Chapter 1 – The Blood in the Snow

The blood freezes before it hits the snow.

My silver-laced fingers grip the hilt of the executioner’s blade, tearing it upward through the rogue’s ribcage. The wolf thrashes, snapping its jaws inches from my throat, hot saliva spraying across my cheek. I twist the steel. Bone splinters. The creature’s snarl chokes out into a wet, rattling gasp.

It collapses, heavy and limp against the white drift.

I step back. My boots crunch in the frost. The air is so cold it burns the back of my throat. I don’t look at the dead man’s face as his body shifts back from fur to bruised skin. I don’t look for the absent moon in the pitch-black sky above us. There is only the target, the kill, and the cold.

The Queen’s decree requires swift execution. I pull a rag from my belt and wipe the viscous blood from my blade. The motion is exact, practiced. I am doing the job I was forged to do.

But my left hand trembles. Not from adrenaline. From the metal.

I press my palm flat against my own sternum. Beneath the hardened leather of my armor, my flesh is numb, wrapped tight around the silver runes etched into my ribs. Every time I draw on the unnatural speed required to take down a rogue, another sliver of my natural bone turns to silver. A permanent transaction. My body grows rigid, the marrow turning to ice, solidifying into the cage the Queen built.

A weapon does not feel the cold. I force my jaw to unclench. A weapon only strikes.

I kneel beside the corpse, drawing my carving knife. In a world starved of light, the glowing moon-bone lodged in a werewolf’s chest is the only thing keeping the encroaching darkness at bay. The Queen demands the harvest. I slide the blade into the dead chest, aiming for the sternum.

A low, rumbling growl vibrates through the soles of my boots.

The scent of fresh blood and silver cuts through the sharp smell of the pine needles.

I step out of the treeline. The executioner is already kneeling over the body of a wolf that belonged to my territory. He holds a blade, ready to rip the moon-bone from the chest of a man I once called pack.

I don’t shift. I don’t need to. The alpha command radiates from my blood, heavy enough to make the air pressure drop.

"Step away from the carcass, executioner."

The man freezes. He turns. Silver hair, eyes the color of a shattered winter sky, and a chest that smells distinctly of unnatural, dead metal. Orin Vale. The Queen’s prized lapdog.

He doesn’t move fast enough. I cross the distance between us in two strides. The system of this forest is mine. The law is mine. The Queen’s decrees end where my shadows begin, and nobody claims the bones of my people but me.

I shove my boot squarely into his shoulder, kicking him backward into the deep snow. I reach my bare hand into the rogue’s open chest, cracking the ribs apart with a sickening snap to extract the faintly glowing sliver of bone. It pulses weakly in my palm, a dying ember in the freezing dark.

The impact knocks the breath out of my lungs.

I scramble up, the silver in my ribs protesting, grating like un-oiled gears. He stands over the body, holding the glowing moon-bone, the light casting harsh shadows across the sharp planes of his face.

Rhun.

The Alpha. The beast who swallowed the moon-heart and plunged the world into this endless night.

He is massive, radiating a suffocating, primal heat that clashes violently with the frost.

I lunge. I bring the executioner’s blade down in a vicious arc aimed straight at his neck. He doesn’t even bother to draw a weapon. He simply catches my wrist.

The force of his grip stops my arm dead in the air. Pain shoots up my elbow, numbing my fingers. He steps in, invading my space, compressing the distance until his chest presses against the edge of my armor. The heat radiating off him is unbearable. I try to wrench my arm free. I can’t. My silver-enhanced muscles strain, grinding against their limits, but his raw, primal strength completely overpowers me.

He drives me backward. My spine hits the trunk of a pine tree, shaking loose a shower of snow. His hand is a vice on my wrist, his face inches from mine, his eyes burning with amber fire.

Total physical helplessness. I am trapped against the bark, feeling the frantic, mechanical thrum of my own pulse beneath my skin.

He fights like a cornered animal.

I hold his wrist against the wood, smelling the metallic tang of his panic. The cold metal inside him repulses me, but the sheer, desperate fire in his eyes is something else. He twists, feral and unyielding.

His free hand drops to his boot. A flash of silver.

I shift my weight to pin him, but he’s faster than a human has any right to be. The hidden dagger slices upward. I twist my torso. The blade misses my heart but bites deep into the side of my ribs, plunging right into the spot where the swallowed moon-heart pulses beneath my flesh.

At the exact same instant, my claws extend. I rake them across his collarbone in a pure reflex of defense.

Silver meets blood. Blood meets bone.

The scar-bond locks.

A shockwave of pure agony detonates between us. It hits me so hard my knees buckle. It isn’t just my pain; it’s his. I feel the freezing, metallic rigidity of his chest as if it were my own, and I feel my own burning, animal heat searing through his veins. I gasp, falling against him, our breaths tangling in the freezing air as the bond sears our nerve endings together.

Above us, the faint, residual glow in the sky vanishes entirely. The moon-heart inside me seizes in response to the silver. The sky turns pitch, suffocating black. Another night of the world, permanently erased.

We are chained in the dark, and the shadows are closing in.