Author's Preface
N Y X A R A
I woke choking on a name the Guild had cut out of me.
It clawed up my throat with teeth. My body knew it before my mind could catch it, before my tongue shaped the first broken syllable.
Lu—
Pain slammed through my arm.
I jackknifed off the mattress, gagging, cuffed wrists striking the bedframe hard enough to split skin. The room lurched around me: stone walls, locked door, barred window, two guards breathing beyond the threshold.
Ashmoore.
My mark moved beneath fresh bandages.
Something twisted under my skin like living wire, dragging heat from wrist to shoulder until gold flashed at the edges of my vision. I bit down on a scream. Screams were offerings, and I had learned young never to give pain anything it could keep.
The name rose again.
Lu—
The serum answered.
Cold flooded my veins. My lungs seized. My tongue went numb. The almost-name dissolved into bitter metal, leaving blood on my teeth and the sick certainty that something inside me had tried to come home.
And been dragged back screaming.
I hit the floor on one knee.
The moonstone beneath me pulsed.
Hungry.
The pulse opened the floor.
Some sensible piece of me knew I was still kneeling in a locked Ashmoore room, blood on my lip, cuffs around my wrists.
The rest of me fell.
White walls. A ceiling too clean for a place where children screamed.
Rows of narrow beds. Small wrists strapped to silver rails. Trainees stood shoulder to shoulder in gray shifts, eyes forward, faces empty the way the Guild preferred. Empty was easier to fill.
A needle slid under my skin.
Antiseptic. Old blood. Burned sage. Something lunar they had no right to possess.
“Subject X shows continued resistance,” Thorne said.
I could not see him. Only his black gloves. One finger pressed to my wrist, measuring a pulse I had not agreed to give.
Another voice asked, “Alpha bond compatibility?”
My mark screamed.
“Unstable,” Thorne answered. “But viable.”
Silver flashed. Blood spread across a table beneath my hand. Not all of it mine. A boy stood behind glass, his mouth open around a name the room refused to let me hear.
Nyx—
The memory snapped.
I was back on the floor, clawing at my bandage with numb fingers. The seal beneath writhed like script trapped under skin.
Then Thorne’s voice breathed through my skull.
“Erase her.”
My body went still.
The door crashed open.
I moved before thought could catch me.
The cuff chain snapped taut as I lunged, one hand closing around the broken pitcher shard I did not remember making.
Kaelor filled the doorway in black and silver, hair loose, eyes burning gold.
Afraid.
He caught my wrist before the shard touched skin. Fast. Clean. His other hand locked around the chain before I could wrap it around his neck, and the world tilted.
My back hit the wall. Not hard enough to break a bone. Hard enough to stop me.
I bared my teeth.
“Use the weakness, Alpha. Isn’t that what monsters do?”
His jaw tightened. He looked at my bleeding hand, the smoking bandage, the mark moving beneath it.
“I heard you choking.”
“Then next time enjoy it quietly.”
A muscle jumped in his cheek. Still, no command came. No Alpha voice dragging my knees to the floor. He only shifted his grip until the shard pointed away from my pulse.
“Fight me if you need to,” he said. “But stop helping whatever that is tearing you apart.”
The seal burned hotter.
My fingers spasmed open.
The shard fell.
Kaelor released me the instant I stopped fighting.
People who let go wanted you to notice the mercy. They wanted gratitude. A softer place to slide the knife in later. I pressed my shoulders to the wall and searched his hands for the trap.
There wasn’t one.
Only tension. Blood on his knuckles from my broken pitcher. Moonlight catching on the edge of his control like a blade held too carefully.
My arm pulsed.
The seal twisted beneath the ruined bandage, black lines surfacing through gold-white light. Not ink. Letters, maybe, if letters could breathe.
Kaelor’s face changed.
“What did they do to you?” he asked.
The question hit harder than his grip had. A laugh scraped out of me, thin and wrong.
“You mean before or after they gave me your name and sent me here?”
His eyes sharpened. I felt the hidden thing inside me notice what I had said.
The seal flared.
My spine bowed off the wall. Air vanished. Every muscle locked, not from fear, not from pain, but obedience. Deep. Buried. Older than I thought.
Thorne’s voice slid through the dark behind my eyes.
“Reset protocol engaged.”
“No,” I tried to say.
What came out was a whisper I had not chosen.
“Don’t let them reset me.”
Kaelor went still.
So did I.
Because the room had heard me.
Kaelor moved toward the door.
“Elaren,” he called, voice sharp enough to cut through stone. “Now.”
Boots shifted outside. A guard muttered, “She’s Dangerous—”
Kaelor’s growl cut him silent.
Low. Lethal. Every wolf beyond the door remembered what he was.
I hated the relief that followed.
My knees buckled.
Kaelor caught my elbow before I hit the floor, as if I were breakable and furious instead of a problem with teeth.
I tried to pull away. My body refused to obey me.
That frightened me more than him.
Elaren entered barefoot, silver hair unbound, blindfold dark across her eyes. She carried no weapon. Only a small bowl of water that steamed under moonlight.
“Do not touch her skin,” she said.
Kaelor’s hand vanished from my arm at once.
Interesting.
Terrible.
Elaren knelt before me. The water in her bowl rippled toward my mark.
“It is not only poison,” she murmured. “The serum is fighting the moonstone. And the mark is fighting the seal.”
“The seal?” Kaelor asked.
Elaren’s face tightened. “No. Not seal.”
The room flashed white again.
Glass. Blood. A boy’s face on the other side of it, desperate and beautiful in the way broken things were beautiful.
He slammed his palm against the glass.
“Run, Nyx.”
“He told me to run,” I whispered.
Kaelor crouched, every line of him suddenly still. “Who?”
The name came.
The serum took it.
Pain burst behind my eyes. I folded over, choking on an answer I could not own. Elaren reached for my arm. The instant her fingers brushed the burning mark, all color drained from her face.
“This was never an assassin’s mark,” she whispered.
Kaelor’s voice went deadly quiet.
“Then what is it?”
Elaren looked at me as if she had found a locked tomb breathing.
“A cage,” she said. “For a Luna who was not supposed to wake.”