Chapter 1

I was reborn.

I stood outside Raven Hollow Pack’s Alpha Hall and heard the drums of the inheritance ceremony inside. The guards at the door did not let me pass. They said nothing, yet their bodies formed a wall across the entrance.

My wolf, Nera, woke deep in my mind. In my previous life, she would have trembled under this kind of humiliation. Now she only pressed closer to me in silence, as if making sure we had truly returned to this day.

Gamma Reed walked toward me. He was Cassian’s most trusted subordinate, and he had been placed in charge of order during the ceremony.

“Lyra, Alpha Cassian will not allow you inside.”

I looked at him.

Reed avoided my eyes and continued, “Seraphina is inside. The Alpha said your presence would make her uncomfortable.”

Several wolves slowed near the steps. They watched me with mockery, and with the bored pity people gave something already ruined.

I knew what they were thinking.

Cassian was Raven Hollow’s new Alpha. I was only an orphaned Omega girl raised by the retired Alpha and Luna. When the mate bond awakened between Cassian and me on my eighteenth birthday, the entire pack said the Moon Goddess had played a cruel joke.

In my previous life, I believed that joke could still become a blessing.

I wore a dress I had altered by hand and waited outside from dusk until late night. I thought Cassian would soften because of the mate bond. I thought he might at least let me stand in a corner and watch him inherit his title.

He never came out.

That night, fever took me on the steps. When the retired Alpha and Luna found me, they forced Cassian to acknowledge the bond. Cassian agreed in front of them, but in his heart, I became the reason he could not openly choose Seraphina.

The day before our bonding ceremony, Seraphina collapsed in the training yard. She claimed her bloodline had been infected by a dark curse. Everyone also knew that I had once prayed in the Moon Temple for the Goddess to end my painful bond with Cassian.

That prayer became her evidence against me.

Cassian believed her.

From then on, I was no longer only the mate he did not want. In his eyes, I became jealous, low, and cursed enough to destroy his true love.

Later, he gained full control of Raven Hollow. The retired Alpha and Luna withdrew to the elder council, and they could no longer stop his orders. Seraphina cried that as long as I remained alive, she and Cassian would never be free.

So Cassian used the forbidden bond-breaking rite.

It was not a proper mate rejection. A true rejection required both mates to stand before the Moon Goddess and admit that the bond had ended. It hurt, but it did not destroy a wolf’s soul.

Cassian chose another way.

He locked me in an underground cell and tortured me with wolfsbane smoke and silver chains. The torn bond ripped through my mind again and again. Nera tried to protect me until the final backlash took her from me.

After she vanished, I did not last long.

The last person I saw before I died was Seraphina.

She stood at the door of the cell with no trace of any curse on her body. She told me that there had never been a curse. She only needed a reason for Cassian to remove me from between them with his own hands.

And Cassian had believed her.

The drums sounded again inside the hall.

Reed still stood in front of me. He seemed to expect me to beg him to send word to Cassian, or to break down in front of everyone the way I once had.

I did neither.

I had planned to make the first declaration of the Moon Rejection Rite during the ceremony and reject Cassian before all of Raven Hollow. Since he refused to let me enter, I would find another way to leave.

Reed lowered his voice. “Lyra, go back. Do not make this worse for yourself.”

“All right.”

He froze, clearly unprepared for agreement.

I lifted my skirt and walked down the steps.

The whispers behind me stopped for a moment, then rose louder than before. They probably thought I had finally been humiliated into running away.

I did not explain.

Nera stirred softly in my mind.

Are we really leaving?

I answered her in silence.

Yes.

First, we would leave Alpha Hall. Then the Alpha House. Then Raven Hollow itself.

Cassian Draven could refuse to accept my rejection for now. The Moon Goddess had given me a second life, and I would not place it in his hands again.