"If you ruin tonight, cousin, what Father did to you yesterday will feel like a love tap."

Lydia's lacquered nails press half-moons into my wrist, right over the bruises that haven't faded to yellow yet. She knows where they are. She watched our father put them there, standing in the doorway of his study with a glass of wine and a look of mild interest, like she was watching someone discipline a dog.

"The most powerful Alpha in four territories is about to make me his Luna." Her grip cinches until a whimper crawls up my throat and dies behind my teeth. "You will be invisible tonight. Understood?"

"Yes." The word peels off my dry tongue like dead skin.

She shoves me into the prep counter. My hip catches the steel edge and the kitchen staff keep their heads down, hands busy, eyes carefully empty. They never look up when Lydia reminds me of the hierarchy. Looking up means involvement. Involvement means risk.

My uniform pulls across my hips where the seams were cut for someone thinner. Another quiet cruelty. Every garment in this pack is sized for Lydia's frame, and my body is a daily trespass against the space I'm allowed to occupy.

"Good." She checks her reflection in a polished tray, smoothing silk. "Finish the wine service. Try not to break anything else this week."

The door swings shut. I give myself one breath. Just one. Even my breathing has to be managed around others. Too loud, too visible, and I become a target.

Lydia as Luna.

The thought would be funny if my ribs didn't ache every time I inhaled. But the man she's marrying makes her cruelty look like playground games.

His name has been crawling through these halls for weeks, ever since the arranged marriage was announced. Three days since my last real meal, punishment for a dropped plate, and my hands won't stop shaking as I line crystal glasses on a silver tray.

Alpha Cade of Iron Peak.

The stories about him are the kind people tell in low voices with their backs to the wall. None of his previous wives lasted a year. His appetites, in war and in bed, are the sort that become legends and then warnings. They say he takes his women the way he takes territory. Without negotiation. Without mercy. Until there's nothing left but quiet surrender or a body to bury.

And Lydia preens about marrying him like she's won a prize.

For decades, Crescent Falls has bled against Iron Peak. The border war claimed sons and daughters on both sides, and nobody remembers what started it anymore. The marriage changes everything. Peace, sealed with my cousin's body and my father's signature.

At least she'll be someone else's problem soon.

The guilt arrives before I finish the thought. Even Lydia doesn't deserve whatever Alpha Cade will do behind closed doors.

The banquet hall glitters with candlelight and forced smiles. I move the way I've learned to move since I was twelve and became a murderer and a slave in the same afternoon. Silent. Forgettable. Eyes on the floor. Part of the furniture.

Delegates from both packs circle each other with the careful politeness of people who'd rather be holding weapons. I weave between them, pouring wine, collecting empties, shrinking.

That's when Lydia's foot catches my ankle.

The tray tilts. Wine arcs through the air in a slow crimson ribbon and shatters across marble. The sound travels. Every head turns. Every eye finds me on my hands and knees in a spreading red stain.

"Oh, Wren." Lydia's voice is warm syrup over broken glass. "How clumsy. You should fetch more wine from the cellar before you cause another scene."

"Of course. I apologize."

The words come from muscle memory. Eleven years of rehearsal.

I flee. The hallways blur past, all wrong, rearranged for the banquet. The cellar should be west but every corridor looks identical in the low evening light, and I'm moving too fast to think clearly because all I can calculate is the distance between this moment and the next beating.

A door on my left. I push through it without thinking, praying for storage shelves and dust.

It's a study. Dim. Warm. The door clicks shut behind me and I take two steps before the smell stops me cold.

Musk and smoke and sex, heavy enough to taste.

A massive figure fills a leather chair at the far end of the room, head tipped back, throat exposed. A woman kneels between his spread thighs, blonde hair moving in a rhythm that leaves nothing to imagination.

My body locks. Feet welded to the hardwood.

His eyes open. Pale, pale blue, the color of glacial runoff, and they find me with the precision of something that hunts.

The sound that comes from his chest is subterranean. It rolls through the floorboards and climbs my spine.

He doesn't stop the woman. Doesn't cover himself. He watches me watching them, his gaze tracing the flush that spills down my throat, the way my chest rises and falls in shallow, useless gulps.

"Stop." One word. The woman pulls back instantly. He's exposed, thick, slick with her mouth, and my thighs press together before I can stop the reflex.

"Get out," he tells her. Not me. Her. He never looks away from me.

She scrambles past. I should run. I should apologize and disappear the way I always disappear, but my legs have abandoned me.

He stands. The chair creaks with relief. Seven feet of carved muscle and something barely caged. He doesn't tuck himself away. He grips himself once, slow, deliberate, and watches my eyes follow the movement with a focus that makes me dizzy.

"Close the door."

My hand moves without permission. The latch clicks like a verdict.

"Come here."

My feet carry me forward. Close enough to see the veins along his length. Close enough that his size stops being abstract and becomes terrifyingly specific. He tucks himself away, finally, and takes a step that eliminates the room.

"Your scent." His voice has dropped to something private. Each step he takes shrinks the air between us until there's nothing left but him. "It's... unusual."

His hand reaches for my face. Eleven years of practice fire through my nervous system and I flinch, bracing for impact.

His palm cups my jaw. Gentle. Impossibly, confusingly gentle. His hand is large enough to hold my whole face and he tilts it up toward his with the care of someone handling something that might shatter.

"What's your name, little wolf?"

"I'm nobody." The words spill out like a reflex. "Just a servant. I'm sorry for the intrusion, I was looking for the wine cellar and..."

"Name." His eyes flash. My pulse trips.

"Wren," I whisper.

"Wren." He rolls it across his tongue like he's testing the weight of it. Deciding whether to keep it.

He steps closer. Close enough that I have to crane my neck to maintain eye contact. Close enough that I can feel him pressing against my stomach through the thin uniform, still hard, insistent.

"Wren!" A voice from the hallway. Angry. Searching.

Kitchen staff. If I don't get back with the wine...

"I should go." I step back, breaking the hold on my jaw. "I'm sorry, I need to..."

"Until later, then. Wren."

He positions himself between me and the door, and his body grazes mine as I slip past. The contact sends a live current across my skin, and I feel his mouth curve against my hair as I flee.

The banquet swallows me whole. I resume my duties with shaking hands, my mind stuck on glacial blue eyes and careful hands and the impossible heat of that study.

I'd never seen him before. A visitor from Iron Peak. One of the enemy delegates.

But why does my skin still burn where he touched me?

The main doors open. The room transforms.

Every conversation stops mid-word. Every spine pulls straight. Every wolf in the hall turns toward the entrance with the kind of primal recognition that doesn't require names or introductions.

The stranger walks in, and all that predatory focus I felt in the study now radiates outward, touching every corner of the room. My father, Alpha Garrett, approaches with a smile that stops at his cheekbones.

"Alpha Cade." He extends his hand. "Welcome to Crescent Falls."

My glass slips from my fingers.

The stranger, Alpha Cade, finds me across the crowded room. He reads the recognition in my face, the blood draining from my skin, the understanding slamming through me like a door torn off its hinges.

His smile turns slow and dark with satisfaction.

Until later, Wren.