A howl split the woods behind me.

"I smell her," a rough voice called through the trees.

I pressed my back to a rotting pine and wrapped a strip torn from my dress around my bleeding forearm. Three pairs of green eyes moved between the trunks. They had found me less than an hour after sunset.

The largest rogue stepped into a shaft of moonlight. His fur was matted with mud, one ear torn nearly in half.

"Alpha Lucas sent us a fine gift."

My stomach tightened. "He sent you?"

The rogue grinned, showing yellow teeth. "He opened the border. That was invitation enough."

So Lucas had not simply banished me. He had made sure the wolves on this side knew I was coming.

I forced myself to stand straight. "Do you always live on another Alpha's scraps?"

A snarl rolled through the brush.

"Careful, human."

"Wolfless," another rogue called from my right. "I can smell it. No wolf. No pack. No one coming to save her."

They were right about the last part.

That did not mean I had to make the killing easy.

I had spent ten years gathering medicinal plants in the southern woods. Lucas thought that work beneath a future Luna, which was why he had never noticed how well I knew the ground. I knew where the limestone shelf broke beneath the moss. I knew which gullies flooded after winter storms. I knew the dead willow grove hid a sinkhole deep enough to swallow an elk.

I pushed away from the tree and ran.

Heavy paws struck the earth behind me.

"Flank her!"

Branches whipped my bare arms. My human lungs burned quickly without a wolf's strength to share the work, but panic would get me killed faster than exhaustion.

I listened instead.

One to the left. One to the right. The leader behind.

Exactly what I needed.

I veered toward the willow grove.

"She is slowing!" the right flanker shouted.

"I want a leg," the other laughed.

"You can fight over the bones when I am done," their leader said.

I reached the fallen cedar that marked the edge of the sinkhole and jumped. My boots landed on the narrow strip of exposed bedrock beyond it.

The two flankers followed without looking.

The moss collapsed under their weight.

Both wolves vanished to the chest in black mud.

One shifted halfway to human form, clawing at roots that ripped free in his hands. "Pull me out!"

The other sank to his ribs. "What is this?"

"Old peat bog," I said, backing across the stone. "The more you fight it, the faster you sink."

"Bitch!"

"That is not a rescue word."

I turned to run again.

A shadow dropped from the branches above me.

The leader's claws ripped across my back before I could duck. Pain exploded from my shoulder blades to my waist. The impact threw me forward onto slick stone.

He shifted into a broad, scarred man as he stalked after me.

"Clever little thing."

I kicked at his knee. He caught my ankle.

"Lucas should have kept you."

"He has terrible judgment."

I twisted, driving my other heel into his mouth. He swore and released me.

I scrambled backward.

The ground disappeared beneath my hand.

Cliff.

Mist boiled in the gorge below, thick enough to hide the bottom.

The rogue saw my hesitation and smiled.

"Forbidden valley. Even pack scouts stay away from it."

My mother's voice came back with brutal clarity.

Never step into the valley, Elena.

Never let your blood touch that ground.

I had been twelve when she whispered the warning from her deathbed. Her fingertips had been red when she traced the crescent across my cheek. I had thought fever made her afraid.

Now the rogue charged.

I had no choice.

I jumped sideways for a thorn vine hanging over the edge. My hand closed around it. Thorns cut into my palm as my body swung against the cliff face. My left shoulder wrenched with a sickening pop.

I screamed.

The rogue leaped after me and caught the same vine below my boots.

His weight tore fibers loose from the rock.

"We fall together," he growled.

"Not my plan."

I kicked his face. He bit at my ankle and missed.

The vine groaned.

Far below, something metallic scraped through the fog.

Clink.

Drag.

The rogue went still.

His pupils widened. "No."

"What?"

Clink.

Drag.

"Cut me loose," he whispered.

I stared down at him. "You were trying to eat me thirty seconds ago."

"You do not understand what lives down there."

The vine split another inch.

He clawed upward, suddenly desperate. "Pull me up!"

"You are heavier than I am."

"Then we are both dead."

The final fibers snapped.

We dropped through the mist.

The impact came in pieces: stone against my ribs, my skull striking frozen ground, the rogue's body hitting somewhere to my right with a wet crack.

For several seconds I could not breathe.

When air finally entered my lungs, it felt like glass.

The rogue lay twisted over a boulder. His neck bent wrong, but one hand still moved.

My own blood spread beneath me, bright against the frost.

Ancient grooves in the stone caught the red and carried it away in branching lines.

My mother's warning returned.

Never let your blood touch that soil.

"Stop," I whispered, dragging myself with my good arm.

The blood kept flowing.

The carved lines began to glow.

Pressure rolled through the gorge, so dense it forced my cheek to the ground. This was not a normal Alpha aura. It felt older, heavier, as if the mountain itself had decided to breathe.

Clink.

Drag.

The sound came closer.

The surviving rogue started to whimper.

"It woke up."

I lifted my head toward the fog.

Two red eyes opened inside it.

A deep voice rumbled through the stone.

"You smell like her."

I swallowed blood. "Stay back."

The chain scraped once more.

"You bled on my floor," the voice said. "You broke the seal."

A silhouette rose out of the mist, twice the height of any wolf I had ever seen, dragging an iron chain thick enough to anchor a fortress gate.

The rogue beside me was not dead.

He clawed at the frost with both hands, dragging his broken body away from the red eyes in the fog.

"Help me," he sobbed.

"Be quiet," I whispered.

"It is coming."

The chain scraped over stone.

The mist parted.

A wolf stepped into the moonlight, if something that size could still be called a wolf. Dark silver fur covered shoulders nearly level with my head even while he stood on four legs. A rusted iron cuff locked around one rear ankle. The chain behind it had carved trenches into the gorge floor.

His eyes were solid red.

No pupil. No recognition.

Only rage.

I had seen an illustration like him in one of my father's locked military journals. The Silver Rot, scholars called it. A disease of the old Lycan bloodline. It began with fever and violent shifts, then ate memory and judgment until the afflicted became stronger than ordinary wolves and less human by the day.

The last Lycan King had vanished years ago.

Apparently, he had not vanished far enough.

The rogue whimpered.

The beast's head snapped toward him.

"Do not move," I hissed.

Panic won.

The rogue screamed and tried to crawl.

The Lycan crossed the distance in a blur. His jaws closed around the rogue's torso. Bone cracked. One brutal shake silenced him.

I pressed my fist to my mouth.

The wolf dropped what remained of the body and turned toward me.

Blood darkened his muzzle.

I could not run. One shoulder hung uselessly. At least two ribs were broken. My back was slick with blood from the claws that had sent me over the cliff.

The Lycan lowered his head.

A growl shook grit from the rocks.

"I cannot run," I told him, because terror had apparently stripped me of good sense. "So if you are going to kill me, do it quickly."

He lunged.

I lifted my blood-covered right hand in front of my face.

The impact never came.

Hot breath hit my palm.

I opened one eye.

His muzzle hovered inches from me. My palm rested flat against his nose.

The wolf shuddered.

A sound escaped him that did not belong to a monster.

A wounded whine.

The red in his eyes flickered.

Black appeared around the edges, spreading inward until awareness returned in jagged pieces. His breathing turned ragged. The muscles under the silver fur trembled.

"What are you doing?" I whispered.

The beast folded.

Bones shifted with a series of brutal cracks. Fur receded. Claws became hands pressed into the frost.

A man knelt where the wolf had been.

He was enormous even in human form, scarred across one shoulder and down his ribs. The iron cuff remained on his ankle. His dark hair hung wet over his forehead, and his eyes, now black, fixed on my hand.

"You stopped it," he said.

His voice was rough from disuse.

"Stopped what?"

"The rot."

He looked at my face. His attention paused on the black crescent.

I waited for disgust.

None came.

"Who are you?" I asked.

"Adrian."

"Adrian what?"

A humorless smile touched his mouth. "You are bleeding to death and interrogating me."

"I prefer information before dying."

He reached for my injured shoulder.

I flinched back. "Do not."

"It is dislocated."

"I noticed."

His gaze sharpened. "If I leave it like that, you may lose use of the arm."

"And if you decide to become a wolf again?"

"Touch me."

I stared at him.

"You calmed the shift once. Do it again if you need to."

I almost laughed. "That is not reassuring."

He moved before I could argue, one hand bracing my upper arm, the other locking around the joint. "Bite down on something."

"On what?"

He tore a strip from the least bloody part of my dress and looped it into a crude sling before I could object. When I tried to shift away, he pointed at the blood soaking my back.

"You can hate me after you stop leaking onto my floor."

"Your floor?"

His gaze swept the gorge. "Everything inside the old seal is crown land. Technically, you trespassed."

"Then file a complaint."

Something almost human touched his expression. "I might, if you survive."

I screamed and struck him hard across the chest with my good hand.

He barely moved.

"You could have warned me."

"You would have refused."

"Correct."

"Then my method was efficient."

I hated him immediately.

I also could not deny that the joint sat where it belonged again.

A distant horn sounded high above the gorge.

Adrian's expression changed.

He stood and looked toward a narrow break in the cliff wall.

"My guard."

"Your guard?"

"They felt the seal break."

The pressure in the valley shifted with his mood. I understood then that the chain was not merely imprisonment. The entire gorge had been built to contain him.

"You are the missing King," I said.

His gaze came back to mine.

"Not missing. Contained."

"By whom?"

"People who preferred a mad King in chains to a sane one on a throne."

That answer carried more history than I could ask about while bleeding into the dirt.

Adrian crouched and slid one arm behind my back, the other beneath my knees.

"No."

"You cannot stand."

"That does not mean you get to carry me."

"You fell off a cliff. Pride can wait."

He lifted me.

My hand caught his bare shoulder on instinct.

The instant our skin met, heat tore through my body.

Not pain.

Recognition.

My pulse struck once, hard enough to make me gasp. His answered against my palm. The pressure in the gorge collapsed into a single line between us, bright and undeniable.

Adrian froze.

His black eyes widened.

"What was that?" I whispered.

His nostrils flared as he drew in my scent.

The red threatened the edges of his irises, but this time it was not madness. It was shock.

Above us, armored figures appeared through the fog.

"Your Majesty!" someone shouted.

Adrian did not look away from me.

"Say it," I demanded. "Whatever you just realized, say it."

His arm tightened around me.

"I know why your blood stopped my curse."

My heart kicked again.

"Why?"

The most feared Lycan on the continent stared at the wolfless outcast Lucas had thrown away.

"Because you are my mate."

"Mate?"

The word left my mouth before I could stop it.

Adrian's guards were descending through the fog behind him, but he seemed to hear only me.

"Yes."

"That is impossible."

"So is a human stopping the Silver Rot with one touch."

"I am wolfless."

His gaze dropped to the blood on my hand. "You keep saying that as if your body believes it."

The world tilted before I could answer.

The last thing I felt was Adrian tightening his hold as darkness took me.

I woke beneath a stone ceiling.

My ribs were tightly bound. My shoulder sat in a sling. Someone had cleaned the claw marks across my back and stitched the worst of them. A narrow cot stood against one wall of a windowless chamber, and a single iron door guarded the other.

Dungeon was the first word that came to mind.

The second was captive.

I pushed myself upright as the lock turned.

Adrian entered in a black shirt and dark trousers, no chain on his ankle now. The change should have made him look less dangerous.

It did not.

"Where am I?"

"The lower royal wing."

"With an iron door."

"The upper wing has windows. You tried to crawl off a cliff yesterday. I considered the risk."

"I was pushed off it."

"Details."

I stared at him. "Open the door."

"Answer my questions."

"No."

"Then we may be here a while."

He leaned against the foot of the cot, watching me with the patience of a predator who knew there was nowhere for prey to run.

"Who sent you into the gorge?"

"No one."

"Why were Blood Moon rogues chasing you?"

"They were hungry."

"Why did you smell like coronation incense?"

I went still.

Adrian noticed.

Of course he did.

"You are a terrible liar," he said.

"I have had a difficult week."

"You have had a difficult life. Those are different things."

His eyes moved to the black crescent on my cheek, then to the bruises on my wrists from Lucas's guards.

I hated that he saw too much.

"I was banished," I said at last. "That is all you need to know."

"By Lucas Thorne."

My pulse jumped.

Adrian's mouth hardened. "There it is."

"You already knew."

"I knew his scent was on your dress. I wanted to know whether you would tell me."

"Why does it matter?"

"Because five years ago Lucas petitioned the crown for permission to absorb the southern woodlands if the general's line died out. The petition was rejected. Yesterday, the general's daughter fell into my prison bleeding."

Cold traveled down my spine.

"You knew my father?"

"By reputation. Elias was inconveniently honorable."

"That is the nicest insult anyone has ever given him."

"He refused two royal appointments because he said the south needed a commander more than the capital needed another uniform at dinner. Men like that become legends or corpses. Sometimes both."

The simple respect in Adrian's voice tightened my throat. Lucas had spent years reducing my father to a convenient dead soldier. Hearing someone remember the man rather than the assets he left behind made the room feel briefly less hostile.

Despite myself, I almost smiled.

"That sounds like him."

Adrian stepped closer. "Now tell me why Lucas wanted you dead."

I told him about the treaty. Not everything. Not the humiliations or Serena. Just the land, the broken agreement, and the banishment.

His expression did not change until I said Lucas had torn the document apart.

Then the air in the room became heavier.

"He destroyed a witnessed blood treaty?"

"In front of the pack."

"Idiot."

"Thief."

"Both can be true."

He reached for my wrist.

I pulled back. "Do not touch me without asking."

He stopped immediately.

That surprised me more than it should have.

"May I?" he asked.

I hesitated, then held out my hand.

His fingers closed lightly around my pulse.

Heat rushed between us again.

Adrian's shoulders loosened. A faint tremor I had not noticed in his hand disappeared.

He looked down at our joined skin.

"My blood is quiet."

"Your curse?"

"It never sleeps. Not until you touch me."

I tried to pull away. His fingers tightened just enough to keep contact, then released when I glared at him.

"High mages have died trying to do what you do by accident," he said. "Do you understand why I cannot simply let you walk out?"

"Because you want medicine."

"Because someone tried to kill the one person who can stand beside me without dying."

The distinction unsettled me.

A knock sounded at the door.

"Your Majesty," a man's voice called. "Captain Marcus Ward. We found Blood Moon tracks above the gorge. Fresh."

Adrian's face went still.

"How many?"

"At least twelve scouts. They are searching the ridge."

Lucas was looking for my body.

Or making sure there was one.

Adrian turned toward the door. "Seal the lower wing. No servant speaks of her. If anyone asks whether a woman came out of the gorge, the answer is no."

"Understood."

I threw the blanket aside. "You cannot keep me here."

"You cannot cross a room without reopening your stitches."

"Then give me a healer and let me leave when I can."

"No healer touches you until I know what your blood does to magic."

"That is not your decision."

His black eyes met mine.

"Then make it a negotiation."

I stilled.

Adrian folded his arms. "You need somewhere Lucas cannot reach. I need a way to control the Rot while I find out why you can stop it."

The bargain formed before pride could kill it.

"Protection," I said. "For as long as his trackers hunt me. Access to your archives about the southern woodlands. And freedom to leave once I am healed."

"In return?"

"I help anchor your shifts. Voluntarily. You ask before you touch me."

His mouth twitched. "You negotiate well for a woman in a dungeon."

"I learned from thieves."

"Careful."

"Do we have a deal?"

He reached into his pocket and produced the brass key.

For one tense second I expected him to lock the door from the outside again.

Instead, he turned the key, opened the iron door wide, and stepped aside.

"Deal," Adrian said. "But you are not in my dungeon anymore, Elena."

I paused at the threshold.

"Then where am I?"

His gaze settled on me with unnerving certainty.

"Under the protection of the Lycan crown."