THE CRIMSON MOON PACT

ath the cold pine smell of the border woods, and she knew befor

set into the ground before her father was born, down through the hollow where the creek cut close to the tree line before it bent east toward vampir

sric, who still had baby fat in his cheeks under all that fur when he shifted. And Bram, who had made her laugh two nights ago ove

ho still had time to fall apart. She knelt instead, pressed two fingers to Bram's throat out

mid-shift. Vampires did not usually bother with blades when they hunted. They preferred their own teeth, their own hands, something closer to intimate.

heir skin even when they were nowhere in sight. Not one scent. Three, maybe four, overlapping and already fading, which meant they had bee

years ago it had taken her mother, in a border skirmish that the official record called a misunderstanding and that Wren had never once believed was

f shift, her father's second Garrick first among them, and then her father himself, moving through the underbrush the way he alw

n watched something in him go still and hard, the particular stillness he only wore around h

," he sai

n this clearing needed to. "Blade wounds. Not claws, not teeth. Wh

ound the way she had, and when he stood back up there was something i

a message

wh

he looked less like her Alpha and more like a man who had buried a wife and was now standing over three more bodies he was respon

d late into the night and her name came up in a conversation she was never meant to hear. Right now she understood o

mother's face floating up out of memory uninvited. She had been eleven when it happened, old enough to remember the funeral pyre and the way her father had not cried in front of anyone, not once, not even when the fire

ame cold scent still caught in the back of her throat, she understood exactly how li

space of a single breath what had happened to their children. She did not stay for the worst of it. She could not. She left the bodies with the healers

wrapped a blanket around her shoulders withou

uncil fire," Ilsa said

t the

ause. "And about the renewal. Garrick's already saying it out loud. If Nocthaven's council decides this counts as a border

en ask for. You're bonded to Ren now. Th

swer, and Wren felt the cold settle into her ches

y-three years, and she thought about her mother's face in the firelight the night before she died, and about Bram's stupid joke about the cook's stew, an

place in her chest where instinct lived ahead of decision, exactly what her