THE CRIMSON MOON PACT

ry elder and ranking wolf in Blackthorn territory was already seated around it. She took her place near the front, beside Ilsa, and tried not to not

fire with Garrick at his shoulder, a

Osric, and Bram. Killed on the border by vampire blades made to look like something else. I wo

ould rather he did not say quite so bluntly. "It means Nocthaven's council has grounds to call the treaty compromised.

and unhappy, and Wren felt Ilsa's han

he fire, an old woman named Petra who had outlived two Alphas and b

each other. This wasn't clean. This was designed to look like exactly the kind of provocation that gives Nocthaven's counc

tting across the fire before she could stop it. "So we'r

everyone here to understand what's at stake if the council in Nocthaven decides otherwise, regardless of what we intend or don't intend. If they call the treaty broken and we refuse the bride, they have the right under the old terms to consid

y grandparents who had lived through the tail end of it, stories that all ended the same way regardless of who told them:

asked quietly, "

sa first, and something moved through his face th

bride has to be unmated Blackthorn blood, direct line, capable of carrying the binding." His eyes moved

were trying to make it real by saying it enough times. Wren stood very still in the middle of it, and for a moment she was not in the clearing at all. She

ice came out steadier than

nt to. I have spent nine years trying to make sure this exact conversation never had to happen. But I am the Alpha of this pack, and if I let thr

my mother and hand myself over as a bride to wh

it that he had never once let her see before. "I know what I'm asking. I know exactly what I'm asking, better than anyone in this clearing, becaus

about Tamsin, seventeen years old and dead in the frost. She thought about Bram's joke about the cook's stew, and about Osric's baby fat still soft under his fur. She thought about the mothers

promise she had made at eleven that had never once a

forgive them. Not because I believe in this pact, or trust a single person in that city

tly she could not tell them apart, and he crossed the clearing and pulled her into an

ough that only she could hea

d the city on the horizon, already promising herself a second time that whatever Nocthaven expected t

lize the early renewal, the escort that would need to be arranged for a trip through territory that had not seen a Blackthorn wolf cross it peacefully in two hundred years. Wren sat throu

watched the stars wheel slowly overhead, and tried to imagine what kind of man was waiting for her at the other end of this road, the o