The Pack House felt colder than the night outside.

I pushed the heavy oak door shut behind me and leaned against it for a moment, my heels throbbing inside silver pumps I'd worn for nine straight hours. The Harvest Gala had run long. Three speeches. Two toasts. A dance with the visiting Alpha from Crescent Ridge who'd held my waist a beat too long while his mate watched from across the room.

I just wanted Jasper.

I wanted him to unzip the back of this stupid green silk gown and tell me I'd done well. I wanted him to pour me a glass of the bourbon he kept in the study and let me put my bare feet on his lap.

That was the small, stupid prayer in my head as I climbed the curved staircase.

I was halfway to the second landing when I heard it.

A woman's voice. Breathy. Catching.

"Jasper—oh god, Jasper—"

My foot froze on the step.

For a second I thought it was the wind, or a TV left on, or one of the staff watching something they shouldn't. The Pack House had thirty-two rooms. Sound traveled. I told myself that.

Then I heard him.

His low groan. The one I knew. The one I'd only ever heard in our bed.

"That's it, baby. Just like that."

The bourbon I hadn't even drunk yet rose into my throat.

My hand locked onto the banister. The wood was cold. My fingers were colder. I couldn't feel them. I looked down at my own hand and it didn't seem to belong to me — pale knuckles, my grandmother's wedding ring catching the chandelier light, trembling against the polished oak.

The bedroom door — *our* bedroom door — was at the top of the stairs. I could see the strip of warm yellow light bleeding out from the bottom of it.

I didn't move.

The mattress was creaking. A rhythm. Their rhythm.

I clamped my hand over my mouth so hard I tasted copper where my teeth split the inside of my lip. A sound was trying to come out of me and I couldn't let it. I couldn't. If I made a sound he'd know I was here, and somehow — somehow in this moment — that felt worse than what was happening.

The ceiling tilted. Or I did.

I don't know how long I stood there. It might have been ten seconds. It might have been five minutes. The chandelier above the foyer made small tinkling sounds every time the heating vent kicked on, and I counted them. One. Two. Three. Four. Like a child counting sheep, except I was counting the seconds my marriage took to end.

I turned. I went back down the stairs.

I was crying without sound. The tears were running into my mouth and I could taste salt and the iron of my split lip and the cheap champagne from the gala all at once. My pumps slid on the marble. I gripped the rail with both hands like an old woman.

I made it to the bottom step and there was Leo.

My son. Five years old. School backpack still on his shoulders, the little blue one with the stitched moon on the front that I'd picked out for him in August.

He looked up at me.

I dropped to my knees. The silk tore at the seam. I didn't care.

"Leo, baby—"

He looked at my wet face. He looked at my shaking hands. His expression didn't change.

He nodded at me. A small, polite nod. The kind a child gives to a teacher he doesn't know well.

Then he walked past me toward the kitchen.

I stayed on my knees in my torn dress.

I should have been used to it by now. Jasper had warned me when I'd carried Leo: *Our line runs cold. Don't take it personal when the boy doesn't crawl into your lap.* And Leo never had. Not when he was teething. Not when he'd fallen off the swing and split his chin. Not on his first day of pre-K when every other mother got a hug at the door and I got that same small nod.

I had told myself it was just how Blackridge wolves were built. The Sterns ran cold. I had married into ice and I had learned to live in it.

But tonight, with my husband's voice still echoing in the upstairs hall, I felt the cold differently. It wasn't a trait. It was a verdict.

I dragged myself up by the banister.

I was going to go back up there. I was going to push that door open and look him in the eye and—

A door opened above me.

I heard footsteps. Two sets.

I froze at the bottom of the stairs and watched my husband come down.

Jasper was in gray sweatpants and a half-buttoned shirt, his dark hair still damp at the temples. He had his arm around a woman's waist. She was small. Maybe five-foot-two. Light brown hair in a long braid pulled over one shoulder. She wore one of the house robes — the cream-colored ones the staff used — and her cheeks were flushed pink.

She saw me first.

Her free hand flew to her mouth and her eyes filled instantly, which is a trick I have never been able to do.

"Oh," she said. "Oh no. Luna, I — I'm so sorry. I didn't mean for you to—"

"Yolanda." Jasper said my name like he was greeting me at a dinner party. Not even surprised. "You're back early."

I stared at him.

I waited for my voice to work. When it did, it came out smaller than I wanted.

"The gala ended at ten, Jasper. It's eleven-thirty."

He glanced at his watch like he was confirming it for himself. The watch I gave him on our fifth anniversary. The one with the inscription on the back.

The woman stepped slightly forward, half-hiding behind his arm. "Luna, my name is Juliana. I'm — I work in the kitchens. Three months now. Alpha Jasper saved my life when the rogues came through the eastern border in August. I owed him. I just — I just wanted to thank him, and it — it got—"

"It got out of hand," Jasper finished for her, and squeezed her hip.

I watched his hand on her hip.

I watched my own breath move the silk over my chest. In. Out. In. The chandelier light glinted off something on the floor — a single hairpin, pearl-tipped, that must have fallen from her braid when she came down the stairs.

"So you fucked my Alpha to say thank you," I said.

Juliana flinched like I'd hit her.

"Yolanda." Jasper's voice sharpened. "Watch your mouth. She's a guest in this house and an Omega. You're the Luna. Act like it."

I almost laughed.

The sound that came out of me wasn't quite a laugh. It was something rougher. Something with no name.

"I'm the Luna," I repeated. "Right. The Luna. Who just heard her Alpha through a door."

"She's been through enough." Jasper pulled Juliana closer, tucked her under his chin like she was something small that needed shelter. "You don't get to make her feel worse because you walked in on something you weren't supposed to see. A Luna has *composure*, Yolanda. You're embarrassing yourself."

My ears rang.

I opened my mouth to say something — anything — and that was when Leo came back from the kitchen.

He had an apple in his hand. He was peeling the sticker off it with his small careful fingers.

He walked past me again, like I was furniture, and he went straight to Juliana.

He wrapped his free arm around her thigh.

He pressed his cheek against her hip.

He looked up at her and he smiled — a real smile, the kind I had never once gotten from him in five years — and he said, clear as a bell:

"Mommy, can we make apple pie tomorrow?"

The marble floor disappeared from under me.

I heard myself say "What?" but it came out like a wheeze.

Leo turned his head to look at me. Calm. Polite. The same nod from before, but with words attached this time.

"Mommy bakes me apple pie," he said. "The kind with the lattice on top. And she sits with me while I do my letters. She's my Mommy. You're Mother."

"Leo." My voice broke in the middle of his name. "Leo, baby, what are you—when did you—"

"Mommy plays with me," he said simply. "You don't."

Juliana put her hand on top of his small dark head. She didn't look at me. She looked at Jasper, and Jasper looked back at her, and something passed between them that had been passing between them for a long time. Long enough for a five-year-old to learn a new word for the woman in his father's bed.

My knees went.

I caught myself on the newel post at the bottom of the stairs and the wood made a sound under my hand — a long, splintering crack that ran up the carved wolf's head at the top of the post.

The pearl hairpin was still on the floor between us.

Juliana bent down, slow, and picked it up. She tucked it behind her ear. Then she looked at me for the first time, really looked at me, and her wet brown eyes had gone perfectly dry.

She smiled.

It was the smallest smile I had ever seen, and it was meant only for me, and Jasper and Leo could not see it from where they stood.

Then she turned her face back into Jasper's shoulder and the tears came back, and she said, "Alpha, I'm so sorry, I should go—"

And I watched my husband stroke her hair and say, "You're not going anywhere, baby. This is your home now."

Behind them, on the wall above the staircase, our wedding portrait was still hanging — me in white, him in black, Leo not yet born, both of us smiling like we meant it.

The newel post cracked again under my hand.

This time the wolf's head broke off clean and rolled across the marble floor, and it stopped at Juliana's bare feet.

The broken wolf's head rolled to a stop against Juliana's bare toes.

She didn't move it. She just curled her toes around it, like a child claiming a marble.

I stared at the carved wood. I stared at her foot. I stared at my husband's hand, still stroking her hair.

And I went somewhere else.

I went back seven years.

I was nineteen. I was barefoot in the river that ran behind the old Beta cabin, and I was laughing because my father had just told me, in his serious voice, that the new Alpha was coming for the formal welcome and I had to wear shoes for once in my life. I had laughed so hard I'd lost my balance and sat down in the water.

That was the day I'd met Jasper.

He had been twenty-four. Already Alpha for six months. Already cold. He had walked out of the trees in a charcoal suit and looked at me sitting in the river with my skirt floating around my waist, and the bond had snapped between us so hard I had felt it pull a sound out of my throat. *Mate.* He'd felt it too. I'd seen him stop walking. I'd seen his jaw clench.

He hadn't smiled. He had held out his hand and said, "Get up. You'll catch cold."

That was his proposal, essentially.

I had been so soft then. I had cried at sad commercials. I had brought wounded birds to my mother in cupped hands. I had wanted, more than anything in the world, to deserve the man the moon had given me.

So I had learned.

I had learned to keep my voice low at council meetings. I had learned to not flinch when the warriors brought back the bodies. I had learned to stand on the dais next to Jasper with my chin up and my eyes flat while he announced punishments and policies, because *Blackridge runs cold*, he'd said, *and the Luna runs coldest of all.*

I had cut every soft thing out of myself with a knife I had sharpened myself.

For him. For our pack. For the boy I would give him.

And now I was standing at the bottom of my own staircase, watching my husband stroke the hair of a girl who cried easily and laughed easily and let a five-year-old wrap his arm around her thigh.

A girl who was exactly what I had been at nineteen.

A girl Jasper had apparently wanted all along.

My stomach turned over. I tasted the split in my lip again. I thought, very clearly, *He didn't want me cold. He wanted me gone. He just didn't have the words for it until she walked through the kitchen door.*

"Yolanda." Jasper's voice cut through whatever was happening in my head. "Are you listening? I asked you to apologize to Juliana."

I blinked at him.

"Apologize," I repeated.

"For your language. For your tone. You upset her."

I looked at Juliana. Juliana's face was tucked back against Jasper's shoulder, but I could see her eye. Just the one. It was watching me.

It was dry. And it was bright. And it was *amused*.

"No," I said.

"Yolanda—"

"I said no, Jasper."

The amused eye narrowed.

Then Juliana moved.

It was small. I almost missed it. Her shoulders rolled forward, her chin dipped, and the air behind her shimmered the way it does when a wolf is about to push through. I felt the shift before I saw it — a hot, animal pressure against my chest, the brush of another wolf's intent reaching for my throat.

Her wolf lunged.

Not in body. In spirit. A gray shape, low and fast, came out of Juliana and came at me across the marble.

I didn't think. Seven years of training did it for me. My own wolf rose up under my skin and I threw my arm out — just my arm, just a block — and the gray shape crashed into the wall of my defense and bounced.

Juliana's human body jerked back like she'd been shoved. She hit the bottom stair and went down hard on her hip with a small, sharp cry.

The hairpin fell out of her ear and bounced twice on the marble.

"Juliana!" Jasper was on his knees beside her before I'd even lowered my arm.

"I didn't touch her," I said. My voice was flat. "Jasper. I didn't touch her."

"She's bleeding." He was holding her elbow, turning it over. There was a scrape there, pink and shallow. "Yolanda, what is *wrong* with you?"

"Her wolf came at me."

"She doesn't have her wolf trained yet," he snapped. "She's an Omega, Yolanda, she barely knows how to shift — she couldn't have—"

"She *did*."

Juliana made a small, broken sound against his chest. "I'm sorry, Alpha, I'm sorry, I didn't — she just — she scared me and I—"

"Shh." He cupped the back of her head. "Shh, baby. It's okay."

I watched my husband shush the woman who had just tried to put her teeth in my throat.

I felt something happen in my chest. Not a break. A *settling*. Like a heavy thing finally landing on the floor of me and staying there.

Leo was standing two feet from his father, still holding the apple. He was looking at me with an expression I had never seen on his face before.

It was disgust.

Five years old, and my son was looking at me with disgust.

"You hurt Mommy," he said.

"Leo—"

"You hurt Mommy." Louder. His small chin trembled, but not the way it should have. It trembled with rage. "I don't like you. Go away."

I opened my mouth.

I closed it.

There was nothing to say to a five-year-old who had already chosen.

And then — between one breath and the next — something else hit me. Something that had nothing to do with the three people on the floor in front of me.

The bond to my father snapped tight and then went thin.

It was like a guitar string being pulled and pulled and pulled until the note went so high it almost wasn't sound anymore. I felt my mother on the other end of it too — a flutter, a flicker — and then a spike of cold so sharp I gasped and grabbed the cracked newel post again.

Something was wrong at the Beta house.

Something was very wrong.

I pushed off the post.

"Yolanda?" Jasper looked up, finally. "Where are you going? We're not done—"

"My father." The words came out of me like I was someone else. "Something's happened to my father."

He stared at me. For a half-second I thought I saw the man I'd married — a flicker of the Alpha who used to put his hand on the small of my back during council, who used to know what my silence meant.

Then he looked back down at Juliana.

"Go check, then," he said. "Send word if it's serious."

*Send word.*

Not *I'll come with you.* Not *take the car.* Not *are you all right to drive.*

Send word.

I turned and I ran.

I ran in my torn silk gown and my throbbing silver pumps. I ran through the foyer and out the front door and down the long gravel drive and I kicked the pumps off halfway and kept running barefoot on the cold stones. The Beta house was a mile through the woods. I knew every root. I knew every dip in the ground. I had run this path a thousand times as a child with my hair in my mouth and my father's laughter behind me.

I ran it now with my heart trying to come out of my ribs.

I smelled it before I saw it.

Blood.

The front door of my parents' cabin was open. The porch light was on. A boot print — not my father's, too big, too deep — was pressed into the mud of the bottom step.

"Dad!" I screamed it. "Mom!"

I came through the door and I went down on my knees.

My father was on the kitchen floor. My mother was halfway to him, one hand stretched out, as if she had been crawling to reach him when whatever happened to her happened. There was a knife on the table that wasn't ours. Long. Curved. The handle wrapped in dark leather.

My father's eyes were open.

They moved when I came in. Just a little. Just enough.

"Dad — Dad, oh god, stay with me—" I was already pulling out my phone, my fingers slick, the screen smearing. I hit Jasper's name first. It rang once. Twice. Three times.

Voicemail.

I hit it again.

Voicemail.

I hit the pack emergency line.

It rang. And rang. And rang.

Nobody picked up.

I sat on the kitchen floor of the house I had grown up in, with my father's blood soaking through the silk over my knees, and I listened to a phone ring in an empty room somewhere in the Pack House, and I understood, finally and completely, that nobody was coming.

My mother's hand twitched against the floorboards.

I crawled to her. I took her hand. It was cold.

Her lips moved.

I bent my ear down to her mouth, and through the blood and the shallow rattle of her breath, my mother said one word.

She said, "*Run.*"

The curved knife on the table caught the porch light, and the dark leather grip had three small notches cut into it — fresh, pale, the wood underneath still bright.

Outside, in the woods behind the cabin, a branch snapped.

Then another.

Someone was still here.

The porch light hummed above me. A moth was beating itself against the glass.

I heard that. I heard the moth's wings before I heard my own voice come out of my throat.

"Mom. Mom, please—"

Her hand was still in mine. The weight had changed. A hand that's still alive has a weight to it, even when it's limp. Hers had gone past that. It was the weight of something put down.

"No." I shook her hand. Stupid. Like I could wake her up. "No, no, you said run, you said it, you have to keep talking, you have to—"

The branch outside snapped again. Closer.

I dropped her hand. I scrambled across the floor on my knees through my father's blood and I grabbed the curved knife off the table because it was the only thing in the room that wasn't soft. The handle was sticky. I didn't look at what it was sticky with.

I crouched in the open doorway.

"Come out," I said. My voice came out shaking and small and I hated it. "Come out, you coward, come out—"

Wind moved the trees. Nothing else.

I waited. I counted my breaths the way I'd counted the chandelier tinkles an hour ago. *Twelve. Thirteen. Fourteen.* My knees were soaked through. My father's blood had stopped being warm.

Whoever it was, they were gone.

Or they were watching.

I lowered the knife slowly and I crawled backward into the kitchen, and when my back hit the leg of the kitchen table I finally let the sound out of my throat.

It wasn't a scream. A scream is a clean thing. This was a noise an animal makes when its leg is in a trap. It came up out of my stomach and tore my throat coming up and I couldn't stop it once it started. I was rocking. I had the knife in one hand and my mother's wrist in the other and I was rocking and making that noise and the moth kept beating itself against the porch light.

I don't know how long.

When I came back to myself my mouth tasted like iron and my jaw hurt from being open.

I reached for the bond.

*Jasper.*

I pushed it down the mate link with everything I had. *Jasper. Jasper, my father is dead. My mother is dead. Someone was here. I need you. I need you to come.*

The bond felt like pushing my hand into cold mud.

I waited. I sat on the floor between my parents and I waited for him to answer.

I waited the way a child waits for a parent.

The bond stayed cold.

I pushed again. *Jasper. Please.*

Nothing.

I pushed a third time, and this time I felt him on the other end. Just for a second. A flicker. Awareness. He knew I was there. He knew I was calling.

And he closed the door.

I felt the link go flat the way a phone goes flat when someone hits decline.

I put my forehead down on the kitchen floor.

I stayed there.

I think I might have stayed there until morning if my radio hadn't gone off.

It was clipped to my belt under the torn silk. Pack issue. Old. Crackly. The voice that came through it was Marco, the night warden at the south checkpoint.

"Luna? Luna, this is Marco, over. We got a report of trouble at the Beta house, over."

I lifted my head off the floor.

I picked up the radio. My thumb left a print on it.

"Marco." My voice was a stranger's. "Get two warriors to the Beta cabin. Bring a stretcher. Bring two."

A pause.

"Two, Luna?"

"Two."

"...Copy. On our way."

I put the radio down.

I made myself stand up. My legs didn't want to. I made them. I made my hand let go of the knife and put it on the table where I'd found it. Evidence. Some part of my brain was still working. Some part was already cataloging the boot print on the step, the three notches on the handle, the way my father had fallen — forward, surprised, not defending — and the way my mother had fallen — crawling, reaching, trying to get to him.

I walked outside before Marco arrived because I didn't want them to see me break again.

I sat on the porch step next to the boot print and I waited.

The warriors came. They were quiet. They were good men. Marco took one look at me and took his jacket off and put it over my shoulders without asking, and I almost broke a second time at the kindness of it.

"Luna." He crouched down. "Who do I call?"

"Nobody."

"Luna—"

"Bury them at the family plot by the river. Tonight. Now."

"The Alpha should—"

"The Alpha knows."

Marco's face did something. He looked at his boots. He looked at the boot print next to me — not mine, not his — and he looked back at his boots.

"Yes, Luna," he said.

They wrapped my parents. They carried them out. I followed them down through the woods to the river plot where my grandmother and my grandfather were already buried, and I stood barefoot on the cold dirt in my torn green dress while two warriors dug two graves by lantern light.

I didn't cry again. I didn't have anything left to cry with.

When it was done, Marco offered me a ride back to the Pack House.

"No," I said. "I'll walk."

"Luna, it's two in the morning—"

"I'll walk."

He didn't argue.

---

I don't remember most of the walk.

I remember the cold under my feet. I remember the moment I realized I was on Main Street, downtown, instead of on the path back to the Pack House. I had walked the wrong way. I had walked toward the lights.

The pack town was small. Six blocks. The bakery, the hardware store, the pharmacy, the one bar, and at the end of Main, the restaurant.

*La Roca.*

White tablecloths. Candle in every window. The place Jasper had taken me on our anniversary every year for seven years.

I stopped on the sidewalk across the street.

I stopped because I saw them through the window.

Jasper. In a fresh shirt, navy blue, the cuffs rolled twice. Leo, in the little gray button-down I'd bought him for picture day. And Juliana, in a soft pink sweater, her braid undone now, her hair loose around her shoulders the way mine had been at nineteen.

They were at the corner table. The good one. The one by the window with the white roses.

Jasper was lifting a piece of something — fish, maybe, the way the candlelight caught it — and putting it on Juliana's plate. She laughed. I could see her laugh through the glass even though I couldn't hear it. She put her hand on his wrist and squeezed.

Leo was sitting in the chair I had sat in for seven anniversaries.

He had his elbows on the table the way I had told him a thousand times not to. Juliana noticed. She tapped his elbow with one finger and said something, and he giggled — *giggled*, my son who had never once giggled for me — and took his elbows off the table and looked up at her like she was the sun.

She kissed his forehead.

He said something to her. I read his mouth through the window. Two syllables. Easy. Round.

*Mom-my.*

I stood on the sidewalk in Marco's jacket over my torn bloody silk gown with dirt from my parents' graves still on my bare feet, and I watched my five-year-old son call another woman *Mommy* across a candlelit table while my husband smiled.

The pavement was cold. I could feel each individual pebble under the ball of my left foot. My jaw was locked so tight I could feel a muscle jumping in my temple.

I waited for the break. The one I'd had on the kitchen floor. The animal noise.

It didn't come.

Something else came. Something quieter. Something that sat down behind my sternum and got comfortable, like it had been waiting a long time for me to make room for it.

I took my phone out of the small bag I had somehow still been carrying this entire time. The screen was cracked across the corner. I didn't remember cracking it.

I scrolled to a number with no name. Just a string of digits I had memorized two weeks ago and never called.

I pressed it.

It rang once.

A voice picked up. Low. Patient. Neither male nor female in any way I could pin down.

"Luna Yolanda."

"The thing you asked," I said. "I'm in."

A pause.

"You're certain."

Inside the restaurant, Juliana fed my son a bite of bread off her own fork. He opened his mouth for her like a baby bird.

"I'm certain."

"When."

"Tomorrow. I leave Blood Moon Pack tomorrow."

Another pause. Longer.

"Good. I'll send the car at first light. Pack nothing they would notice. Bring only what is yours."

"Understood."

"Luna?"

"Yes."

"Don't look back through that window again. It will only make it harder."

The line went dead.

I lowered the phone.

I did not look through the window again.

I turned and I started walking back toward the Pack House, and I made it three steps before something across the street caught the streetlight.

A black town car. Parked. Engine off. Windows tinted.

I hadn't noticed it pull up.

The back window slid down two inches.

A gloved hand came out, holding something small and pale between two fingers, and dropped it onto the sidewalk in the pool of light from the streetlamp.

The window slid back up. The car pulled away from the curb without its headlights on.

I crossed the street.

I bent down.

Sitting on the wet concrete was a single pearl-tipped hairpin.

The same one Juliana had picked up off my foyer floor three hours ago.