Chapter 1
The room held a sickening kind of silence. Only the fire in the hearth crackled.
I looked at the woman before me,Chloe,her expression smug, lit with the easy arrogance of someone who believed her victory had already been secured.
"You agreed that easily?"
She rose from the plush leather sofa, every motion polished into deliberate elegance.
"What game are you playing now?" Her fox-cut eyes narrowed at me. "Are you trying to set me up,make Alpha Dominic believe I've wronged you?"
"Or" she lifted the cup of moonlight tea from the table, that delicacy reserved only for high-blooded wolves, and dashed it down at my feet, "did you slip wolfsbane into the tea?"
The scalding tea splashed across my ankles. I looked at her,bristled and shrieking like a frightened bird,and found her absurd beyond words.
Before I could speak, the guard's respectful voice came from outside the door.
"Alpha Dominic."
The heavy oak door swept open, and the man I had not seen for two months,my mate, Alpha Dominic,strode in.
He went straight to Chloe, his eyes crowded with anxious concern.
"Didn't I tell you to leave these matters to me, not to come and confront her on your own?" Dominic's voice was so soft it nearly dripped honey. "If anything happened to the pup in your belly,what would I do?"
I listened to him, and a strange dizziness rose in me. My thoughts drifted, against my will, back five years.
That had been when I first discovered Dominic was my fated mate. My parents had refused to let me leave them,so I had assumed the guise of a nameless Rogue, and let Dominic carry me back to his Pack.
Because of my "lowly" identity, the elders had seen me as a stain upon them. By Pack law, I had been condemned to the silver lash.
That Dominic had also come rushing back. He had charged into the chamber wreathed in winter cold, thrown his arms around me, and taken the killing strike of the lash for me.
His eyes back then had been just as gentle as they were now,but back then, the gentleness had belonged only to me.
"Didn't I tell you to leave these things to me?"
"Seraphina!"
"Who gave them permission to lay a hand on you?"
Dominic had clung to me as he stood, alone, against the entire Council of Elders.
"I, Dominic, accept only Seraphina as my Luna in this lifetime. I do not care if she is a Rogue. I do not care that her blood is base. She is mine, and I will have her, and that is the end of it."
For me, Dominic had taken thirty lashes of the silver whip,a punishment that scorches the very soul of a wolf.
His back had been ribboned in raw flesh, soaked through with blood, but he had not made a sound. He had bitten down through his own teeth and endured, all so that I would have a name beside his.
Until at last the elders had relented.
Just before he had passed out, he had pulled together the strength to give me a faint, broken smile.
"Seraphina."
"I told you. Trust me."
After he had ascended to Alpha, I had become Luna of one of the most powerful packs in the world.
Through Dominic, I had escaped the precarious, hand-to-mouth existence of a Rogue.
Everyone said I was a sparrow turned phoenix.
It was only today that I finally understood: even the mate bond of werewolves cannot survive the test of time.
Now the man who had once stood between me and the silver lash stood before me again,sheltering another woman in his arms.
"Seraphina."
"Whatever happened today, it is still you who is in the wrong." Dominic's gaze settled on me, glacial. "Whatever your grievances, Chloe carries a pup of noble blood,the future hope of this Pack. Even if you are angry, you should not vent it on her."
He glanced at the porcelain shards at my feet,but he did not see the cuts those shards had carved into my ankle. He could not smell the thread of grief inside my blood.
"Whatever it is that's upset you."
"Take it out on me."
Without asking my reason, by Alpha authority alone, he had already pronounced me guilty.
"And don't forget."
"How you came by this Luna's seat in the first place."
