The summer Amara Quinn turned fourteen, the woods behind Lake Washington smelled like wet cedar and coming rain. It was the kind of Seattle summer that never really got hot. The sky was a low, gray sheet, the kind that made everything look like a watercolor painting left out in the rain. The air was thick with mosquitoes and the sound of crows. For most kids from Seattle Prep, summer meant sailing camps in the San Juan Islands or internships in their parents' downtown offices. For Amara, summer meant the back entrance of the art supply store on Aurora Avenue where Mrs. Henderson let her sweep floors for free charcoal pencils, and it meant the woods. Always the woods. Her mother, Lena Quinn, had been a human. A beautiful, free-spirited painter from Portland who had fallen in love with a werewolf passing through Seattle and paid the price for it. He had stayed long enough to give Lena a daughter and a complicated birth certificate, and then he had gone back to his pack in Montana, saying a human life was not for him. Lena had died when Amara was twelve. Ovarian cancer. Fast. Quiet. The pack that her father had come from sent a check for the funeral and a letter saying Amara could attend Seattle Prep Academy on a scholarship, as a "courtesy." It was charity, not family. So Amara lived with her mother's sister, Aunt Rosa, in a small two-bedroom apartment above a laundromat in Ballard. Aunt Rosa worked double shifts at the Harborview Medical Center and told Amara every night: "Keep your head down, baby. Don't let them smell you're different. Humans don't want us and wolves don't want us either. Just be invisible." But Amara was terrible at being invisible. She was half-breed, which meant she was too loud, too emotional, too human for the wolves, and too wild, too aware of scents and sounds for the humans. Her eyes were hazel, but they glowed faintly amber when she was angry. Her nails sharpened when she was scared. She couldn't shift, not fully. She was stuck in between. The only place she felt normal was in the woods with her sketchbook. On August 17th, a Tuesday, she told Aunt Rosa she was going to the library. Instead, she took the 44 bus to the edge of Carkeek Park and walked past the "No Trespassing - Private Timber Land" sign that everyone ignored. She had a cheap composition notebook, three pencils worn down to nubs, and a peanut butter sandwich. She was trying to draw the Cascade Mountains. She wanted to capture how they looked like sleeping giants. That's when she heard the whine. It wasn't a dog. She knew dog sounds. Aunt Rosa's neighbor had a beagle that howled at sirens. This was deeper, more guttural, and laced with pain that made the hair on the back of her neck stand up. Amara froze. Her half-wolf hearing, the one thing she had inherited from her father, picked up another sound: metal creaking, and frantic breathing. She should have run. That was rule number one Aunt Rosa taught her. If you hear a full-blood wolf, you run, because they hate half-breeds more than anything. They see you as a mistake. But her feet moved forward anyway, pushing through salal bushes and ferns that soaked her sneakers. In a small clearing, near a fallen Douglas fir, was a wolf. Not a normal wolf. This was enormous. Its fur was jet black, so black it seemed to absorb the gray Seattle light. Its shoulders were as high as her chest. And its leg - its back left leg - was caught in a rusted bear trap. The trap was old, illegal in Washington State for ten years. Poachers sometimes came up from Oregon. The metal teeth had sunk deep into muscle. Blood, bright red, soaked the moss and turned the dirt to mud. The wolf was panting, its blue eyes - an impossible, human blue - fixed on her. It bared its teeth, a warning. Amara's first thought was stupidly simple: He's going to die here if no one helps him. Her second thought was: He is the most beautiful creature I've ever seen. She dropped to her knees at the edge of the clearing, making herself small. "Hey," she whispered. Her voice shook. "Hey, big guy. I'm not going to hurt you. I'm - I'm going to help you, okay?" The wolf growled. The sound vibrated through the ground. "I know it hurts," she kept talking, because talking kept her from fainting. "My mom used to say wolves in Washington are protected. Someone shouldn't have left that here. That's illegal, you know. You're not supposed to -" She was babbling. She pulled the hairpin out of her messy bun. Her hair fell around her face, dark curls tangled. "I have this. It's not much. But maybe I can..." She crawled closer. The wolf's nose twitched. He was smelling her. She could see his nostrils flare. Most full-bloods smelled half-breeds and snarled in disgust. They smelled human sweat mixed with weak wolf. This wolf went completely still. Amara reached for the trap. The rusted spring was stiff. She jammed the hairpin into the mechanism and pushed with all her fourteen-year-old strength. Nothing. "Come on, come on," she muttered, cutting her finger on the rust. Blood welled up. Her own blood mixed with his on the moss. The wolf made a sound. Not a growl. A soft, choked whine. It lowered its huge head to the ground, watching her hands. She tried again. She put her foot on one side of the trap for leverage, grabbed the other side with both hands, and pulled until her arms shook and tears ran down her face. The spring screamed. And sprang open. The wolf ripped its leg free so fast Amara fell backward into the ferns. For a second, she thought it would attack her. Fourteen-year-old half-breed saves Alpha heir, gets eaten. That would be a story. Instead, the wolf stared at her. Its blue eyes were locked on her bleeding finger. It took one limping step toward her. Amara held her breath. The wolf - gently, so gently it made no sense for an animal that big - licked the blood off her finger. Its tongue was warm. Its breath was hot on her skin. Then it turned and vanished into the trees, limping, leaving a trail of blood and paw prints bigger than her hands. Amara sat in the clearing for a long time, her heart hammering against her ribs, her finger throbbing, the peanut butter sandwich forgotten. She didn't know it then, but she had just saved the future Alpha of the Cascade Pack. --- Ethan Blackwood was fifteen and he was furious with himself. He had been on his first solo run. His father, Richard Blackwood, Alpha of Cascade, who owned half the timber and tech land from Seattle to Aspen, had told him: "Don't go past Carkeek. You're not ready." Ethan had gone past Carkeek because being told not to do something had always had the opposite effect on him. He had shifted for the third time that month. The shift was still new, painful, exhilarating. His wolf was huge even for an Alpha pup, black as midnight, with eyes the color of glacier ice - the mark of the Blackwood line. He had been chasing a deer scent when the trap snapped shut. The pain was white-hot. He had howled, but his pack was miles away at the estate in Bellevue. No one heard. He thought he was going to die of infection in those woods, caught like a common animal. Then he smelled her. Before he saw her. Vanilla. Cheap vanilla shampoo from a drugstore. Charcoal dust. Paint thinner. And underneath it all, something wild, something that made his wolf - who had never cared about anything but running and hunting - go completely silent and focused. A girl crashed through the bushes. Small. Skinny knees, scraped. Dark curly hair falling out of a bun. Glasses crooked on her nose. A composition notebook clutched like a weapon. She smelled like half-breed. He should have been disgusted. Pure-blood Alphas were taught to despise half-breeds. Weak blood. Diluted. But she looked at his trapped leg and her eyes filled with tears, not fear. "Hey, big guy..." Her voice. He would remember that voice for the next four years in every dream. She fought that rusted trap for twenty minutes. He watched her. She cut herself. She didn't stop. She talked to him like he was a stray dog, not a monster. When she finally sprang it, his leg was free. The instinct to run was overwhelming. But he couldn't leave without tasting her first. He licked her blood. It was sweet. It was his. He ran, but he didn't go far. He hid behind a cedar tree, in human form now, naked and bleeding, watching as she sat in the mud, crying a little, laughing a little. He saw her sketchbook had fallen open. On the page was a drawing of a wolf - not a scary wolf, but a sad, beautiful wolf trapped, with a girl reaching for it. She had drawn him before she even knew him. Ethan Blackwood, who at fifteen already had a trust fund worth fifty million dollars and a pack of two hundred wolves waiting for him to lead them, sat behind a tree in the Seattle woods, bleeding, and felt his heart do something it had never done before. It chose. --- *Two Years Later - Seattle Prep Academy, Junior Year* Amara Quinn was sixteen and she had gotten very good at being invisible. She sat in the back of AP Art History, the only girl with thrift-store clothes in a room full of Lululemon and Canada Goose. The Cascade Pack kids sat together - tall, beautiful, cruel. They were all legacy admits. Their parents owned buildings downtown. At the center of them was Ethan Blackwood. At seventeen, he was already six-foot-three, captain of the lacrosse team, with a face that belonged on a billboard in New York. He was cold. He never dated. He never smiled. Girls from Seattle to Aspen threw themselves at him and he looked through them. He was the Alpha heir. Everyone knew it. Amara knew to stay away from him. She had heard the stories. He once put a senior boy in the hospital for touching his lacrosse stick. He was feral. She was trying to pass him in the hallway one day, late for class, arms full of canvases for the winter show. She wasn't looking. She tripped over someone's extended foot - one of the pack girls - and her canvases went flying. Paint, water, brushes everywhere. The hallway went silent. People laughed. "Watch where you're going, half-breed," the girl sneered. Amara knelt, her face burning, picking up wet canvases. Her hands were shaking. She could feel her claws wanting to come out, which would only make it worse. Then a shadow fell over her. Ethan Blackwood crouched down. Without a word, he picked up her largest canvas - a painting of Lake Washington at night - and handed it to her. Their fingers touched. A shock - like electricity, like static, like a match being struck inside her chest - shot up her arm. Amara gasped. Ethan's blue eyes went wide, then furious. He stood up so fast he almost knocked her over. "Don't touch me," he snapped, so quietly only she could hear. But his voice shook. He walked away, leaving her on the floor. That was the first time. After that, strange things started happening. The girls who bullied her got called into the principal's office for cheating. Her art scholarship, which was supposed to be reviewed every year, was suddenly made permanent, with a note saying "Donor: Anonymous." The best easel in the art room, the one everyone fought for, was always free when she got there. Ethan never spoke to her again. For two full years, from sixteen to eighteen, he ignored her existence in the hallways of Seattle Prep. But he always knew where she was. His wolf always knew. He told himself he was disgusted by her. That a half-breed with no pack, no money, no pure blood could never be Luna of Cascade. His father was already arranging a match with Victoria Ashford, the Alpha daughter from the Upper East Side Manhattan pack, whose family owned half of Park Avenue. He told himself love was weakness and Alphas didn't get to be weak. So he watched her from a distance, this girl who had once saved his life in the woods with a hairpin and vanilla shampoo, and he waited for his eighteenth birthday, when the Moon Goddess would give him his true fated mate and he could finally forget her. He had no idea the Moon Goddess was about to give him exactly what he had been trying to forget. The Aspen Moon Ball, the night before his graduation, was in three days. And Amara Quinn, who had just turned eighteen two weeks before, had just gotten her first full shift. A small, gray-brown wolf, fast and clever, with hazel eyes. She didn't know yet that she had a mate. She didn't know yet that he was the same blue-eyed wolf from the woods. She just knew she had been invited to the Aspen Ball as part of the scholarship students' service staff. To serve drinks. She was going to serve drinks to her own mate, who was about to reject her in front of three hundred wolves.

AMARA QUINN* The Blackwood Estate in Aspen is not a house. I know houses. I've cleaned enough of them in Seattle. I know the difference between the houses in Queen Anne where they try to look rich and the houses in Hunts Point where they actually are rich. This is neither. This is something else. This is a house built to remind you that you will never belong in it. It's built into Red Mountain like it grew there. Glass and cedar and stone. Tonight, for the Moon Ball, they've filled it with elk antler chandeliers and pine branches and three hundred of the most beautiful, cruel people I have ever seen. I can smell them even from the service corridor. Pure-blood werewolves. Alpha bloodlines from Seattle, Vancouver, Chicago, New York. Their scents are heavy, expensive. Mine is - well, according to my aunt Rosa, I smell like a mistake. Half human, half wolf. Not enough of either. I'm supposed to be invisible. That's the job. Black uniform, non-slip shoes a size too big, tray of water glasses. Fifty dollars an hour. I said yes before the lady from catering finished her sentence. Fifty dollars an hour is charcoals. Fifty dollars an hour is the electric bill. I shouldn't be peeking through the service door. But I always peek. I'm an artist. I look. And then I see him. Ethan Blackwood is standing at the top of the grand staircase, talking to his father. Even from here, even in a room full of wolves who are all trying to be the most important, he is the most important. It's not just that he's tall. It's that everyone moves around him without thinking. Like he's gravity. He's wearing a black tuxedo with no tie. His hair is too long. He looks bored. He looked bored at our graduation from Seattle Prep six months ago too, when he gave the speech about "legacy and responsibility" and didn't look at me once. My heart does something stupid and traitorous. It starts pounding so loud I'm sure he can hear it. I tell myself I'm over my crush. That hallway moment in sophomore year when he picked up my canvas. That electric shock when our fingers touched. It was nothing. He was the billionaire Alpha heir. I was the scholarship kid who lived above a laundromat in Ballard. I push the door open a centimeter more, just to see the way the light hits the crystal. The air conditioning shifts. A draft moves from the ballroom into my corridor. And it carries three hundred scents. And it carries my scent to him. I see the exact second it hits him. He goes completely still at the top of the stairs, mid-sentence. His head snaps toward my door. His nostrils flare. Even from here, I can see his eyes start to glow amber. No. No no no. I try to step back, but I'm frozen. My own body betrays me. Two weeks ago, on my eighteenth birthday, something woke up inside me. My wolf. A small, gray-brown thing with hazel eyes, fast and scared. She had howled at the moon over Ballard and then hidden. Tonight, she suddenly throws her head back inside my chest and howls. Mate. The word isn't a thought. It's a feeling. It's every nerve ending in my body turning on at once. It's warm and terrifying and wonderful. It's him. Ethan is moving. He's coming down the stairs two at a time, ignoring everyone. Victoria Ashford, in a red dress that costs more than my life, steps forward with her perfect smile, her hand out. He walks right past her. He pushes open the service door and grabs my arm. The tray wobbles. Water sloshes. His eyes are glowing. His claws are out, pricking his palms. He pulls me into the shadows behind the champagne crates. "Do you know what you are?" he hisses. He's breathing hard. Like he's run miles. My wolf is whining. Mate. Mate. Mate. "Ethan, what's happening? You're hurting me -" My voice is tiny. I'm crying already and I don't know why. "I told you to stay away from me," he says. His grip is tight, not enough to bruise, but enough that I can't move. "I - I work here. I didn't -" "I told you to stay in Seattle. I had them make your scholarship permanent so you would stay in Seattle." He stops himself, like he's said too much. I stare at him. What is he talking about? "You felt it too, right?" I whisper. The tears are falling now. "In the hallway. For two years. I felt - I thought I was crazy." "You felt nothing," he says. His voice is flat. Cruel. The cold voice he uses in the hallways at Seattle Prep. "You're a child, Amara. You're confused." "My mom told me about mates -" "Your mom was human." I flinch like he's hit me. The service door opens. His father, Richard Blackwood, stands there with two Betas. He smells the air and his eyes go wide. Victoria appears behind him. Ethan looks at his father. At Victoria. At the crowd gathering, whispering, staring at me in my cheap uniform. I see him make a choice. I see the boy I saved in the woods behind Lake Washington disappear. I see the billionaire take his place. He turns to me. He makes his face stone. "I, Ethan Blackwood, Alpha heir of the Cascade Pack, reject you, Amara Quinn, as my mate and Luna. I sever the bond." *ETHAN BLACKWOOD* I have been trained since I was old enough to walk to feel nothing. My father taught me. My grandfather taught him. Blackwood Alphas don't feel. We calculate. We build. We own timber rights and tech startups and half of downtown Seattle. We make alliances with New York packs who own Park Avenue. We marry Alpha daughters who bring pure bloodlines and three hundred million dollar mergers. We do not mate half-breeds who live above laundromats. I have known Amara Quinn for four years. Or rather, I have known her scent for four years. The first time, I was fifteen, bleeding out in a bear trap in the woods behind Lake Washington like an idiot pup on his first solo run. She was fourteen, with crooked glasses and a hairpin, crying while she fought rusted metal to free me. She smelled like cheap vanilla shampoo and charcoal dust. She didn't run. She saved me. I tasted her blood that day. My wolf decided that day. Mine. The second time, she was sixteen, in the hallway at Seattle Prep, arms full of canvases. I bumped into her on purpose. I wanted to see if she smelled the same. She did. When our fingers touched, the mate spark hit me so hard my knees buckled. I had to be cruel to make her stay away. For two years, I watched her. I made sure no one sat in her spot in the cafeteria. I had the lacrosse team that messed with her art show suspended. I anonymously paid her scholarship permanent. I told myself it was responsibility. That as future Alpha, I protected all weak wolves. It was a lie. I was obsessed. I waited for my eighteenth birthday, for the Moon Goddess to give me my true mate, to free me from this insanity. My father had already arranged the match with Victoria Ashford. Pure blood. Upper East Side. Perfect Luna. Three hundred million dollars. Everyone approved. And then tonight, at the Aspen Moon Ball, the draft from the air conditioning carried vanilla and paint thinner into the ballroom. My wolf howled inside my skull so loud I thought I would shift right there in front of three hundred wolves. Mate. I looked at the service door and there she was. Amara Quinn. Eighteen years old. Hazel eyes. In a server uniform. Peeking through the door like she did in art class. My mate. My fated, Moon-Goddess-given, true mate is a half-breed art student with no pack. No. The word was not a thought. It was panic. I walked past Victoria. I pushed open the service door. I grabbed Amara's arm and pulled her into the shadows. I needed to smell her up close, to be sure. To be wrong. I wasn't wrong. Up close, she was worse. She was beautiful. Her wolf was new, just turned eighteen, small and scared and calling to mine. Her eyes were full of tears and hope. "Do you know what you are?" I asked her. I was shaking. My claws were out. I wanted to bite her. Mark her. Throw her over my shoulder and run into the mountains and never come back. I wanted to burn my entire empire to the ground for her. And that is why I had to reject her. My father appeared in the doorway. Victoria behind him. The crowd behind them. Three hundred wolves were about to know that Ethan Blackwood, heir to Cascade, was mated to a half-breed server. If I claimed her, the pack would revolt. The New York alliance would collapse. My father's life work would crumble. My mother would cry. I would be a weak Alpha who chose love over duty. My grandfather's ghost would be ashamed. So I did what Blackwoods do. I calculated. I made my face stone. I used my Alpha voice, the voice that makes Betas kneel. "I, Ethan Blackwood, Alpha heir of the Cascade Pack, reject you, Amara Quinn, as my mate and Luna. I sever the bond. I break it." The words have power in the old language. To reject a fated mate is to spit in the Moon Goddess's face. Amara screamed. A small, broken sound. And then I felt it. The pain hit me like a truck. Like ice being branded into my chest. My bond - the golden thread that had been growing since I was fifteen, since she saved me in the woods - snapped. My wolf howled in agony and tried to take over, tried to force me to take it back, to bite her, to beg. I dug my claws into my own palms so hard blood dripped onto the concrete. I had to stay standing. She fell to her knees. Glasses shattered around her. Richard grabbed my shoulder. "Enough." I looked down at her. At the girl who saved my life with a hairpin. At my mate, on her knees in her ugly shoes, in the snow of my own estate. She looked up at me, her face wet. "You saved me," she whispered, so quietly only I could hear. "In the woods. You were the wolf. I saved you." "I don't need saving from you," I said. My voice broke. She pushed herself to her feet. She walked past my father, past Victoria, past everyone, out the back exit into the Aspen snow. Twenty-three degrees. No coat. My Beta, Marcus, came up to me. "Alpha, should I send someone after her? She'll freeze." I watched the back door close. I watched the snow where she disappeared. Every cell in my body screamed to go after her. "No," I said. "Let her go. She doesn't belong here." I turned and walked back into the ballroom, back to Victoria, back to my future. Every step felt like walking on broken glass. My wolf went silent inside me. Not dead. Worse. Hollow. And in the snow, somewhere on Red Mountain, my mate was walking away with a piece of my soul in her chest. A piece I would spend the next three years trying to get back.

AMARA QUINN* I didn't go back to Ballard after Aspen. I couldn't. The apartment smelled like Aunt Rosa's bleach and the laundry downstairs. The walls were thin. And my chest hurt. It wasn't just emotional. The rejection had left an actual wound. When Ethan said those words - "I reject you" - something inside me tore. I felt it. A golden thread snapping. My wolf, who had only been alive for two weeks, had gone silent. I couldn't feel her at all. I kept putting my hand over my heart on the bus from Aspen to Denver to Seattle, trying to feel her breathing, and there was nothing. Just cold. Aunt Rosa was working a night shift at Harborview when I got back. She left me a note on the fridge: "Leftover lasagna. Don't wait up. - R" I threw up the lasagna. Then I threw up again. That had been happening for three days. Since Aspen. I thought it was the pain. I thought it was grief. I thought it was because I had walked two miles in the snow in a server uniform and gotten frostbite on my toes. On the fourth day, I was in the bathroom of the tiny apartment, staring at my pale face in the cracked mirror, and I realized my period was late. Two weeks late. No. No no no. I did the math. My eighteenth birthday party. Seattle Prep had a bonfire at Golden Gardens for the seniors who turned eighteen. The pack kids brought moonshine that was actually moonshine - brewed for wolves. I had never had my wolf before. That night, my wolf had come out for the first time, wild and shaking and terrified and so, so lonely. I had run into the woods behind the beach. There was a boy there. I didn't see his face. It was dark. He smelled like pine and snow and expensive cologne and something that made my new wolf whine and press close. Glacier ice. Like Ethan, but not Ethan. Older? I didn't know. He held me when I shifted back, shaking and naked and crying because shifting hurts the first time. He wrapped his jacket around me. He said, "You're okay, little wolf. I've got you." I don't remember much after that. I remember warmth. I remember wanting to not feel cold and alone. I remember his hands, his mouth on my neck, not biting, just breathing. I remember thinking, for a second, that I wasn't invisible. I told myself it was a dream. A weird, hazy, wolf-heat dream. But now my body was telling me it wasn't a dream. I stole a pregnancy test from the Walgreens on Market Street. I couldn't afford the good one. I took the cheap one with the blue dye. I sat on the cold tile floor of our bathroom for five minutes, my knees pulled to my chest, staring at the little plastic stick. Two lines. Positive. I am eighteen years old. I live above a laundromat. My mother is dead. My father is a wolf from Montana who sends checks. My aunt works double shifts. I was rejected by my fated mate in front of three hundred rich wolves four days ago. And now I am pregnant by a stranger whose face I don't remember in the woods at Golden Gardens. I put my hand on my stomach. Still flat. Nothing there yet. But I felt - something. A tiny spark. Like a second heartbeat, so faint I thought I imagined it. My wolf, who had been silent for four days, suddenly whimpered inside me. Weak, but alive. _Pup,_ she whispered. Not in words. In feeling. _Protect pup._ I started crying. Not pretty crying. Ugly, loud, shoulders-shaking crying that echoed in the tiny bathroom. I knew what happened to half-breed girls who got pregnant alone in Seattle. The Cascade Pack had charities, yes, but they also had rules. If a half-breed had a pup with no pack father, the pup was taken. "For its own protection." Raised in the pack orphanage in Bellevue. My mother had told me that story once, drunk, crying. "They almost took you, Amara. They almost took you." They would take my baby. I had to leave. I packed a backpack that night. Two sketchbooks, charcoals, three shirts, my mom's silver locket with her picture inside, the $400 I had saved from catering, and the $600 from the Aspen job that hadn't cleared yet but I took as cash advance from the manager by lying and saying my aunt was sick. I left a note for Aunt Rosa: "I love you. I have to go find my pack. Don't look for me. I will be okay. - A" I didn't go to New York. That was too obvious. Victoria Ashford was from New York. The Manhattan pack would be there. I bought a Greyhound ticket to Portland. From Portland, I would go to Boise. From Boise, to Denver. I was going to disappear. At the bus station, at 2:17 AM, my phone buzzed. Unknown number. I almost didn't answer. "Amara Quinn?" A deep voice. Cold. Familiar. "This is Richard Blackwood. We need to talk about what happened in Aspen." I hung up. Turned off my phone. Threw the SIM card in the trash can at the station. And got on the bus. I didn't know that the stranger from Golden Gardens had been watching the buses leave Seattle that night. Or that he had just found out his one-night stand was pregnant with his pup. *ETHAN BLACKWOOD* She was gone. Marcus checked the apartment in Ballard. Empty. Backpack gone. Aunt gone to work, said Amara left a note. The girl at Walgreens said she saw Amara crying in the bathroom aisle. The bus station camera showed her getting on the 2:30 AM to Portland, wearing a hoodie three sizes too big, her backpack clutched like a life preserver. I watched the footage on my father's laptop in his Seattle office on the 48th floor of the Blackwood Tower. Downtown Seattle was glittering below us. My father's timber and tech empire. "Let her go," my father said again. "It's better this way, Ethan. You did the right thing in Aspen. A half-breed cannot be Luna. Victoria's father called this morning. He is still willing to move forward with the merger if you apologize publicly for the... disturbance. If you mate with Victoria at the next full moon, the alliance is secure." I didn't hear him. I was staring at the screen. At Amara's small face on the grainy CCTV. She looked pale. Sick. She had been sick for four days, Marcus said. Throwing up. The caterer said she asked for extra crackers. My wolf, who had been silent since I rejected her, suddenly lifted his head. _Pup._ The word came from nowhere. From everywhere. From the bond that I had supposedly severed. Rejecting a mate doesn't break the bond. It just wounds it. My grandfather told me that once, drunk, after my grandmother died. "You can say the words, boy. But the Moon Goddess doesn't listen to boys. She listens to souls." I had torn Amara's soul. And now I felt - something else. A second heartbeat. Faint, far away, but there. Connected to her. Connected to me through her. No. It wasn't possible. I had only touched her once - in the hallway. No, we never - Unless - The bonfire at Golden Gardens. The senior party. I wasn't there. I was in Aspen with my father. But my cousin, Jace Blackwood, was there. Jace, who is twenty-two, who looks exactly like me when I was younger, who has the same glacier eyes because we share blood. Jace, who was sent to Seattle Prep to watch over me and who had a habit of picking up drunk eighteen-year-old girls in the woods. I stood up so fast my chair fell over. "Where is Jace?" I asked Marcus. My voice was an Alpha growl. Marcus went pale. "He - he left Seattle last week. Said he got transferred to the New York pack. Sir, I -" I was already dialing. My hands were shaking. Jace picked up on the third ring, laughing, music in the background. "Yo, cuz -" "Golden Gardens. The bonfire. Two weeks ago. Did you fuck a half-breed girl with curly hair?" I said, no preamble. Silence on the other end. Then: "Jesus, Ethan. How did you -" The line went dead in my hand. I had crushed my phone. My father stared at me. "Ethan, what is going on?" I couldn't breathe. The second heartbeat was louder now. It wasn't in my head. It was real. Amara was pregnant. And it wasn't mine. It was my cousin's. My bloodline. Which meant the pup was still a Blackwood. Still an Alpha bloodline pup. Growing inside my rejected mate, alone on a bus to Portland with $1000 and a backpack. My wolf howled, no longer hollow. Furious. Possessive. _Get her. Get them. Now._ I grabbed Marcus by his shirt. "Find that bus. I don't care if you have to buy the fucking Greyhound company. Find it, stop it, and bring her back to Seattle. Now. And if Jace sets foot in Washington State, you shoot him on sight." For the first time since I was fifteen, I didn't care about the merger. I didn't care about Victoria. I didn't care about being a good Alpha. I cared about the girl in the snow. And the pup she didn't know was mine by blood. Even if she hated me forever, she was not disappearing with my family's future in her belly.