Prologue
It was the depths of winter and frost laced across the windowpane. The early morning sunlight filtering through provided the only warmth that permeated Mara’s tiny attic room in the packhouse of the Silverleaf pack.
Her sleeping quarters were sparse. The floorboards were bare wood sanded smooth. The walls lacked any decoration, and the plaster was old and crumbling in places. There was no bed, just a thin mattress on the floor. An uncomfortable looking wooden chair stood on the corner, one leg broken, the cushion pad on its seat missing. A single bulb hung from the ceiling.
Despite the lack of comfort, the room was so small that it looked full. Mara was surprisingly grateful for that. Were it any bigger she would be expected to share. Mara preferred her privacy so that she could keep her secrets.
That day she woke cold. Huddled in her blankets and wrapped in nearly every item of clothing she owned, Mara normally managed to keep the arctic temperatures at bay. Yet as she opened her eyes it felt like a lump of ice had found its way into her body.
Yet it wasn’t just a physical chill. A subtle menace lurked at the edge of her consciousness and filled her with a sense of foreboding.
Forcing her rigid muscles to relax, she closed her eyes and tried to identify the source. The danger was not nearby. It was not within the packhouse, nor within the compound of communal buildings clustered around it. Nor was it in the forest that surrounded the pack’s buildings.
Her forehead furrowed in concentration as she cast her senses further. The source didn’t come from within the pack’s territory, yet. But it was approaching from the south and it was approaching swiftly. Worse, it had a distastefully familiar resonance.
A heavy knot wound in Mara’s stomach. The Alpha was coming to Silverleaf.
She had felt the same threat before, nearly fifteen years ago. Back then it had foreshadowed a disaster.
On that day Mara had lost everything – her family, her friends, and her future.
For all outward appearances Mara was nothing more than a drudge, an omega in the pack hierarchy. She had been found in a kitchen cupboard in the pack kitchens when she was six and the current Alpha took over the territory where she lived. It had been assumed that her parents had died in the fighting.
In a rare show of mercy, the Alpha’s warriors had spared her life. A six-year-old was hardly going to be a menace to the new leadership and perhaps they took pity on the orphan.
All the highest ranked wolves and many others from the vanquished pack had been killed when they resisted the invaders. However, several of the kitchen staff had survived. Jennie was the chief cook and she volunteered to take the child in and raise her.
No omega should have a strong sense of what was happening in their territory. But Mara’s mother had been sister to the pack’s previous Alpha and his blood ran through her veins.
Ever since that fateful day she had concealed her heritage. Jennie had helped her, warning her on that first night after they had been conquered, knowing that if anyone should discover Mara’s true parentage she would be killed instantly.
It had been easy to escape attention. The meagre rations that the omegas were entitled to meant that Mara grew small and her height was only a few inches over five feet, hardly remarkable for an omega. She kept her dark hair long and hid behind the uneven locks so nobody could take a close look at her. Her clothes were shapeless on her slender frame so she did not attract much notice. On the rare occasion somebody paused to stare at her she had learned to send out a ripple of her bloodline’s power to divert their gaze.
The only time she came close to discovery was when she first came into her wolf form. Like all children born to ranking wolves she had her first shift early, when she was barely twelve years old. Fortunately Jennie found her before anyone else and helped her to pretend she did not have her new ability for another two years.
Perhaps if the Alpha had spent more time in his newly acquired territory, he would have realised that there was still a member of his pack descended from the old bloodline. But Alpha Blackthorne rarely spent much time in any of his territories.
Most packs consisted of a single territory ruled by a single Alpha. Blackthorne, however, had abandoned the old ways. He had a total of seven packs under his command. One was his by right and he had inherited leadership of it from his father. He had come into the second when he mated his Luna, who had been the only member of that pack to have a strong bloodline and so their had been no rivals to Blackthorne’s claim.
That must have given him a taste for ruling as he had gone on to take five more packs by force, including Mara’s pack. Each time he had defeated a pack he had purged it of any possible competition, ensuring every member of the Alpha’s family and their Betas were dispatched as swiftly and efficiently as possible. Then he installed one of his own Betas to keep order when he was absent.
Usually Blackthorne visited each of the packs under his rule every three or four months, but his last visit to Silverleaf had been over two years ago. Perhaps it was Mara’s presence but Silverleaf no longer seemed to flourish as it had before Blackthorne had attacked it, so he avoided the territory, preferring not to face his failures.
And so Mara had stayed hidden and kept her secret, waiting for an opportunity to claim her birthright. Adversity had taught her patience.
In the distance a bell rang. There was movement in the corridor on the other side of her bedroom door. The other omegas were awake, and it was time to rise and start preparing breakfast.
Stretching, she arched her back before rubbing her hands together and blowing warmth into her fingers. She folded her blankets neatly and headed to the communal showers to get ready for another day of chores and waiting.
