and crossed to the wash basin, and the girl who looked back at me from the small mirror above it was thinner than I remembered being before he left. My collarbones stood out more sharply beneath my nightdress. My brown eyes, which my mother used to say held too much feeling to ever properly hide anything, looked tired in a way that had nothing to do with the early hour.
Today it changes, I told the reflection, the same way I had told it every morning for the last several weeks, ever since word had reached Blackthorn that the war was finally, truly over and the host was riding home. Today he comes back and he sees what four years should have taught him to see. Today we start again.
I believed it. I needed to believe it. Belief was, by now, the only muscle in me that had never atrophied from disuse.
I had come to Blackthorn Pack at nineteen, an omega from a modest bloodline with no particular gifts to recommend me beyond a steady mind and a mate bond that had announced itself, without warning or mercy, the moment Cassian Blackthorn looked at me across a crowded gathering hall and went very still. I remembered that night more clearly than I remembered almost anything else in my life — the way the noise of the hall had seemed to fall away, the way something in my chest had recognized something in his before either of us had spoken a single word. He had crossed the room to me. He had said my name like he already knew it. For one evening, I had believed that the universe had handed me something extraordinary.
The pack had not agreed.
Blackthorn was old and wealthy and proud, a territory that had grown fat and strong on generations of warriors who measured a person's worth by the speed of their shift and the strength of their bite. I could do neither well. My shift, when it came at all, came slow and effortful, my wolf small and pale and, by pack standards, unremarkable. I had never won a sparring match in the training yard. I had never needed to — Luna was not a rank earned by combat — but Blackthorn had never quite forgiven me for it regardless.
An Alpha needs a Luna who can stand beside him, I had heard a senior warrior mutter once, years ago, not quite out of my hearing. Not one he has to carry.
I had told myself, for four years, that such comments did not matter. That Cassian's love — the love promised by the bond, the love I had felt blaze to life in his eyes on the night we met — would be enough to outweigh whatever the pack thought of me. I had poured myself into every duty a Luna could hold that did not require strength of body. I organized the pack's stores before winter. I sat with the sick in the medical house until dawn when Dr. Elias needed an extra pair of hands and no one else would stay. I settled disputes between families that Cassian was too busy or too impatient to hear himself. I had made myself useful in every way I knew how, because I had come to understand, slowly and without anyone ever quite saying it aloud, that usefulness was the only currency I had to offer a pack that would never respect me for my strength.
And Cassian — Cassian had let them. That was the part I circled back to most, in my quietest and most honest hours. He had never joined the pack in mocking me, not exactly. But he had never stopped them either. He had watched warriors laugh when I stumbled in the training yard and said nothing. He had watched the whispers follow me through the meeting hall and said nothing. Somewhere in the last four years, without ever announcing it, he had grown embarrassed of me, and I had felt that embarrassment settle over our marriage like a fine, permanent dust, coating everything, changing the color of the light.
I still believed — I had to believe — that the man who had crossed a crowded hall for me still existed somewhere beneath the Alpha who had grown so distant, so cold, so careful never to touch me in front of anyone who might see. War had a way of stripping men down to what mattered. I told myself that eight months on a battlefield, eight months of nearly dying for people who would never know his name, would have reminded Cassian of what he actually valued. I told myself he would come home changed. Softer. Grateful to be alive, grateful to have a wife waiting for him at all.
I dressed with more care than I had in months — a deep blue gown that had once been my favorite, the one I'd worn on our bonding day, though it hung looser on me now than it had then. I brushed out my long dark hair until it fell smooth and shining down my back. I did not paint my face; Cassian had once told me, in the early gentle days before the distance set in, that he liked to see me as I actually was, and some small, foolish, hopeful part of me had held on to that memory for four years like a coal I refused to let go cold.
Outside my window, the pack grounds were coming fully awake now, and I could hear it — an unusual note in the noise, an energy that did not belong to an ordinary morning. Voices rising with excitement instead of the flat routine of chores. Someone laughing too loudly near the gates. My heart picked up its pace to match it.
He's close, I thought, and for the first time in eight months, hope did not feel like something I had to force myself to hold. It felt like something rising up to meet me on its own.
I had no way of knowing, standing at that window with my hair combed smooth and my oldest gown pressed against my thin frame, that I was about to watch the last four years of my life collapse in front of the entire pack I had spent them serving.
I only knew that he was coming home, and that some foolish, loyal, unbroken part of me was glad.
