Chapter 2

The memory vanished, and I slowly opened my eyes. They felt sore, dry, and faintly burning. How long had it been since I'd wept?

Years, certainly. In the shadow cells, I had cried until nothing remained inside me to cry with. The healer who tended the prisoners once told me my tear ducts had been damaged beyond mending by the cold and the dark. "You may never weep properly again," she'd said, and at the time I hadn't cared, because there had been nothing left in the world I considered worth weeping over.

I turned toward the edge of the cart. The road outside had grown unfamiliar, lined now with the timbered halls and carved storefronts of the territory's upper village, where only the wealthiest bloodlines kept their homes. Before I could ask why we had stopped here rather than at the manor, the cart's canopy was drawn back, and bright afternoon light poured in around a familiar figure.

Lucien.

My mate.

Eight years had passed, and yet he looked exactly as I remembered him. Tall, broad through the shoulder, his sharp features still carrying the quiet authority of an Alpha who could alter the fate of an entire territory with nothing more than a lowered word.

A smile spread across his face when he saw me. "Selene," he said warmly. "Come, step down."

He extended his hand toward me.

"Marga has spent the whole day preparing a welcome feast in your honor. You're the only one the hall is waiting for."

The words nearly made me laugh. Lucien was still exactly the same. Gentle. Patient. Endlessly kind.

At least where Evelyn was concerned.

His hand settled naturally against my shoulder, and my body stiffened at once. Before I could pull away, a bright voice rang out across the square.

"Selene!"

The instant Evelyn appeared, I felt Lucien quietly withdraw his hand from my shoulder, as though he had been caught at something shameful. I lowered my eyes and said nothing. Of course.

Evelyn hurried toward me, her eyes already red and glistening, and before I could step aside she caught my hand in both of hers.

"Selene," she said, her voice trembling, "I am so sorry for everything that happened. I know what my blade did to your brother, and I have grieved it every single night since. I only wanted the chance to tell you properly."

I did not answer, and the silence that followed grew thick enough to choke on.

Evelyn bit her lip, looking more wretched by the moment, and as I expected, Lucien stepped smoothly into the gap. "Marga rose before the sun today," he said, his voice softening the moment he turned toward her. "She chose the hall herself, hung every banner with her own hands."

Evelyn shook her head quickly. "Lucien, please, don't—"

He pressed on as though she hadn't spoken. "She hasn't eaten a bite all day. She was so afraid nothing would be perfect for you." Only then did his gaze return to me. "Selene, she is trying, truly."

"I am," Evelyn added at once, her voice small.

Together they made it sound as though I were the unreasonable one in this, as though eight years bound in the shadow cells beneath the mountain had been some small misunderstanding between friends.

No one asked how I had survived down there. No one asked what the cold and the dark had carved out of me. No one asked how many nights I had wept myself hoarse, or how it felt to be branded a murderer for a death I had never caused.

No one cared. All that mattered to any of them was whether Evelyn's guilt looked convincing enough.

I was on the verge of speaking when Lucien caught my wrist. "Come," he said, and without waiting for my answer, he drew me toward the great hall.

Before we had even crossed the threshold, voices spilled out through the open doors, loud enough that there was no mistaking them for anything but deliberate.

"If it weren't for Lucien and Marga's generosity, I'd hardly believe it. A welcome feast for a murderer, of all things."

Someone gave a short laugh.

"Truly. What exactly are we celebrating? That she got away with killing her own kin?"

A ripple of laughter followed.

My fingers curled slowly into my palms.

"I warned Lucien years ago," another voice said. "A wolf raised in that kind of den was never going to run clean."

"Just so."

"I heard her brother used her cruelly for years, since she was a pup all the way through her first shift."

My chest tightened.

Every word was a lie, yet they kept spinning them.

"They say she finally snapped and tore his throat out herself."

"That's not even the worst of it." The voice dropped, savoring the moment. "I heard she killed her parents too, because they always favored the elder son."

"Truly?"

"So it's said. Hated them for it, apparently. Then their carriage went over the ravine road not long after. Tell me that isn't strange."

"I knew there was something wrong with her."

"By the moon, she's a frightening thing."

The rumors grew louder and bolder with each retelling, as though repeating a lie enough times might transform it into truth. No one mentioned that my brother had never once raised a hand against me. No one mentioned that my parents had died because the mountain road had iced over that winter. No one mentioned that Evelyn herself had spent years feeding these very stories to anyone in the pack willing to listen.

Why would they? The truth held no flavor. The lie was delicious.

Beside me, Lucien suddenly went rigid. His expression darkened, and in the next breath he wrapped an arm around me, one hand pressed over my ear while the other drew me hard against his chest.

It was a familiar gesture. For years, whenever cruel talk had reached me, whenever I had broken down in tears, Lucien had done exactly this, sheltering me from the world, holding me close, swearing that all would be well. I had once believed him to be my den, my shelter, my home.

How amusing, that the very wolf who had taught the pack how to bare its teeth at me was now trying to shield me from the bite.

The trembling he expected from me never came.

Slowly, I lifted my hands, thinner and more brittle than they had ever been before the shadow cells, and without hesitation I pushed him away.

Lucien stared down at me, his eyes widening with something between shock and hurt. I knew precisely what passed through his mind in that moment. There had been a time when such rumors would have shattered me entirely, a time when he alone had been the one to gather the pieces.

Nothing will ever harm you again, Liv. I will guard you with my life. I swear it on the moon.

I had believed every word of that oath once. But I no longer needed his shelter.

Something shifted behind his eyes, a flash of something almost suffocating, and then anger swept across his face, directed not at me but toward the hall behind us. In the next instant he drove the great doors open with a single kick.

The sound cracked through the hall like a thunderclap, and silence fell over every wolf inside.

Lucien stepped through the doorway like a gathering storm, tall and broad-shouldered and terrible to behold, and the room remembered all at once precisely why the entire territory feared him.

His gaze swept coldly across the assembled guests. "If any of you have something to say, say it to my face."

No one answered.

His voice dropped colder still. "Selene is my mate."

The silence held.

"She never asked for any of what has been done to her. So if you have a quarrel with her, bring that quarrel to me."

Not a soul stirred.

"Strange. You all had plenty to say a moment ago."

Several heads bowed toward the floor.

"If this feast doesn't suit you, the door is behind you. No one is holding you here."

The weight in the hall grew unbearable.

"And if I catch wind of anyone whispering behind her back again, we will be having an entirely different sort of conversation."

That silenced the last of them.

Across the hall, Evelyn's smile very nearly cracked apart. For the briefest instant, something sharp and jealous flickered through her eyes before she buried it beneath a look of practiced sorrow. Lifting a goblet of spiced wine, she began walking toward us.

"Lucien..." she said softly.