Prologue
Alasdair
The moon was already rising when Mòrag found me.
She always did.
I stood at the edge of the lower paddock, boots sunk in black mud, staring at the distant line of the forest where the heather gave way to shadow. The air carried that old metallic tang—the one that crept beneath my ribs and woke something that never truly slept. My pulse had begun to count time in a different way, measuring not minutes, but how long I had before I was no longer entirely myself.
“You should not be out here,” Mòrag said softly behind me.Not a warning. A claim.
I did not turn. “You shouldn’t be either.”
A rustle of skirts. A breath too close. “You forget,” she murmured, “there is nowhere you go that is not already part of my concern.”
That was her gift—taking fear and dressing it as devotion.
She slipped around me until I had no choice but to meet her eyes. In the moonlight, Mòrag Fraser was almost gentle-looking. Dark lashes. A mouth made for sympathy. Anyone else might have mistaken her for kind.
“You feel it, don’t you?” she whispered. “It’s starting.”
My jaw tightened. “Go inside.”
“Why?” Her fingers brushed my sleeve, light as a threat. “So you can suffer alone? So you can imagine what you might do if no one were there to… help you?”
Help. That was what she called it.
She knew. That was the root of everything. Three winters ago she had followed me when I thought myself careful. Three winters ago she had seen blood on the snow and a shape too large and wrong to be human. Three winters ago she had chosen not to scream.
Instead, she had smiled.
“Does it hurt tonight?” she asked. “When it starts?”
“Yes,” I said, because lying to Mòrag was useless. “It always does.”
Her gaze softened, just enough to be convincing. “Poor Alasdair. Burdened with such a terrible gift.” Her thumb traced the inside of my wrist, where my pulse beat too fast. “If people knew… if the kirk knew…”
My breath caught. Not from the cold.
“But they don’t,” she continued, “because you have me. I keep you safe. I keep you… acceptable.”
There it was. The hook beneath the velvet.
I stepped back, but she followed, her skirts whispering over the grass. “You should let me stay tonight,” she said. “You’re worse when you’re alone. You forget who you are.”
No.I forget who I am when I am with you.
But I did not speak it.
Mòrag tilted her head, studying me as if I were something she owned and was learning to use properly. “You know what happens if I ever stop loving you,” she said gently. “Don’t you?”
The moon cleared the clouds, spilling silver over her face. Over my hands, already beginning to tremble.
“Yes,” I said.
She smiled then—small, satisfied. “Good. Come inside, Alasdair. Let me take care of you.”
And because I was afraid—of the beast, of the world, of being alone—I followed her, even as something in me began to quietly, desperately break.
