Chapter 5

After that slap, we never exchanged another word.

Cyrus moved with Vianca to a different room in the east wing of the stone fortress. The entire west wing was left with only me and the rotation of guards keeping watch, day and night.

Preparations for the Luna coronation continued on schedule. Cyrus's head guard came to deliver a message: "The Alpha hopes you'll accompany Miss Vianca to the neighboring settlement to try on the ceremonial gown. He also hopes you'll serve as a handmaid at the coronation ceremony."

"Fine," I said.

This was his way of telling me — there was absolutely no possibility between us.

The tailor's workshop in the neighboring settlement was in a quiet cluster of homes down the valley. When Vianca arrived, she had two guards in tow, and when she saw me, she linked her arm through mine with a smile, as if the night she'd stood in the doorway screaming at me had never happened.

She tried on gown after gown. Each time she'd step out from behind the curtain and stand before the polished bronze mirror, turning in a slow circle. White hide gowns trimmed with silver thread embroidery, wolf-tooth beads sewn along the collar — the ceremonial dress of a Luna, a style permitted only to an Alpha's partner throughout the entire northern frontier.

"Aelia, does it look good?" She turned to me, her eyes bright.

I sat on the wooden stool, pressing my nails into my palm.

"It looks beautiful."

Those were the most effortful words I had ever spoken in my life.

Vianca turned back to the bronze mirror, satisfied. She was adjusting the hem of the skirt when she suddenly spoke, her tone utterly unlike her voice a moment before.

"Aelia, there's something I've always wanted to ask you." Her gaze settled on my reflection in the bronze mirror, a smile curving her lips that didn't quite reach her eyes.

"Doesn't it disgust you? Falling in love with your own foster brother?"

The air went still.

I looked up at her.

"We have no blood relation," I said with a frown. "And—"

I paused, meeting her eyes in the mirror directly.

"I'm certain that he loves me."

Vianca turned around. "Certain?"

She tilted her head, studying me the way you'd look at a child too naive to be anything but funny. "You're certain an Alpha would choose you? A Null Wolf who has nothing to offer him?"

She stepped closer, the white hem of her skirt whispering across the stone floor.

"Aelia, you need a wake-up call." Her voice was very soft. "Don't worry — I have a way to make you see reality."

I didn't understand what she meant by that. Not until that same evening, when Vianca and I were on our way back from the neighboring settlement, and we were taken.

Everything happened too fast. I hadn't even made out the shapes of the wolves. Seven or eight grey shadows burst from the dense forest without warning; the guards barely had time to shift before they were tackled to the ground. Vianca was screaming somewhere beside me. Someone pressed a hide cloth soaked in sedative over my nose and mouth, and the world went quiet.

We were taken to Sheer Cliff.

The highest ridge on the northern face of the Crestfang Range. Beneath our feet was a ring of low jagged rock, and beyond that, a forty-foot drop into a gulch of broken stone. In the distance, mountain ridges layered in shadow; the moonlight turned the shattered rock at the clifftop pale white. Wind surged up from the valley below, sending my hair streaming back behind me.

They shoved Vianca and me side by side toward the edge.

I looked down. At the bottom: jagged stone points and a dry riverbed, the moonlight too faint to reach the valley floor — only a thick, congealed darkness. Cold air rose from below, carrying the smell of stone and moss.

Cyrus was summoned.

"Alpha, choose one," the leader of the rogue wolves said, standing between me and Vianca — half-shifted, old scars webbing through the grey fur at his sides. "Who do you want to live?"

Cyrus stood there, four or five armed warriors at his back, every blade pointed at the rogue wolves. His hide armor sleeves were rolled to the forearm, exposing that old scar running from the elbow down.

Vianca was shaking with sobs. "Cyrus! Save me! Please, Cyrus!"

She cried so genuinely. So helplessly.

I said nothing.

I didn't need to cry. I didn't need to beg. Because I knew he would choose me.

My entire childhood, this person had refused to let any harm come to me. At fourteen, he'd taken a wolf's claws in his left arm for me. When I'd accidentally eaten Silver Fir, he'd dropped everything and run back to inject the antidote. Every time I walked around the settlement, three or four guards walked with me — those black-armored, expressionless warriors appearing by my side with punctual reliability.

My entire girlhood was lived in their shadow.

No young man in the settlement had ever dared get close to me. When I was sixteen, a hunter's son had quietly pushed a wildflower through my stone room window. By the next day, he'd been transferred to the most remote outer watchtower.

After that, "Aelia" became a forbidden zone throughout the entire Silver Moon Clan.

No one dared touch, no one dared approach, no one dared even look too long.

My first love, my secret love, every dream I'd ever had about love — from beginning to end, there had only ever been Cyrus.

A man like that — how could he let me fall from this cliff?

So I said nothing. I simply looked at him, waiting for him to walk over and take my hand.

Then I heard him say—

"Release Vianca."

The rogue wolves let Vianca go. She stumbled, running toward Cyrus, throwing herself into his arms.

The next second, I was pushed over the edge.

I started to fall. Wind poured into my ears, its roar swallowing everything. Before my brain had time to understand, my body crashed into a dense mass of shrubs and moss — a protruding shelf of rock midway down the cliff face, blanketed in decades of thick, established growth.

The force of impact bounced me once and threw me back. I lay face-up in the brush, a dull pain radiating from my right hand. The rope bindings from the kidnapping had cut into my wrists too tightly; the skin had broken open, and blood was slowly seeping between my fingers, dripping down onto the moss, spreading into dark stains.

Cyrus came down the cliff face at a run. I was still lying motionless in the brush when he found me.

He ran to me, crouched down, cupped my face in both hands.

"Aelia — Aelia, look at me — are you hurt—"

His eyes dropped and found the blood on my right hand.

His expression shifted instantly. Eyes filling with fury.

He stood, turned toward the captured rogue wolves being held down by his warriors.

He drew the short blade at his hip.

No excess words. No interrogation, no intimidation. He walked over and pressed the blade to the first man's throat. Drew it across. Then the second. The third.

I sat in the brush and watched.

When Cyrus turned and walked back, the front of his hide armor was marked with large dark patches. He crouched in front of me, tucked the blade back at his hip, and reached up to brush the loose hair from my forehead back behind my ear.

"Don't worry." His voice was achingly gentle. "We'll sort everything out when we're back."

Cyrus. There is no "when we're back" anymore.

The second you said her name on that cliff — that was the last second between us.

I am going to leave you. For good.

When Cyrus helped me up from the brush, Vianca was standing a short distance away. She watched me across the gap.

Then she smiled.

A victor's smile.

I finally understood what she'd said in the tailor's workshop.

"I have a way to make you see reality."

Now I saw it.

That same night.

The bonfire in the main settlement had long since burned out, leaving only a few dull-red embers glowing on and off in the ash. The entire stone fortress lay sunk in the dark, only the torches on the watchtowers still flickering in the wind.

I walked alone down the stairs of the stone fortress, across the empty central courtyard, and into the Elder Council Hall.

The few elders keeping night watch looked up at the sound of footsteps, and when they saw it was me, their expressions shifted to mild surprise.

"Aelia? At this hour—"

"I heard the Dusk Abyss court has submitted a marriage alliance request to the Silver Moon Clan."

The elders exchanged a glance.

"That is the case," the white-haired elder at the head of the table said, slowly. "But the alliance is still under discussion, and the candidate—"

"I'll go."

A moment of silence fell over the stone hall.

"I'm willing to represent the Silver Moon Clan," I said, "and marry into the Dusk Abyss vampire court."