Chapter One
Faye's POV
The bells would not stop ringing.
Each toll hammered against my skull like a judgment, counting down the seconds to something I could not escape. I stared at the woman in the mirror, the one with the golden hair pinned up in a delicate style and the turquoise blue gown pooling around her feet, and I did not recognize her. She looked like a bride. She looked like someone who had chosen this.
I had not chosen anything. Not really.
But I was choosing to marry Alpha Damon of the Crescent Moon Pack. That was my choice, the only one I had made freely in years.
Five years ago, he saved my life.
I was fourteen, lost in the eastern forest, and the rogues had cornered me against a fallen oak. Three of them, all teeth and claws and yellow eyes that glowed in the dark. My arms were already bleeding, and I knew I was about to die.
Then Damon appeared.
He was young then, only nineteen, but he moved like a warrior twice his age. His sword flashed in the moonlight, and the rogues fell one by one until he was the only one standing. He knelt beside me and pressed his hand against my wounds, and spoke so gently.
"You are safe now. I have got you."
I had never heard anyone say those words to me before. Not my father, who was always too busy, or the servants, who looked through me like I was furniture.
Damon looked at me like I mattered.
He carried me back to the border himself, refusing to let anyone else touch me. I remember the warmth of his chest against my cheek. The steady beat of his heart under my ear. The way his arms tightened around me when I shivered.
"You are shaking," he said.
"I am cold."
He pulled me closer and wrapped his cloak around both of us. "Better?"
I nodded against his chest. I did not want him to let go. I did not want to go back to the packhouse where no one waited for me. I wanted to stay in his arms forever.
He set me down at the edge of WhiteMoon territory, and I immediately missed his warmth. He crouched in front of me and brushed the hair out of my face, his fingers lingering on my cheek for a moment longer than necessary.
"What is your name?" he asked.
"Faye."
"Faye." He said it softly, like he was memorizing it. "You are very brave, Faye. Most people would have frozen in fear against three rogues. But you fought."
"I did not fight. I just screamed."
"You screamed while swinging a broken branch at their faces, that counts as fighting."
I laughed despite myself. He smiled at me, and my heart flipped inside my chest.
"Run faster next time, little one," he said. Then he stood up and walked back into the forest without looking back.
I watched him go until the trees swallowed him whole.
I had been in love with him ever since.
For five years, I thought about him. I rehearsed conversations with him in my head. I imagined what it would be like to see him again, to thank him properly, to tell him that he had saved more than my life that night.
Sometimes, late at night when I could not sleep, I wondered if he ever thought about me. Probably not. I was just a girl he had rescued. One of many, I was sure.
But I liked to imagine that he remembered. That sometimes, when the moon was full and the forest was quiet, he thought about the golden haired girl who had swung a broken branch at rogue faces.
It was a silly fantasy. But it kept me warm on cold nights.
So when my father announced the marriage alliance three months ago, I screamed in his face and slammed the door and swore I would never marry a stranger. But then he told me the groom was Alpha Damon, and everything changed.
Damon was Alpha now. His father had passed, and he had inherited the Crescent Moon Pack. And he had agreed to marry me.
He remembered me. He had to remember me. Why else would he agree to marry the daughter of a dying pack? There were dozens of more advantageous alliances he could have made, but he chose me.
I was not being sold to a stranger but was being given to the man I already loved.
That was why I was standing here in this heavy dress, waiting for the bells to stop, waiting for the doors to open, waiting for him to finally see me again after five long years.
I touched my mother's ring, the one I wore on a chain around my neck. It was too big for my fingers, so I had threaded it onto a thin leather cord and kept it close to my heart. The inscription on the inside said DON'T STOP FIGHTING. Those were the last words my mother ever spoke to me.
I kissed the ring and tucked it back beneath my dress.
"You look like a ghost."
Scarlet's voice cut through the room like a blade. My stepmother stood in the doorway, her arms crossed, her eyes sharp with satisfaction. She had been waiting for this day for years. The day I finally left the house.
"Do not fold your arms," she said. "Stand up straight or you will wrinkle the dress."
I straightened my spine and lifted my chin. The old me would have looked away or would have mumbled an apology and tried to make herself smaller. But I was not the old me anymore. I was the woman who was about to marry Damon.
Scarlet adjusted my veil with rough fingers and smiled. "I am so glad you will be out of our lives. What better way to get rid of you than to sell you off to another pack?"
I did not answer. I had learned years ago that arguing with Scarlet was like arguing with a wildfire. It only made her burn hotter.
"It is time." My father appeared in the doorway, broad shouldered and grim. He did not look at me the way fathers were supposed to look at daughters on their wedding days. He looked at me like I was a transaction finally being completed.
The veil slipped over my face, and the world softened into a blur of white and gold. I walked down the hallway with my heart pounding and my hands steady, and I thought about Damon.
I thought about the way he had held me after the rogues attacked. The way his arms felt like safety. The way he had looked at me like I was something worth protecting.
I had imagined this moment a thousand times. He would be standing at the altar, tall and handsome, and his eyes would find mine across the crowded hall with recognition. Of course he would, I was the girl he had saved.
Standing outside the door, the guards threw it open.
