Every wolf in the Crescent Moon pack knows me and my mate are the unhappiest couple in pack history. They know it because he's the male I stole. For eight years I called him my mate. For eight years I wore the Luna title and slept in the Beta's chambers and watched him flinch every time I tried to touch him. We poisoned each other's food. I hid silver pins under his pillow. He hid wolfsbane in my tea. Every single morning in that pack house started with one of us hissing *I hope you choke* across the breakfast table. I told myself he'd come around. I told myself the bond would settle. Then the rogues ambushed us at the border. He pressed his bullet-proof vest into my hands and shoved me behind a rock. I thought — gods, I actually thought — *he's finally choosing me.* "Rae, run!" I ran. I ran like a stupid pup. And when I came back with the warriors, I found his body torn open by rogue claws, and Mira's body curled up next to his. He'd died covering her. His last words floated back to me later from the one warrior who'd survived long enough to hear them. *"I'm coming, Mira. Next life — don't let her find me first. My heart only has room for you."* I stood over his corpse and I didn't cry. I just walked back into rogue territory alone, took out their command post with my own claws, and bled out under their banner. My name went on the pack memorial wall. One line. Nothing else. Then I opened my eyes. I'm staring at the ceiling of my old room in the Crescent Moon pack house. My hands are small again. The mating ceremony with Caden is ten days away. Mira is still alive, still sleeping two doors down, still plotting whatever she plotted that put us all in the ground. I sit up slowly. The moon goddess gave me a second chance. Fine. I know exactly what to do with it. I get dressed. I walk straight to my father's war room. Alpha Quinn looks up from his maps, and I say it before I can think twice. "Call off the mating ceremony. I'll take the undercover mission instead of Mira." He stares at me. "You want to replace your sister on the infiltration team. You. Are giving up Caden Wolfe." "Yes." "The whole pack knows you'd die before you let another she-wolf near him." "Things change." He keeps staring. He's waiting for the punchline. Every wolf in this pack thinks I'm a spoiled brat who clawed her way into a mating with the Beta heir — and they're not exactly wrong. Last life, when the lots fell on Mira and Caden begged my father to spare her, I dragged Caden home by the collar and forced the ceremony forward. This life, I'm done. "You always told me Mira lost her father young," I say flat. "You always told me I should step back for her. So I'm stepping back." His face does something complicated. He's remembering my mother. The former Luna who took a rogue's claws to the throat so he could live. He's remembering how, after he married the widow with the small soft pup, he stopped looking at me the same way. He signs the papers. The mating ceremony is off. Mira gets Caden. I get the mission. I walk out of the war room and slam straight into a wall of muscle and rage. Caden. Last life he was already on his knees in front of my father, mud and blood streaked down his uniform, begging on behalf of Mira. Same desperate face. Same wild eyes. I rub my shoulder and try to step around him. He catches my arm. "What did you just do." His voice is low. His inner wolf is right at the surface — I can see the yellow bleeding into his irises. "Drawing of lots is pack law," I say. "You know that." "Give me a week. I'll find another way. We don't have to send a she-wolf into that brutal Alpha's bed —" "We have a week's worth of warriors dying at the border every day, Caden. How many more do you want?" His jaw locks. "If you don't go stirring things up in front of the Alpha, there's still time —" There it is. Not *don't go, Rae*. Not *I'm sorry*. Just — *don't make trouble for Mira*. I peel his hand off my arm. "It's done. The paperwork's in. You'll be very happy with how it turns out." I walk past him. I don't look back. In the courtyard, I let myself breathe. One breath. Just one. *Caden Wolfe, last life you gave me your vest and went and died next to her. This life I'm giving you back to her. We're even.*
I spend the whole night with the rogue territory maps spread across my floor. The intel we're chasing is huge. Last life Mira got caught three months in, tortured into telling them everything, and the whole operation collapsed. Warriors died. The war came back hotter than before. Caden died in the second wave shielding her. I died chasing his ghost. This time I know the layout. I know the schedules. I know which rogue warlord is sleeping with which traitor. I have one shot to walk in there clean and walk out with the names. I haven't slept when dawn breaks. I throw on a plain jacket and crack my bedroom door open — A gun barrel presses straight into my forehead. "Why," Caden grits out, "do you keep going after your sister?" I don't even blink. I bring my arm up to knock the gun away. He's faster. He twists my wrist, spins me, pins me against my own door frame. Stronger than I remembered. Stronger than a Beta should be at this hour, when his wolf hasn't fed. "Caden. Let go." I kick back. He just presses harder. "You'd let your own sister die just so I'd mate you? Is that the kind of she-wolf you are?" His voice is shaking with something ugly. Rage. Disgust. "Tell me, Raelynn. What gives a wolf like you the right to be loved?" For one ugly second I'm right back in that bedroom in the old pack house. Eight years of mating. Same words. Same voice. I snap. I drive my heel into his gut, scoop the gun off the floor, and turn it back on him in one move. The barrel kisses his forehead. "You drew a weapon on me. Inside our own pack territory. Do you have any idea what the Council does to wolves who do that?" He goes very still. His eyes drop to my wrist. It's bruising already, ugly purple blooming under the skin. The fury drains out of him so fast I almost feel sorry for him. "...I'm sorry." "Save it." "I lost my head." I toss the gun at his feet. "Someone has to take this mission, Caden. Yelling at me won't change which name's on the paperwork. Maybe you'll get the result you want. Go home and prep for your ceremony." He doesn't catch the bitterness in my voice. He bends down for the gun like a wolf with a broken back. "You really think every wolf is as cold as you," he says quietly. "Talking about a ceremony at a time like this —" I breathe in once. I walk past him. My teeth ache from biting down so hard. I don't look back. If I look back I'll claw his face off. *Caden. This life I'm going to give you everything you want. Watch.* That evening I come back to find a small box on my desk. Inside it: a stack of blueberry tarts, warm, fresh, the kind they don't make in our pack kitchens. He'd have to have run them in from the human town to get them here. My favorite. He remembered. He always remembered the small things. That's what kept me hooked for eight years. I don't touch them. I know exactly what they are. They're not love. They're a thank-you note. My mother took him in when he was a starving pup with no pack. She raised him. She fed him. He owes her, and he's been paying that debt out in tarts and small kindnesses to her pup for fifteen years. He doesn't love me. He never did. I wrap the tarts back up and leave them out for the kitchen omegas in the morning.
The mission paperwork comes through fast. The cancellation of my mating to Caden — I told my father to sit on that one. Tell Mira privately. Let her file her own ceremony request. The rest of the pack finds out the day of the ceremony. Cruel? Maybe. Last life he buried me in a single line of carved stone. This life he gets a surprise of his own. All the mission files burn in my fireplace the second I've memorized them. Caden's been useless for days. Anyone can see it. He skips training, skips meals, haunts the Council chambers begging to be let in on the mission planning. They keep turning him away. I cross the courtyard after dinner and there they are, tucked into the garden pavilion — Caden and Mira, his head bent over his hands, hers tipped toward his shoulder like a flower toward the sun. He's weaving something out of long grass. His fingers know the pattern. My mother taught him that pattern. She used to make me wolves out of grass when I was small, little carved wolf shapes that would last a week before they fell apart. After she died, Caden started making them for me. That's how he kept me from crying myself sick. Grass wolves. Then Mira showed up, and there was suddenly a second pup in the garden, and the grass wolves started getting handed to *her* too. "Caden, what're you making? I've never seen one of those before." Lying, soft-eyed bitch. She's seen a thousand. "Just something stupid," he mutters, hands still moving. Mira's gaze slides past him and lands on me. Standing there in the path. Watching. Her eyes light up. "Oh — could you make me a little wolf? Just a small one?" Caden's hands freeze. He knows. He has to know what she's just done. The grass wolves are mine. The last one my mother ever made for me — the one she gave me the morning before the rogues hit our compound — that wolf is sitting on the shelf above my bed right this minute. It's the only thing I have of her left. Caden looks up. His eyes find mine across the garden. I don't give him anything. I turn around and walk away. Let him weave her one. Let him weave her ten. I'm not going to stand there and watch. That night there's a small wooden box outside my bedroom door. I open it. A grass wolf, fresh, perfect, exactly the way my mother used to make them. Same little crooked ear. Same loop of stem for the tail. "Childish," I say out loud, to no one. I put the box down outside the door and close it. In the morning the box is still there. Untouched. He didn't take it back. I stare at it for a long minute. Then I pick the wolf up and tuck it into my jacket pocket, right against my ribs. I tell myself it's because my mother made the original. It has nothing to do with the wolf who wove this one. Nothing at all. I walk out into the training yard and don't think about Caden Wolfe for the rest of the day. I think about a wolf I've never met. Damon Ravencroft. Alpha of Ravencroft Pack. The wolf I'm going to crawl into bed with in nine days' time. The reports say he hasn't taken a mate. Hasn't taken a Luna. Buries himself in war planning. Cold-blooded, brilliant, half a head taller than any wolf in his pack, and the rogues he's been doing deals with say even *they* are scared of him. Good. I'd rather be scared of my target than soft on him.
The Council throws Mira a small send-off in the pack hall. I come out of the training yard sweaty and bruised, and there she is, sitting in the middle of the long table like a saint about to be martyred. Wolves crowded around her, hands on her shoulders, eyes wet. "To think the lots picked *you*, Mira. Raelynn's Alpha Quinn's only bloodline heir — *she* should be the one stepping up for the pack. Instead she's busy bullying our Beta heir into mating her. Poor Mira." "Right? And Raelynn doesn't even have the decency to come see her sister off. Heartless bitch." Mira lowers her lashes. There's a single tear ready on the edge of one of them. But just behind that tear, I catch the flick of something else — satisfaction. Then she sees me. The tear forgets to fall. She wasn't expecting me. Why would she? Last life I was tearing the pack house apart trying to drag Caden back to the mating altar by his collar. Showing up to her send-off would have been the last thing on my list. I smile. I walk over. I find an empty chair right at her side, drop into it, cross my legs. The wolves around her stare. The one closest to me actually pulls her chair back a couple inches. "What's *she* doing here? Coming to gloat?" "Don't waste your breath. Mira's just *better* than her. Mira's got the heart of a real Luna. Raelynn watches her sister get sent into rogue territory and doesn't even blink — Alpha Quinn must be ashamed every time he looks at her." I don't argue. These wolves were my packmates once. Last life most of them died at the border within a year. The one talking the loudest right now actually took a silver round for me on a raid I don't remember being grateful for. If they want to gossip into their drinks while they're still breathing — gods, let them. It's almost nice. After a while it gets boring. I push back from the table and head for the door. "Rae." Mira catches up to me in the corridor, slips her arm through mine like we're best friends. "Father told me. About you giving up the mating. That was so generous of you — Caden was always going to be mine anyway, right? You're not going to call it stealing, are you?" She tilts her head up at me, sweet as poison. "The lots picked me, but I'm letting *you* have the glory of the mission. We can call it even. So just — be nice to my friends, okay? They're worried about me." I laugh in her face. "Glory." "What?" "You think if it had been you out there, you'd have come back with glory? With *anything*?" Her smile freezes. "Mira. You can't run a training drill without crying. You've never bled for this pack in your life. You really thought you were going to walk into Damon Ravencroft's pack house and out-Alpha *him*?" I lean in. "If Father hadn't covered for you, you wouldn't even be a recognized member of this pack. You'd be a stray that wandered in behind your mother." "I'm taking your mission because somebody has to clean up after you. Don't mistake that for charity." Her face goes white. Then ugly red. Then her eyes do this thing — that quick flicker I should have remembered from last life — and her hand snaps up, locks around my wrist, and yanks. She slaps herself across the face with my own hand. "Rae — *why* —" I open my mouth to call her a clumsy little — A shape blurs in from my left. A hand slams into my shoulder. I go backward, hard, and the small of my back cracks against the stone edge of the rockery. The pain whites out my vision for a second. When I can focus again, Caden is in front of Mira. Body angled to shield her. Eyes blazing yellow at me like *I'm* the rogue. "Raelynn! Since when do you raise a hand on your own sister?!" "She's leaving on an undercover mission in three days. If she gets hurt now, are *you* going to step in for her?!"
"You hit me? Did you even *see* what just happened?! She grabbed my —" "Enough!" Caden's voice drops into Beta tone — the heavy pressure of it slamming out toward me on instinct. It glances right off. My Alpha bloodline doesn't bend for a Beta. But the part of me that loved him for fifteen years still cracks straight down the middle. His face is gray. His eyes are colder than I've ever seen them. "Your whole life you've been like this. Throwing your weight around because you're Alpha Quinn's only bloodline heir. I told myself you'd grow out of it. I told myself you weren't really cruel." "Now you can't even leave your own sister alone." "You and Mira were raised in the same pack, by the same parents — she gives everything she has for this pack, and you? You're rotten with envy." "I don't know who poisoned you into this. I think your mother died from the shame of having a pup like —" A crack splits the corridor. I don't remember moving. I don't remember lifting my hand. My palm just goes off across his face like a bullet. He turns his head with the force of it. Slow. He doesn't even raise a hand to his cheek. A thin line of blood splits his lower lip and runs down to his chin. Behind him Mira is making a thin pitchy noise — *Caden, Caden, your face* — like she's been shot. I'm panting. My eyes are burning. The grass wolf in my jacket pocket is digging into my ribs. Eight years of mating, last life. Eight years of him screaming things at me across that dinner table. He called me selfish. He called me jealous. He called me a curse. But not *that*. Not my mother. He never crossed that line. This life he crossed it in three days. "The wolf in this corridor with the least right to say a single word about my mother," I say, and my voice is shaking so hard I can barely shape the words, "is *you*." I turn around. The small of my back is already swelling — I can feel it pulsing under my shirt — and I have to grip the wall to walk straight. I get maybe four steps. Then I hear him move. Fast. The kind of fast wolves move when they finally feel something. He scoops me up off the floor before I can swing at him. "Put me down." He doesn't. "Caden — *put me down* —" Behind him I hear Mira's small wet voice. "Caden, I — I never meant for —" He doesn't even turn his head for her. He just walks. Long strides, jaw locked, carrying me down the corridor toward the healer's wing like a wolf carrying his own dying mate. For one second — one stupid, stupid second — my chest cracks open with old hope. Then I remember. Last life he carried me like this exactly twice. Once after a rogue raid where I almost lost a leg. Once after a training accident at the academy. Both times I told myself *see, he loves me, he just doesn't know it yet.* Both times he set me down on a healer's cot and left without a word and went to find Mira. I close my eyes. The healer's wing smells like crushed wolfsbane and bandages. He lays me down on the cot, steps back, and stands at the doorway like a sentry while the healer works on my back. The healer asks who did it. "I fell," I say. The healer looks at Caden. Caden's hands are fists at his sides. After she leaves, he stays at the door. "I didn't mean —" "Get out." "Rae, what I said about your mother —" "Get out, Caden." I roll over to face the wall and pull the blanket up to my ears. He doesn't move for a long time. Then I hear the door click softly behind him. Half a minute later, from out in the corridor, I hear the *crack* of a palm on a face. He just slapped himself. Hard. Last life he did that too. Once. After he'd called me a worthless she-wolf in front of half the pack. He stood outside our bedroom and slapped his own face raw and then knelt at our door for two hours. I didn't open it then either. I close my eyes. *Caden Wolfe, you ran out of chances eight years before I was born.*
Two nights before I leave for Ravencroft territory, I go to pack my mother's grass wolf. The shelf above my bed is empty. For a second the floor tilts. I check under the bed. I check the dresser. I check every drawer, every shelf, every coat pocket I own. It's gone. There's exactly one other wolf in this pack house who knows where I kept it. I find her in the small parlor next to the kitchens. She has the grass wolf in her lap. She's pulling it apart. Strand by strand. Slow. Methodical. Like she's deveining a fish. "*Mira.*" Her hand jerks. The whole wolf comes apart in her fingers — ear, tail, body, all of it, fifteen years of careful weaving falling into her skirt as dry brown grass. She looks up at me with huge wet eyes and the cheekbone I "slapped" yesterday already purpling for the show. "Sister — I'm sorry — I was going to surprise Caden, I was going to weave him a little charm to wear at my ceremony, I just wanted to study how my mother — *your* mother — used to —" I draw the knife. Not a real blade. A training knife. No silver edge, no proper point — they don't let us carry live silver inside the pack house. But I'm three days off training and my hand is steady and the look in her eyes when she sees the blade is so satisfying I could weep. I take one step toward her. Her foot moves. She steps forward — *toward* the knife, not away — and crushes the loose grass into the floor with the toe of her shoe. Grinds it in like she's putting out a cigarette. What's left of the grass wolf is a smear of green and brown on the stone. I stop breathing. I take another step. The training blade is at her throat. A wrist clamps around mine from behind. "Rae — *what are you doing* —" Caden. He twists my arm down and out. The training blade clatters somewhere I can't see. Mira sags backward into a chair, all tears now, the act so practiced it would be funny if I wasn't shaking. I turn my head to look at him. "Did you give it to her?" He doesn't answer. "That charm was kept on the shelf above my bed. Nobody knows that except you, Caden. So I'll ask again. *Did you give it to her?*" His silence is the answer. I laugh. It comes out wrong. "Tell me something. Is anything I own worth as much to you as her *mood*?" He flinches. He actually flinches. Then his eyes land on Mira, on her tear-soaked face, on the bruise that I didn't put there, and his jaw locks again. "Because of you," he says, low, "she might die in three days. And you're going to put a blade through her over a *fistful of grass?*" "A fistful of grass." I say it back to him slow. So he can hear it. "Caden. You *know* what my mother left me. You *know*." He goes very still. For one second I see it crack open behind his eyes — the pup in the corridor of my mother's house, twelve years old, watching her weave that wolf for me at the kitchen table. The pup who'd cried into her apron when he got his first shift wrong. The Beta heir who'd taught me how to pin a wolf twice my size on the training field. Then he looks at Mira again, and the door behind his eyes slams shut. "I'll weave you a better one." I stare at him. "I don't want anything from you." I drive my shoulder into his ribs and break for Mira. He's faster — gods, he's always been faster — and this time he draws his sidearm. Real one. From his hip. Points the barrel at my chest. "You're acting against pack order. As Beta heir I have the authority to bring you in right now." I freeze for half a second. Then I laugh, because I have nothing else. I draw my training blade out of my belt — useless, blunt, no edge — and I point it back at him. We stand there in the parlor like the eight years that never happened. "Stop it, Raelynn —" I take a step forward. Caden's eyes go wide. His arm jerks — instinct, training, he's trying to swing the barrel away from me — and his finger slips. *Crack.* The shot grazes across the top of my shoulder. Cloth shreds. Heat blooms. Blood runs hot down my arm in a thin clean line. The whole room stops. Mira screams. Caden's gun hits the floor. He's looking at me like he doesn't understand what just happened. Then his eyes drop to the training blade in my hand. The dull edge. The blunted tip. "You — you weren't going to —" His voice cracks. "You weren't even going to *cut* her. Why didn't you draw your real weapon? Why didn't you —" He stops. Something opens inside his face. Something he didn't know was there. *Why was I so sure you'd reach for a real blade. Why was I so sure you'd kill her. Why have I been treating you like a rabid wolf for fifteen years.* I sway on my feet. The pain is catching up. The grass under Mira's shoe is catching up. My mother's last gift in fifteen years catching up. Caden moves. He's across the room and pulling me against his chest before I can swat him off. His hand is at my shoulder, shaking, pressing down on the wound. I don't fight him. I'm too tired. The tears I've been swallowing for two lives finally roll down my face and land on the back of his hand. He makes a small broken sound against the top of my head. I let my eyes close.
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