FROM THE WOLFLESS HEIRESS TO THE MOON-BLOODED QUEEN

SERAPHINA'S POV The candle on the nightstand had burned down to a stub of gold, throwing shadows that trembled against the stone walls of Casa Valdieri. Outside, the wind moved through the cypress trees like something breathing, and five-year-old Seraphina Valdieri sat curled at the edge of her mother's bed, small enough still to fit into the space beneath her mother's arm. "Mama," she whispered, "you feel cold." Isabella Valdieri did not answer right away. Her skin had gone the color of parchment left too long in the sun, pale and thin, and her dark hair … the same shade as Seraphina's … lay damp against the pillow. Three days ago she had been laughing in the garden, teaching Seraphina how to whistle for the doves. Tonight she could barely lift her hand. "Come closer, mia luce," Isabella murmured. My light. She always called her that. "Closer. I need you to listen." Seraphina pressed her small body against her mother's side, and Isabella's arm curled around her the way it had every night of her life, as though the shape of that embrace had been carved into both of them from the moment Seraphina was born. "You are frightened," Isabella said. It was not a question. "The healers whisper when they think I'm asleep," Seraphina admitted. "They say a bad word. Poison." Something flickered behind her mother's eyes … not surprise, but confirmation, as if a truth she had already suspected had simply been spoken aloud by someone else's mouth. She did not deny it. She did not comfort the child with a lie. Instead she reached for Seraphina's face and held it between two hands that shook faintly with fever. "Listen to me now," Isabella said, "because I may not have the strength to say this again." Seraphina nodded, though her throat had gone tight and hot. "There is something inside you," her mother continued, "that the world must never know. Not your father. Not the servants. Not even yourself, not truly, not yet. Do you understand?" "No," Seraphina whispered honestly. A faint, exhausted smile crossed Isabella's lips. "Good. That is exactly as it should be, for now." She drew a slow breath, as though gathering the last of something precious. "Beneath your shoulder, here…" her fingers grazed the curve of Seraphina's collarbone, just above the small blade of bone beneath her nightgown "...there will come a mark. Not yet. Perhaps not for many years. But when it comes, you must never let anyone see it. Never let them find the mark beneath your shoulder. Do you hear me? Never." "Why, Mama?" "Because there are people in this world who have hunted our blood for a hundred years, and they are patient, and they are clever, and they do not care that you are only a little girl." Isabella's voice cracked, and for a moment the fierce composure she had worn like armor through the whole of Seraphina's illness-blurred memory of these last days seemed to slip. "I have done something to protect you. Something that will make you feel … smaller than you are. Empty, perhaps. Like something is missing." Seraphina's small hands curled into the blanket. "What did you do?" "I have hidden your wolf, mia luce." The words meant nothing to a five-year-old, not fully … she knew wolves the way she knew wolves, as the shape her father took sometimes in the training yard, silver-brown and enormous, and as the shape she was told she would take herself one day, when she was old enough, when her wolf finally woke inside her chest the way every child's did. She had been waiting for that day the way other children waited for their birthday. "Will I still get my wolf?" she asked. "When I'm big?" Isabella's eyes filled, and one tear slid free and traced the hollow of her cheek. "One day. When it is safe. When you are strong enough to protect her, and she is strong enough to protect you. Until then, everyone … everyone, Seraphina … must believe you were born without one. They must believe you are wolfless. It will hurt. People will be cruel to you for it. I am so sorry. I am so, so sorry, my darling, that this is the gift I am leaving you instead of the one I wanted to give." "I don't want a different gift," Seraphina said, fierce in the particular way that only small children manage, absolute and without doubt. "I just want you." Isabella made a sound that was half a laugh and half a sob, and she gathered her daughter tightly against her chest, pressing her lips to the crown of dark hair. "You will always have me," she whispered. "Even when you cannot see me. Even when the nights are long and no one is kind to you and you believe you are entirely alone … I will be there, in your blood, in the moon, in the mark you must hide. You come from something ancient, Seraphina. Something they call the Lunara. The moon-blooded. You must never say that word aloud to anyone. Not until you know, in your bones, that it is safe." "Lunara," Seraphina repeated softly, tasting the shape of it. "Hush." Isabella pressed a finger gently to her daughter's lips. "A secret spoken is a secret lost. Keep it here…" she touched Seraphina's chest, over her small, frantic heart "...and nowhere else." From beyond the heavy oak door, footsteps approached, unhurried, deliberate. Isabella's whole body went rigid, and something like fear … real fear, sharper than any Seraphina had seen on her mother's face in five years of life … passed like a shadow behind her eyes. "Mama?" "Quickly," Isabella breathed, and from beneath her pillow she drew a necklace, its chain thin and silver, its pendant a small stone the color of moonlight caught in glass. She pressed it into Seraphina's palm and folded the small fingers closed around it. "Keep this hidden. Do not wear it where others can see. When the time comes … you will know when … it will help you remember who you are." The door creaked open. Lucerra stood in the frame, a candle in one gloved hand, her golden hair pinned in elegant coils despite the late hour, her face arranged into an expression of practiced, tender concern. She was Isabella's cousin by marriage, a frequent guest of the house these past months, always so helpful, always so attentive to poor ailing Lady Valdieri. "Isabella," Lucerra said softly, stepping inside. "I heard voices. You should be resting, cara. The healer left a tonic for your fever." She held up a small glass vial, the liquid inside dark as wine. Something in Isabella's face closed like a door slamming shut. "I am not thirsty." "Now, now." Lucerra crossed the room with unhurried grace, setting the candle down, and Seraphina … small, forgotten in the corner of the bed … watched her mother's hand tighten reflexively around her own. "You must keep your strength up. For Seraphina's sake, if not your own." The two women looked at each other for a long moment, and even at five years old, Seraphina understood, with the primal instinct children have for danger long before they have words for it, that something silent and terrible was passing between them. "Seraphina," Isabella said without looking away from Lucerra, "go to your room now, mia luce. I will come to you soon." "But…" "Go." It was gentle, but it was final. Seraphina slid off the bed, the necklace clutched so tightly in her fist that the edges of the stone bit into her palm. At the door she turned back once. Her mother was watching her, and in that last look there was something Seraphina would spend the next sixteen years trying to understand … not fear exactly, not entirely sorrow, but a kind of fierce, aching love, the look of someone memorizing a face they suspect they will not see again. "I love you more than the moon loves the sea," Isabella said. It was the phrase she always said. It was the phrase Seraphina would repeat to herself in the coldest, loneliest nights that were still to come, though she would not understand until much, much later exactly what her mother had been trying to give her in that room, in those final hours, with Lucerra's shadow stretched long and patient across the floor between them. "I love you more than the stars love the dark," Seraphina answered, as she always did, and stepped out into the corridor. The door closed behind her. By morning, Isabella Valdieri was dead, and the servants would whisper for years about the strange stillness of her face … not the stillness of illness, they said, but the stillness of someone who had known, with absolute certainty, exactly how her story was going to end. Seraphina never saw the necklace again after that night. She would search for it in secret for years, tearing through drawers and chests when no one was watching, certain she had simply misplaced it, refusing to believe what some small, buried part of her already suspected. That Lucerra had taken it from her, the very night her mother died.