CHAPTER 1
The first time I saw the moonlit gates of Blackthorn Ridge, I thought they looked like a mouth.
Open. Waiting.
Like the mountain itself was hungry.
I stood at the edge of the iron drive with one hand clenched around the strap of my duffel bag and the other pressed against the chain-link fence that marked the border of the pack’s land. Beyond it, the road curved upward through a wall of black pine and stone, vanishing into a haze of mist that glowed silver under the full moon.
My pulse kicked hard enough to hurt.
A human girl at a wolf pack border at midnight.
Stupid. Reckless. Probably one of the worst decisions I’d ever made, and my life had been full of bad ones lately.
“Please,” I whispered into the dark, more to myself than anyone else. “Just let this work.”
The answer came not from the mountain, but from the security light snapping on above the gate.
For one sick second I froze in the harsh white glare, every nervous thought going blank. Then I jerked back as a low growl rolled out of the treeline.
Not one growl.
Several.
My skin went cold.
Shapes shifted between the pines, too fast to be fully seen. Large bodies. Heavy paws. Yellow eyes glinting through the branches.
Guard wolves.
Of course there were guard wolves.
A voice sliced through the silence. “Step away from the fence.”
I spun so fast my bag slid off my shoulder and thudded to the ground.
He was standing on the road behind me, just inside the gate where the light hit him in sharp silver lines. Tall. Broad enough to block half the moon. Dark hair falling over his forehead. A black coat hanging open over a plain shirt and combat pants like he’d walked straight out of some nightmare designed to ruin a woman’s ability to think.
He didn’t look surprised to see me.
That was somehow worse.
His eyes landed on my face and narrowed. “You’re trespassing.”
My mouth went dry. “I’m here to see Alpha Reed.”
“Are you.”
It wasn’t a question. It was a verdict.
I bent quickly, yanking my bag back to my side before he could decide I was suspicious enough to steal. My fingers shook so badly I nearly dropped the zipper.
“I have an appointment.”
“One human,” he said, voice flat. “At midnight. At a secured pack border. In the middle of a lunar rise.”
Heat rushed into my cheeks. “Yes. I understand how it sounds.”
His gaze flicked over me once, slow and clinical, like I was a risk assessment rather than a person. Jeans. Worn boots. Grey sweater under a coat that wasn’t warm enough for mountain air. My hair had escaped its clip in damp strands around my face from the drive up. I could feel every flaw, every bit of my nerves laid bare under his stare.
I hated him instantly for making me feel smaller.
“You should leave,” he said.
“I can’t.”
“Then you’re already in trouble.”
The growl in the trees came again, closer this time, and I flinched despite myself.
His eyes dropped to the movement. “First lesson. Never flinch at the scent of a predator.”
“I’m not flinching,” I snapped.
One corner of his mouth twitched, not quite a smile. “You are.”
The heat in my face went from embarrassment to anger in a heartbeat. “I’m trying to ask for help.”
Something shifted in his expression at that. Not softness. Never that. But attention sharpened by something I couldn’t name.
“From Alpha Reed?”
“Yes.”
“Your name.”
The order hit like a slap.
I straightened my spine. “Evelyn Hart.”
He went still.
Not much. Just enough that I noticed. Just enough for the night around us to seem to draw tighter.
Then, very carefully, he said, “Say that again.”
My stomach dropped. “Why?”
“Because I didn’t hear you.”
I knew he had.
Still, I repeated it. “Evelyn Hart.”
His stare changed. Not warmer. Not kinder.
Dangerous.
The guards in the trees shifted restlessly. A wolf padded into the edge of the light, enormous and silver-gray, its hackles raised. It fixed me with a stare that made my knees feel weak.
I took a step back.
The man in the road moved faster than thought. His hand shot out, not touching me, but stopping me with a solid wall of presence.
“Don’t,” he said quietly.
My breath snagged.
It was absurd how the word landed. Not just command, but warning. As if something in the dark had noticed me, and he was the only thing keeping it from lunging.
“I’m fine,” I lied.
“No, you’re not.”
A distant rumble of thunder rolled over the mountain.
I wrapped my hand tighter around the strap of my bag. “Look, I was told Alpha Reed would meet me personally.”
His eyes flicked to the bag, then back to my face. “Who told you that?”
“I received a letter.”
That got his attention. Full, sudden focus. The air seemed to change around him. He took one step closer, and my body reacted before my mind did—breath catching, skin tightening, awareness turning painfully sharp.
Not because I was attracted to him.
That would have been ridiculous.
I was reacting to the fact that he was too close, too large, too male, and every instinct I had was screaming at me that I was standing in the territory of something ancient and lethal.
“You have the letter with you?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Show me.”
I hesitated. Every practical part of my brain said that handing over the only proof I had was stupid. But if I didn’t, I was a lone human on a mountain road full of wolves, and that was somehow stupider.
I dug into my coat pocket and pulled out the envelope. Cream paper. Thick. Unmarked except for the seal stamped in black wax: a wolf’s head split by a crescent moon.
The man’s face went hard.
He took it from me without asking. His fingers brushed mine for half a second, and electricity shot up my arm so violently I nearly gasped.
He noticed.
His eyes snapped to mine, and for one suspended moment the world narrowed to his hand and my pulse and the dark look in his face.
Then he dropped the letter back into my palm as if it had burned him.
“Who gave you this?” he asked.
I swallowed. “A lawyer. It arrived with a property notice.”
That wasn’t the whole truth, but I didn’t owe a stranger my life story. Especially not one who looked at me like I was carrying explosives in my ribs.
“My mother died two weeks ago,” I said, because the words had to go somewhere and I hated the tremor in them. “I found the letter after the funeral. It said I was expected here.”
His jaw tightened.
“Expected,” he repeated.
“Yes.”
His gaze moved past me, toward the road, toward the manor house hidden somewhere beyond the pines. I could tell he was deciding something. Weighing me. The letter. The absurdity of my being here.
Then his attention returned to my face and I felt, absurdly, as if I had been stripped bare.
“You should have come in daylight.”
“I wasn’t exactly invited for tea.”
That time, the corner of his mouth definitely moved.
It wasn’t a smile.
It was worse.
It made him look briefly less like a storm and more like a man who knew exactly how to survive one.
He reached down, grabbed my bag by the strap before I could stop him, and lifted it with one easy motion. “Come with me.”
My heart lurched. “Where?”
“Inside.”
“No.” The word came out too fast.
He stopped and turned his head just enough to look at me over his shoulder. “You came this far, Evelyn Hart. Don’t develop courage at the gate.”
Anger flared hot in my chest. “I’m not some stray you can drag around by the collar.”
His eyes cut back to me, and for one terrifying second I thought I’d gone too far.
Then his nostrils flared.
He went completely still.
So did I.
The air had changed. I felt it before I understood it. A pressure, low and pulsing, like the mountain had drawn a breath and was holding it.
His gaze sharpened on my neck.
My hand went instinctively to the silver pendant resting against my skin, a small oval charm I’d worn since I was a child. It had belonged to my mother. Simple, unremarkable, always cold.
Tonight it burned.
I sucked in a sharp breath. “What is that?”
His stare locked on my fingers, on the pendant, on the spot where it rested above my heartbeat.
“You have no business wearing that here.”
My skin prickled. “It was my mother’s.”
His face changed so fast I almost missed it.
Not fear.
Recognition.
The kind that hits before disaster.
Then, from somewhere deeper in the trees, a wolf howled.
The sound was answered by another.
And another.
The man in front of me swore under his breath.
“What?” I said, panic creeping up my throat. “What’s happening?”
Before he could answer, the security light overhead exploded.
Glass rained down in a bright, glittering spray.
I screamed and threw up an arm as the road plunged into darkness.
A beat of silence.
Then movement.
Fast. Massive. Snarling shapes burst from the treeline, not wolves this time, but men shifting mid-run, bones cracking in a blur that turned my stomach. One second human. The next monstrous.
I stumbled back, heart hammering so hard I couldn’t hear my own breath.
The man beside me moved like lightning.
He shoved me behind him with one arm and snarled, and the sound that tore out of him was so feral, so primal, that every hair on my body stood on end.
“No,” he growled into the dark. “Not here.”
Something slammed into the gate.
Metal shrieked.
I lost my balance and hit the ground hard, the breath knocked from my lungs. Gravel bit into my palms. My bag skidded away.
A flash of teeth.
A shadow over me.
I looked up just in time to see a wolf—no, not a wolf, too big, too wrong—launch over the fence toward the road.
My scream was ripped out of me as the man in black moved, catching the creature midair and throwing it aside with brutal force. It hit the asphalt and rolled, then sprang back up, jaws opening wide.
I scrambled backward, terror turning my limbs clumsy.
The pendant at my throat blazed hot enough to hurt.
The creature’s head snapped toward me.
Its eyes fixed on the charm.
And it lunged.
I had one absurd, crystal-clear thought: this is how I die. On my knees in the dirt, wearing my mother’s necklace, in front of a pack that wanted me dead before I even crossed the threshold.
Then the man slammed into the creature like a force of nature.
They went down in a tangle of limbs and fur and teeth. I heard bone crack. Heard a roar that shook through my ribs. The world became noise and motion and the metallic taste of fear on my tongue.
Something hit me from the side.
I cried out as I was dragged across the gravel, nails biting my arm through my coat. A second creature, smaller but faster, had gotten behind me. Its muzzle was inches from my face, hot breath and blood and something rotten curling over me.
I kicked wildly. “Get off—!”
Its jaws snapped.
Pain flared white-hot across my forearm.
I screamed.
The scent of blood hit the air.
Everything changed.
The creature froze.
So did every wolf in sight.
Across the road, the man in black whipped his head toward me, and his expression went from fury to absolute horror.
“No,” he said.
He moved toward me so fast the eye could barely follow.
But the injured creature beat him to it.
Its pupils blew wide. It shuddered once, as if struck by a command deeper than instinct, and then it lowered its head to my arm.
Not to bite.
To sniff.
To hesitate.
Confusion ripped through me.
Then its muzzle pressed against the blood at my skin, and it made a sound I had never heard before from any living thing.
A whimper.
The creature recoiled violently.
The man reached me an instant later, hauling me up against his chest and turning me away from the road in one sharp motion.
“Do not move,” he ordered.
I was shaking so hard I could barely stand. “What is happening?”
His arm locked around my waist, steadying me. Too steady. Too intimate. I felt the solid heat of him through both our clothes, felt the hard line of muscle beneath his coat, felt the rapid beat of his heart shockingly close to mine.
For one insane second, the touch did something to me.
Not comfort.
Not safety.
A pull.
Deep in my chest, something answered his presence with a painful, stunned pulse.
I went utterly still.
His head jerked down.
Our eyes met.
The look on his face was so raw it stripped the air from my lungs.
Then, in the distance, someone shouted, “Alpha!”
The word snapped the moment apart.
Alpha.
He turned his head sharply, and I saw it then—the change in the crowd spilling from the darkness toward the gate, the way every wolf and every man shifted aside for him, the way even in chaos the pack instinctively made room.
He was not just one of them.
He was the one.
Alpha Reed.
The reason I was here.
The reason my mother had sent me this far from home and told me not to open the letter until after she was gone.
My throat tightened painfully.
He looked back at me, and something unreadable passed through his eyes.
“Why didn’t you say so?” I whispered.
He didn’t answer.
Instead, he leaned down, taking my injured arm with startling gentleness before I could protest. His thumb brushed the edge of the torn fabric and the blood beneath.
Every nerve in my body lit up.
The world tilted.
A low, vicious sound rolled from somewhere inside him.
Not anger.
Not pain.
Recognition.
His gaze dropped to my neck again, to the pendant now glowing faintly against my skin like it had been touched by fire.
His expression went cold enough to freeze me in place.
Then he said, very quietly, “Get her inside.”
The order cut through the night.
Two wolves were already at the gate. A woman with a long braid and a hard face pushed through the crowd, eyes widening when she saw my blood.
“Reed,” she said sharply, “tell me that isn’t—”
“Inside,” he repeated, his voice low and lethal.
A hand reached for me.
I jerked back instinctively, terrified of every stranger in the dark, every pair of eyes on my bleeding arm, every wolf watching me like I had walked in carrying a match to dry tinder.
“No,” I said, breathless. “I’m not going anywhere until someone tells me why that thing bit me and why you all are looking at me like—”
I stopped.
Because every sound on the road had gone silent.
The creatures that attacked had retreated to the edges of the trees.
Not fleeing.
Waiting.
Alpha Reed followed my gaze, and his entire body went rigid.
Slowly, one of the wolves lifted its head and stared directly at me.
Its eyes were black as tar.
Not yellow.
Black.
The woman beside Reed drew in a sharp breath. “No.”
My blood ran cold.
“What?” I whispered.
Reed’s hand closed around my wrist, firm and unyielding now, his thumb pressing against my pulse.
The touch should have terrified me.
Instead, my traitorous body shivered.
His voice dropped to something so quiet it barely carried over the wind.
“Evelyn Hart,” he said, and for the first time, he sounded almost afraid. “Tell me exactly what your mother was.”
Before I could answer, the black-eyed wolf opened its mouth and spoke in a voice that was not human at all.
“She belongs to the curse.”
And the world went still.
