After my mate consolidated the secondary bloodline succession, he took his brother's former mate and her two pups to the capital to build a new life.

My daughter and I survived on scraps and foraged roots outside pack territory, waiting for him in that freezing den for five long years.

The only news that ever came was that he'd inherited the Thornwood Alpha title.

I carried my daughter a thousand miles to find him, and the guards at the gate beat us with wooden clubs like we were feral rogues.

"Showing up at the Alpha's territory claiming to be pack? You must be tired of living. Don't you know how our Luna deals with stray she-wolves who come sniffing around?"

I lay in a heap of my own blood. "...Luna?"

When I lifted my head, I could just make out Edith Ashvale in the distance, dressed in a Luna's finery, her two pups raised as the young Alpha heir and she-wolf of the house.

Edith greeted us with a warm smile and set out a plate of pastries. They were laced with wolfsbane.

My daughter was starving. She wolfed down a piece and dropped dead on the spot.

I choked up a mouthful of black blood. As the world dimmed, I heard Edith's vicious laugh cutting through the haze.

"Narelle Silvercrest, you should never have come here to disrupt our pack. Finn has treated me as his Luna for years. If you showed up alive, how was I supposed to go on holding this territory?!"

My daughter and I died like dogs. They rolled our bodies in reed mats and dumped us in a mass grave beyond the territory markers.

After I was gone, Finn wrapped his arms around a weeping Edith and murmured comfort against her hair.

"She's dead. Let it go. Even if she'd lived, I would've burned the mating mark off her neck myself and told her to stay away from our pack."

The meal I'd once given a starving stranger, the vows he'd sworn under open sky, all of it erased from his memory as though it had never existed.

I died with hatred lodged so deep it followed me into the dark. When my eyes opened again, it was the very day Finn inherited the title.

I threw the foraged roots from my hands, sold the den for every coin it was worth, and carried my daughter to my father's territory compound, where I fell to my knees.

"Father. I've decided to reject the mating bond."

...

In my previous life, the moment I heard Finn had become the Alpha of the Thornwood Pack, I bundled up my daughter and traveled a thousand miles to find him. Edith killed us both with wolfsbane-laced pastries.

My last thought before the darkness took me was regret. Not for dying, but for severing the blood-bond with my father, Alpha Aldric Silvercrest, all for the sake of mating with Finn Thornwood.

This time, the moment I opened my eyes, I sold the den, packed what little money it brought, and set out for the capital.

But I was not going to the Thornwood territory.

I told the driver to take the long way around, and the carriage rolled to a stop before the gates of the Silvercrest Pack compound.

The driver took one look at us, my daughter and me in our threadbare rags, shuffling toward the Alpha's gates like a pair of packless rogues, and let out a snort.

"Takes all kinds. Now even rogues have the nerve to show up at the Alpha's door claiming to be blood."

I ignored him. I took Hildegarde Thornwood's small hand in mine, walked to the gate, and knelt.

"Father. Your daughter knows she was wrong."

My father was the Alpha of the Silvercrest Pack, the most powerful pack on the Northern Frontier. My mother had been a royal she-wolf of the Valdorian wolf nation.

I was born an Alpha-blooded daughter of the Silvercrest line, raised in moonstone and silver. Then one spring, on a hunt near the Greenshire borderlands, I stumbled upon Finn Thornwood, the unwanted second pup of the Thornwood Pack.

His brothers had been tearing each other apart over the Alpha succession, and he'd nearly been killed in the crossfire. They broke his leg and left him in a ditch, half-starved and wolfless, unable to shift.

I felt sorry for him. So I saved his life.

Then, sharing those cramped border dens day after day, I fell in love with him.

When I swore I would mate with Finn and no one else, my father was furious. His voice went cold as iron, and the weight of his Alpha aura pressed down on the room until the air itself seemed to thin.

"If you mate with that man, I no longer have a daughter."

Finn swore to the Moon Goddess he would cherish me for the rest of his life.

I stripped off my moonstone and silver, put on a plain cotton dress, and became his mate.

And over the years, lulled by his sweet words repeated day after day, I withered into a gaunt, hollow-eyed she-wolf whose inner wolf had gone so quiet I sometimes forgot she was there at all.

I never imagined that within five or six years, every one of his elder brothers would die, and the Thornwood Pack elders would offer Finn the Alpha title on a single condition: accept the secondary bloodline succession, and the territory was his.

Once he became Alpha, he simply slotted Edith into the role of his Luna and raised her pups as his own.

By the time I dragged myself to his territory gates, Finn had long since forgotten that my daughter and I existed.

So much so that when we died miserably in my past life, he didn't shed a single tear.

If anything, he was relieved he wouldn't have to write up divorce papers after all. Relieved the mating bond would simply rot away with my corpse, no Moonfire Ritual required.

This time, no matter what it took, I would change my daughter's fate and my own.

Hildegarde and I knelt at the gates of the Silvercrest compound. The territory sentries couldn't bear the sight of us and reported our arrival five or six times. Two hours later, my father finally came out.

"Reduced to this sorry state, and NOW you remember you have a father?"

He stood in the archway, shoulders filling the frame, his aura pressing outward like the weight of a coming storm. The scent of ancient pine and frozen granite rolled ahead of him. He held no weapon, but his claws had half-extended, the tips catching the light.

"Your daughter knows she was wrong. Beat me, kill me, do whatever you see fit."

"I regret not listening to you back then. I put my trust in the wrong man."

Tears streamed down my father's weathered face. He didn't strike me. His claws retracted. He threw nothing to the ground because there was nothing to throw, but his hands were trembling when he pulled me to my feet.

"You were so heartless back then. You severed your own blood-bond and abandoned your pack for a man. But since you know you were wrong, cut those ties clean and come home where you belong!"

"As long as you sever that cursed mating bond completely, you are still a daughter of the Silvercrest bloodline, and this territory is still yours."

He told me to change out of my rags, but I shook my head.

His expression shifted. "Don't tell me you still intend to have dealings with that man?"

I smiled faintly. "He wronged me this deeply. You think I can just turn the page? I need to make him pay first."

That same day, I took Hildegarde to the Thornwood Pack compound and sent word inside.

"Tell Finn Thornwood his mate has come home."

The guards at the gate took one look at my tattered clothes, wrinkled their noses, and moved to shove us away. I could feel them sizing us up, two wolves deciding we were beneath their notice. One of them bared his teeth.

"Where'd you rogues crawl out from? This is the Thornwood Alpha's compound!"

"The Luna is hosting a banquet for the most powerful Alphas in the capital. If you disturb her guests, you and your little runt won't have enough lives to pay for it!"

"Go on, get! Get out of here!"

I'd expected exactly this. I deliberately stepped back, dropped to my knees, and raised my voice for the whole street to hear.

"Someone help me get justice! Finn Thornwood mated me six years ago in a proper ceremony. I bore him a pup! He promised to bring me back within three years and make me his Luna. But now that he's the Alpha, he left me and my child in the borderlands eating scraps and foraged roots! Is that something a wolf with any honor does?!"

The compound sat on a busy thoroughfare near the market district. The commotion drew wolves from every direction, and whispers rippled through the growing crowd.

"They say the Thornwood Alpha is famously devoted to his Luna. He's got two pups with her and won't even take a second mate. So where did THIS mate come from?"

"Probably a fraud. I mean, look at her. The Thornwood compound is high-ranking territory. She claims to be his mate, but she looks like a feral rogue off the road. Bet she's just some packless grifter trying to latch onto a rising bloodline."

I listened without a flicker of emotion, then reached into the bundle I'd brought and pulled out a mating certificate.

"Take a good look. This is Finn Thornwood's own handwriting. If he refuses to acknowledge me as his mate, I'll take this certificate straight to the Grand Pack Council and demand justice before every Alpha in the realm."

The head steward, lurking in the shadows, caught a glimpse of the handwriting on the certificate from a distance. His brow furrowed.

He leaned toward the gate guard, voice low. "Stay here and watch her. I'm going in to inform the Alpha and the Luna."

I saw every bit of it.

Sure enough, before a quarter hour had passed, Finn Thornwood came striding out of the compound, and right behind him, draped in gold and silver, was Edith Ashvale. The cloying scent of overripe peaches and crushed oleander reached me before she did, sweet enough to turn my stomach.

The steward pointed at me. "My Alpha, this woman claims to be your mate. If she's a fraud, I'll have her thrown out at once."

Finn looked down at me from the top of the steps. "Lift your head."

I tilted my chin up slowly, the ghost of a smile on my lips. My wolf was utterly still inside me, watchful, coiled, silent as a held breath.

The moment he saw my face, every drop of color drained from his.

"Narelle, is it really you? What are you doing here?"

He strode over and lowered his voice to a hiss.

"If you wanted to see me, you could have sent word through the servants. Why make a scene in front of everyone?"

"Besides, I told you in my letters not to come back on your own. When the time was right, I would have sent someone to bring you."

I held my daughter tight and stared at him in cold silence.

Five years apart, and Finn looked even more handsome than before. Younger, somehow. His wolf had clearly benefited from the life he'd stolen. His coat was cut from the finest cloth in the Territories, the cuffs stitched with silver-thread sigils marking the Thornwood Alpha line. A line he'd inherited only because I had stabilized his wolf with my Omega blood and given him the strength to shift at all.

My daughter and I, by contrast, were dressed in rags. Our rough-spun clothes had more holes than I could count. We carried no pack scent. We smelled like the wild, like dirt and hunger and the open road.

"Husband, didn't you promise me yourself? You said within three years, you would send someone to bring me back to the territory. It's been five."

Finn's expression darkened, though a flicker of panic crossed his eyes. I caught the subtle shift in his scent, that iron-rust sharpening beneath the damp bark, the way it always did when he was cornered.

"Narelle, I will bring you back. But not now. The den is hosting a feast for the Grand Pack Council delegates and visiting Alphas. Take the pup and leave. We'll talk later."

He slipped a heavy pouch of gold moons into my hands, expecting me to take the money, walk away, and pretend we had nothing to do with each other.

I smiled coldly, opened the pouch, and turned it upside down. Gold moons clattered across the stone ground.

"The Pack Alpha has done well for himself. And this is how you dismiss the mate who stood by you when you had nothing? A few coins?"

My voice carried just far enough for every pack member and guard within earshot to hear every word. Finn's face went darker still.

He clenched his jaw and leaned in close. "What do you want from me? I said I'd bring you back. Can't you just take the pup and wait a little longer? Just until tonight—"

I turned away with a cold smile, shifting my daughter in my arms as I walked toward the den gates.

"Our daughter hasn't eaten in three days. I'm afraid she can't wait."

"Tell me, my lord, why are you so desperate to keep your own mate from stepping through the door? Is there something in there you'd rather I not see?"

I knew exactly why Finn didn't want me inside. The feast hall was filled with the most powerful Alphas in the Territories, and among them sat Luna Consort Rosalind Nighthollow, the High Alpha's most beloved mate.

Every guest seated comfortably at those tables believed that Edith Ashvale, his brother's former mate, was the rightful Luna of the Thornwood Pack.

A mate appearing out of nowhere was a problem Finn had no idea how to explain.

And that was precisely why I was here. To make sure he couldn't.

Finn stared at me, his face drained of color, scrambling for a way out.

Edith's eyes darted, and then she stepped forward with a warm smile, reaching for my arm. Her scent hit me before her fingers did, overripe peaches and crushed oleander, sweet enough to choke on.

"Pack-sister, what are you saying? You're Finn's mate, which makes you family. You and the pup arrived so suddenly that Finn was simply overwhelmed with joy and didn't know what to say. He would never hide anything from you!"

She tried to steer me toward a side chamber.

I pulled my arm free. "You must be my mate's brother's former mate."

Edith's smile froze for a heartbeat before she forced it back into place with a nod.

In my previous life, I had pitied Edith for losing her mate so young. I never thought to guard myself against her. So when she led me to that side chamber and offered me pastries, I never once suspected her intentions.

I had no idea that the wolfsbane in those pastries was what killed my daughter and me. And the hand that placed it there was Edith's.

"I think I'll skip the side chamber. Didn't my husband just mention there's a feast going on? My daughter and I are starving. We'll eat there. And while we're at it, my mate can introduce us to everyone."

"Narelle!"

Finn's voice dropped to a sharp growl, low enough that his wolf bled through it. "You want to walk into that feast dressed like that? You'd humiliate the entire pack on purpose?"

"At least change your clothes first. Edith, would you take her to—"