Prologue
Elk City, Idaho — Late Spring, Early Morning
The truck came at dawn.
Violet heard it before she saw it — the familiar diesel knock of the pack’s cargo vehicle coming up the track from the main road, the sound of it carrying in the cold morning air the way sounds did in Elk City before the day had fully started. She was already awake. She was usually already awake at this hour, in the way of people who have learned that the early morning belongs to no one and is therefore the safest part of the day.
She did not go to the window immediately. She waited until the truck had stopped and the voices started below, and then she moved to the edge of the glass and looked down at an angle that kept her back from the frame.
Six of them in the yard.
She recognized two — the woman called Petra, who worked the packhouse laundry and had a habit of humming tunelessly while she folded, and a younger girl whose name Violet did not know but whose face she had seen every morning for two years across the common room at breakfast. The others were from the outer quarters, faces she had seen in passing without occasion to attach anything to them. They stood in a loose cluster near the truck’s rear doors with the stillness of people who had been told to stand there and understood the cost of doing otherwise.
Bruno was at the doors. Two other enforcers worked the perimeter of the group in the easy unhurried way of men who were not expecting resistance and had never been given reason to.
Mace stood at the packhouse steps.
He had his arms crossed and his eyes moving over the group with the flat evaluating attention he brought to everything that was his — assessing, categorizing, making the calculations of a man who understood the value of what he was looking at and had decided what he was willing to part with. He said something to his Beta, Cord, who stood at his right shoulder. Cord nodded and moved toward the truck.
Petra looked up once — not at the packhouse, not at the enforcers, just up, at the grey-gold sky above the tree line, at the kind of morning that almost looked like something worth seeing. She looked at it for a moment with an expression that did not have a name that Violet could find.
Then she looked back down.
Bruno opened the rear doors.
They got in.
Violet stood at the edge of the window and watched the doors close and watched the truck move back down the track toward the main road and watched the tree line take it, and then she stood there for a moment longer in the grey morning light of her room with her arms at her sides and her face doing nothing at all.
She had a face that was good at doing nothing. She had been practicing since she was sixteen.
She turned from the window and went to make her bed.
✦
Bruno came to her door an hour after the truck left.
She was finishing her bed when the knock came — the flat single knock that was Bruno’s, that she would have known anywhere by the specific lack of anything in it, no courtesy and no apology, just the sound of a fist against wood. She smoothed the last corner of the blanket and went to the door.
“Alpha wants you,” Bruno said. He was already turning when he said it, already moving back down the corridor, the summons delivered and his obligation to it complete.
“Should I get my—”
“He said come as you are.”
She came as she was.
The walk to Mace’s chambers was not long. The packhouse was not a large building relative to what it contained, and she had made this walk enough times that her feet knew it without consulting her. Past the common room, past the corridor that branched toward the kitchen, up the half-flight of stairs to the Alpha’s wing. She had a way of moving through the packhouse that took up as little of it as possible — close to the walls, quiet on the stairs, her eyes tracking ahead with the automatic attention of someone who had learned to read a space before entering it.
Bruno knocked once on Mace’s door and left without waiting for the response.
“Come in,” Mace said.
She went in.
The Alpha’s chambers were large by Ironmaw standards — a sitting room, a separate bedroom beyond the inner door, windows that looked out over the rear yard and the tree line beyond it. A fire going despite the season, because Mace ran cold and had never seen a reason to accommodate anyone else’s comfort in his own space. The room smelled of woodsmoke and the heaviness of a space that belonged completely to one person and had for a long time.
Mace was standing at the window with his back to her.
She stopped inside the door and waited. This was how it usually went — she came in, he finished whatever he was doing, he told her what needed cleaning. She had a routine built around the waiting. She kept her hands loose at her sides and her eyes on the middle distance and she waited.
He didn’t turn immediately.
“Close the door,” he said.
She closed it.
The latch catching was very loud in the quiet of the room.
He turned then. Looked at her the way he always looked at her — the full flat assessment of it, head to foot and back, unhurried, making no effort to disguise what it was. She had learned to stand still under that look. She had learned to make her face do nothing and to look at a point slightly past his shoulder and wait for him to speak.
He crossed the room slowly. Not toward her — to the side table, where he poured himself a drink and stood with it in his hand and looked at her over the rim without drinking.
“You know why you’re here,” he said.
She didn’t answer, because it wasn’t a question.
“Nine years,” he said. “I’ve watched you for nine years. Waited.” He set the glass down. “I’m done waiting.”
She kept her eyes on the point past his shoulder. Her hands were still loose at her sides. She was concentrating very hard on keeping them that way.
“You’re going to be my mate,” he said. The same flat unhurried voice he used for everything — for pack business, for giving orders, for this. As though this were simply another item on a list of things that had already been decided. “I’ve made up my mind. Thought you should hear it from me directly.”
He moved then. Crossed the remaining distance between them — the unhurried way of a man who understood that he had all the time available to him, and she had nowhere to go, and both of those things were simply facts. His hand closed around her throat and shoved her back into the wall. His hand was just there. Not crushing. Not yet. Just there. Keeping her there. His face close enough that she could feel his putrid breath fanning her face.
She shook her head. “No.”
He squeezed enough to feel her pulse thundering beneath his thumb. He crashed his lips on hers with bruising force. She pushed on him to try and get him off of her. It was like pushing on a brick wall. His free hand grabbed her hip, pulling her flush with his body. She could feel his arousal through the clothing between them. She pounded on his chest with small fists. When he finally broke the kiss, she had tears in her eyes.
“I’ll never be your mate.”
“Oh, little moon, I think you will.” He slid his hand between them to feel her up through her clothes.
She tried to squirm away, but he held her throat too tight. She kneed him.
His grip loosened. His face turned an amazing shade of red.
“Bruno,” he said.
Bruno was already at the door.
✦
The cell beneath the Ironmaw packhouse had not been built for comfort and had never pretended otherwise. Stone floor, stone walls, a single iron-barred door with a lock that had not been tested in some time because no one who went through it gave Mace a reason to open it again. The air at the bottom of the stairs had a particular quality — cold and still and faintly mineral, the smell of a place that received no natural light and had stopped expecting any.
Bruno dragged Violet down the stairs by her hair.
She did not scream. She had learned some time ago that screaming produced results she preferred not to invite, and she had the practical intelligence of someone who had survived Ironmaw for twenty-five years by understanding the difference between the things she could affect and the things she could not. Bruno’s grip in her hair was not a thing she could affect. The stairs beneath her feet she could. She kept her feet under her as best she could and concentrated on not falling.
Behind them, at the top of the stairs, Mace stood with one hand braced against the door frame and the other pressed to his midsection. His face had not entirely returned to its usual color. His eyes tracked Violet down the stairs with an expression that was not the flat evaluating arithmetic of his ordinary attention — there was something else in it now, something that had been moved off its foundation and had not yet decided where it was going to land.
“Far cell,” he said. His voice was the same. The rest of him was not.
Bruno didn’t acknowledge this. He knew which cell. He dragged Violet past the first two doors — both empty, the locks rusted in their housings — and stopped at the third. The key was on his belt. He released her hair long enough to work the lock, one hand clamped on the back of her neck while he did it, and she stood without moving, her breath audible in the cold air, her eyes on the floor.
The door opened.
Bruno pushed her through it.
She caught herself on her hands before her knees hit the stone. Stayed there for a moment, her hair fallen forward around her face, her palms flat against the floor. Then she sat back on her heels and looked at the wall in front of her and said nothing.
Bruno locked the door.
At the top of the stairs, Mace straightened slowly. The hand at his midsection dropped. He stood for a moment looking down the stairs at the closed cell door, at the dark corridor, at the nothing that was all the cell had to offer.
Then he turned and went back into the packhouse and pulled the door shut behind him.
In the cell, Violet sat on the stone floor and did not move for a long time.
✦
