BLOODMOON PACT

Chapter 1: The snow didn’t muffle the screams. Raina Voss pressed her back against the splintered oak, breath fogging in the -12°C air, and listened to her pack die. Steel on bone. Wet tearing. The high, broken sound of a wolf reverting mid-shift, too fast, too wrong. The forest reeked of copper and smoke and fear, sharp and sour under everything else. Her father’s voice cut through it once. “Run, Raina.” She didn’t. Twelve years of training said stay low, stay quiet, wait for the opening. Breathe through your nose. Count your heartbeats. Don’t let them hear you. The part of her that was seventeen and stupid wanted to sprint out there with her blade and die on her feet. Her wolf agreed. It clawed at her ribs, desperate to answer the pack’s pain with teeth and blood. The opening never came. Torchlight spilled through the trees in jagged patterns. Five figures in black, masks hiding their faces, moved through the clearing like they’d done this before. Like it was routine. Efficient. One of them kicked over the body of her brother, Lorne. He didn’t move. His eyes were open, fixed on the sky he’d never see again. “Alpha’s dead,” a voice said, distorted through the mask. Mechanical. Hollow. “Burn the den. Leave no bloodline.” No bloodline. The words hit her harder than the blade that had taken her father. Erasure. That was the goal. Not just death. Not just territory. They wanted the Voss name wiped from the earth like it had never existed. Raina’s hand tightened around the hilt of her dagger until the leather cut into her palm. Pain grounded her. Her wolf was screaming under her skin, clawing to get out. If she shifted now, they’d kill her before she got ten feet. Silver would finish her. If she stayed human, she’d freeze by morning. The cold was already biting through her leathers, stealing the feeling from her fingers. Choose. Raina chose wrong. A twig snapped under her boot. It was nothing. A whisper of sound in any other night. Tonight, it was a gunshot. Three masks turned in perfect sync. “Contact,” one hissed. Raina ran. The forest was familiar. Every root, every dip in the ground, she knew it like her own pulse. She’d chased rabbits through these trees at twelve. She’d learned to track here at fourteen. She’d kissed her first boy behind that fallen log at sixteen and pretended she didn’t care when he never spoke to her again. It didn’t matter. They were faster. And they’d been waiting for this. An arrow grazed her shoulder. Heat bloomed, then cold. She stumbled, caught herself, and kept running. The treeline was fifty meters. Thirty. Ten. If she made the treeline, she had a chance. If she made the treeline, she could lose them in the ravine. Something hit her like a truck. She hit the ground hard, snow packing her mouth, and rolled to avoid the blade that would’ve taken her throat. The cold bit through her clothes, through her skin, straight to bone. She came up swinging. Her dagger met a blade made of silver. It burned. The metal hissed against her skin, and Raina hissed back, dropping the knife. Silver. They knew. Of course they knew. The Voss line had been hunted for generations. They’d learned. They’d planned. The attacker stepped forward, mask off now. A woman, maybe thirty, scar cutting through her left eyebrow. Her eyes were wrong. Too gold. Too wolf. Not human, not entirely. A turned wolf, or worse. A mercenary who’d sold her humanity for power. “You’re Voss’s daughter,” the woman said. “Pity.” There was no malice in it. Just fact. Like commenting on the weather. She drove her knee into Raina’s stomach. Raina folded, gasping, and the world went sideways. Hands grabbed her, dragged her to her knees. Someone wrenched her arms behind her back. Rope bit into her wrists. Not regular rope. Something treated. She could smell the herbs. “Where’s the pack seal?” the woman demanded. Raina spat blood in her face. The woman didn’t flinch. She wiped her cheek slowly, deliberately. “Wrong answer.” Claws extended. Raina closed her eyes. Pain. Sharp, ripping, tearing pain that started at her shoulder and didn’t stop. It felt like being torn apart from the inside out. She screamed. She couldn’t help it. The silver in the claws burned her blood, stopped her healing. She could feel it — feel the wolf inside her dying, choking on poison. Her heartbeat thundered in her ears. Her vision blurred red. “Leave her,” a new voice said. Male. Calm. Dangerous. The kind of calm that came before violence. The woman didn’t move. “Orders were clear, Alpha.” Alpha! Raina forced her eyes open. He stood ten feet away, half-hidden by shadow. Tall, broad, coat soaked with blood that wasn’t his. His hair was black, cut short, and his eyes… the same gold as the woman’s, but colder. Older. Like he’d seen too much and stopped caring. Kael Drayce. Alpha of the Drayce Pack. Their enemy for forty years. The man her father had called a butcher. The man who’d taken three valleys from them in the last skirmish alone. “What are you doing here?” Raina choked out. Kael’s gaze dropped to her shoulder. To the wound that wouldn’t close. Blood poured down her arm, black in the torchlight. “Saving you,” he said. It sounded like he didn’t believe it either. The woman, the Alpha’s lieutenant, stepped back. Reluctantly. Her jaw clenched, but she obeyed. “Take her,” Kael said. “If she dies, the bond breaks. And we’ll never know who hired them.” Bond? Raina didn’t get to ask what he meant. The world went black. She woke to the smell of herbs and blood. Her shoulder was wrapped, the silver dug out, but the wound was still angry, red at the edges. Not healing. The poison sat in it like a splinter, refusing to let her body do what it was made to do. Her wolf whined under her skin, weak and confused. She was in a room she didn’t recognize. Stone walls, a single window barred with iron, a bed too soft for a den. Too clean. Too quiet. This wasn’t the Voss den. This wasn’t home. The door opened. Kael walked in alone. No lieutenant. No weapons visible. But she saw the tension in his shoulders, the way his eyes tracked her like she might lunge. “How do you feel?” he asked. Raina sat up too fast. Pain lanced through her shoulder. “Like I want to kill you.” “Fair.” He pulled a chair to the bed and sat. Close enough that she could see the scar cutting through his left eyebrow. Same as the woman’s. Siblings. “You’re bonded to me.” Raina laughed. It hurt. “I don’t do arranged marriages.” “It’s not a marriage. It’s a blood pact. Old magic.” He rolled up his sleeve. A matching wound sat on his forearm, already scabbed over, the edges angry and red. “Someone used your father’s blood and mine to tie us together.” He tapped the wound. “I felt it the moment it happened. During the attack.” “Why?” “Because whoever did this wants us to kill each other.” Raina stared at him. He looked tired. Not like a man who’d just won a war. Like a man who’d been running for too long. “If I die, you die,” she said slowly. “If you die, I die,” he confirmed. “So we have a problem. Because I don’t plan on dying today.” “And I don’t trust you.” “Good,” Kael said. “Trust gets people killed. Stay alive first. We’ll figure out the rest later.” He stood. “Where are you going?” “To find out who burned your pack,” he said. “You’re coming with me. If you stay here, they’ll come back for you.” Raina looked at her shoulder. At the wound that refused to heal. At the man who’d been her family’s enemy since before she was born. She had no pack. No home. No options. “Fine,” she said. “But if you betray me, I’ll take you with me.” Kael’s mouth twitched. Almost a smile. Almost human. “I’d expect nothing less, Voss.”