PROLOGUE
Twenty three years ago
The desert at midnight kept its secrets well, and Elena Silverfang had learned to keep hers better.
She drove without headlights for the last two miles, the moon bright enough to carve the road from darkness, her daughter sleeping in the car seat behind her, small fists curled against the cold despite the desert heat that lingered even after sunset. Elena's hands stayed steady on the wheel. She'd trained them to stay steady for years now, ever since she'd understood exactly what she carried and exactly who wanted it taken from her.
The pendant sat warm against her collarbone, the way it always did when danger drew close, like it could sense the same things she'd spent her whole life learning to sense.
She'd known this night was coming for weeks. The whispers through the territory had grown too loud to ignore, Damon Blackthorn's patience finally fraying after years of careful, watchful waiting. He wanted what hung around her neck. He wanted it the way men like him always wanted power they hadn't earned and didn't understand, desperately, violently, without any regard for the cost of taking it.
She would not let him have it. Not the pendant. Not her daughter. Not the future she'd spent two years building in the shadow of a war she'd never asked to inherit.
In the rearview mirror, headlights appeared, far enough back to seem harmless to anyone who didn't know better. Elena knew better. She'd know that particular engine's growl anywhere, had heard it pacing her for the last three nights running, patient as a predator who already believed the chase was over.
She glanced at her daughter in the mirror, this small, sleeping miracle who had no idea what she carried in her blood, no idea the world was about to break apart around her before she'd even learned to walk steadily on her own two feet.
"I'm sorry," Elena whispered, though there was no one awake to hear it. "I'm so sorry, my love. I should have run further. I should have hidden better."
The headlights closed the distance behind her, faster now, no longer bothering with patience.
Elena's hand moved to the pendant at her throat, fingers trembling for the first time that night as she began the old, desperate working her own mother had taught her, a sealing meant to be done in safety, in ritual, with time and care she no longer had the luxury of spending. She would not get this right. She knew that even as she began. But a flawed seal was better than no seal at all, and her daughter's life was the only price she had left to pay for it.
The car behind her surged forward, closing the final distance with terrible speed.
Elena's last clear thought, as the pendant flared white hot against her skin and the world outside her windshield dissolved into chaos and impact and screaming metal, was not for herself at all.
It was a single, desperate prayer that somewhere, somehow, her daughter would survive long enough to finish what she could not.
She never saw whether that prayer was answered.
Some mirages are illusions. Others are warnings.
Xena Silverfang built her entire life on the belief that her parents died in an accident twenty three years ago. She was wrong. Her mother was murdered hunted by a man who wanted the ancient pendant she died protecting, and the bloodline she died trying to hide.
Now that same hunter has found Xena.
Ragnar Ironclaw, the Alpha who claims her as his fated mate, was supposed to keep her safe. Instead, she wakes bound in the dark, in enemy territory, with Damon Blackthorn standing over her promising to break her by whatever means necessary because only her blood can unlock the power he's spent twenty years chasing.
Ragnar doesn't know where she is. He doesn't even know if she's still alive.
And somewhere beneath the desert moonlight, a war two decades in the making is about to finish what it started the night her mother died.
Xena survived the system. She survived loss. She survived being no one to no one.
Surviving Damon Blackthorn may be the one thing she can't do alone.
Will Ragnar find her before it's too late or will the secret buried in her blood destroy them both first?
Read to find out.
