Chapter 1
The scent of silver-tipped arrows and wet earth was the smell of my death.
I dragged my hind leg through the slush, matted fur leaving a dark, rhythmic smear across the white. Behind me, the baying of the Blackwood hounds echoed through the pines.
That sharp, mechanical yapping meant they’d tasted the air and found blood.
For three centuries, Direwolves were the monsters in bedtime stories. Tonight, I was just an ugly red stain in the snow.
Pathetic, I thought, my vision blurring into grey. The last Queen of the North, run to ground by mutts in tactical vests.
A branch snapped fifty yards back. They were closing the net.
I could smell him now—Silas Blackwood. He carried the scent of ancient cedar and cold steel, a heavy, suffocating presence that seemed to still the very air. This was the man who had built his reputation on the extinction of my kind.
I hit a clearing, my strength finally buckling.
The Regression Lock ground against my marrow—a sickening, oily friction. If I didn’t shift now, the silver poisoning would rot me from the inside out. But I didn’t have the mana to go human.
Fine, I thought, baring blood-slicked fangs at the moon. If the world wants a pet, I’ll give them a masterpiece.
I triggered the Miniature Shift.
My body collapsed. Bones snapped and re-knitted like a hundred dry twigs breaking at once. My five-hundred-pound frame imploded.
Warrior-grade muscle withered into soft, snowy fluff. Lethal claws pulled back into blunt, pink nubs. In seconds, the engine of destruction was gone.
In its place sat a five-pound ball of white fur with oversized violet eyes and a tail like a discarded pom-pom.
The Regression Lock clicked into place—a heavy, magical shackle. My mind felt cramped, forced into a brain the size of a walnut.
The urge to yip—to actually yip—was a physical pressure behind my teeth. I suppressed it with a silent, murderous curse.
“The trail ends here!”
Four men burst into the clearing. They were wolves in their prime, mid-transformation, their eyes glowing a low, predatory amber.
At their head stood Silas Blackwood. He didn’t need to growl to command the space.
His dark tactical jacket strained against his shoulders as he held a silver-alloy crossbow with a reaper’s casual grace. His face was a mask of cold, calculated violence, his black hair dusted with the evening’s frost.
“Spread out,” Silas commanded.
His voice hit me like a low vibration, sending a tremor through my tiny, borrowed ribcage.
“The Direwolf is wounded. She couldn’t have jumped the ridge.”
Marcus, a lean man with sharp glasses and a radio earpiece, knelt by the pool of blood I’d left behind.
“Alpha, the trail stops dead. But there’s no body. Only...”
He paused, his flashlight beam sweeping the snow until the blinding white circle landed directly on me.
I didn’t move. I didn’t wag. I sat there, a miniature fluff-ball in the center of a killing field, looking up at the world’s most dangerous hunter.
Inside, I was imagining the taste of his jugular. Outside, I was a shivering, wide-eyed puppy.
“What the hell is that?” Marcus asked, his voice flat. “Is that a dog? In the middle of a high-altitude hunt?”
One of the other hunters let out a short, jagged laugh, lowering his rifle.
“Looks like a designer mix. Someone’s escaped purse-toy?”
Marcus stepped forward, his heavy combat boot thudding inches from my nose. He smelled of antiseptic and deep-seated suspicion.
“It’s too convenient. We’re tracking a legendary predator and find a pampered stray? I should just—”
He raised his foot, the heavy tread shadowed with my own blood. My instincts screamed kill, but I held. If I shifted now, I was a corpse.
I stayed still, my violet eyes fixed on Silas, pleading with a soul I didn’t possess.
“Stand down, Marcus,” Silas said.
The Alpha walked toward me. He carried the weight of a thousand dead enemies in his stride.
He knelt in the slush, his massive frame cutting off the moonlight. He looked at the blood on my white fur, then deep into my eyes. The iron in his gaze cracked.
“It’s hurt,” Silas murmured.
“Alpha, we don’t have time for strays,” Marcus snapped, his fingers twitching on his belt. “The Silver Paw Council is waiting for a kill-report. We need to move.”
Silas didn’t blink. He reached out a hand—a hand that had likely snapped a dozen necks before breakfast—and moved it toward my head.
I froze, my internal monologue screaming. Touch me and I will end your bloodline, Blackwood. I am the Queen of the Tundra, not a—
His fingers brushed the fur behind my ears. They were calloused and warm.
“Hey there, little one,” Silas said.
My brain stalled. That wasn’t his Alpha voice. It was a soft, ridiculous coo.
The most feared hunter in the northern hemisphere was talking to me like I was a piece of sentient cotton candy.
“You’re a long way from home, aren’t you?” he whispered, his thumb brushing a stray snowflake from my snout. “And you’ve got a nasty cut on that leg.”
“Sir?” Marcus sounded like he was witnessing a stroke. “We are in a hot zone.”
Silas ignored him. He unzipped his tactical jacket, revealing a black t-shirt stretched over a chest that felt like a brick wall.
Without a word, he scooped me up. His hands were so large they practically engulfed my entire body.
He tucked me inside the jacket, securing me against the furnace-blast of his skin. I was pressed directly against his heart—a steady, powerful thrum that vibrated through my tiny skull.
“Search the perimeter again,” Silas ordered, his voice snapping back to its iron-cold public persona as he stood. “If the Direwolf vanished, she had help. I want every inch of this border scrubbed.”
“And the... the creature?” Marcus asked, gesturing toward the lump in Silas’s chest.
Silas zipped the jacket higher, leaving only my head poking out like a white stowaway. He looked down at me, and for a fleeting second, his thumb stroked the top of my head again, hidden from his men.
“She’s coming with me,” Silas said. “She’s too small to be out here alone. I’ll call her Luna.”
Luna? My soul recoiled. You named the last Direwolf Luna? You generic, basic—
“Move out,” Silas commanded.
His hand tightened protectively over my fluff as he turned toward the black SUVs idling at the tree line.
I was inside the fortress. I was in the arms of the man I needed to destroy.
As the silver-poisoning in my veins finally began to dull against his warmth, Silas leaned down and whispered into my ear.
“Don’t worry, Luna. Nothing is going to hurt you while I’m around.”
