The Warren Pack elders exchanged puzzled glances. None of them had expected the usually agreeable Cassandra to stand her ground so firmly.
She had even defied Rebecca, the pack’s matriarch.
"She’ll come around. She doesn’t have any other choice," Rebecca said coldly.
That was true, or so the elders believed. With her birth pack gone, Cassandra had no one left to shelter her except the Warren Pack. She was still Adrian’s rightful Luna, and no one in that room could say she had ever been mistreated.
Early the next morning, Cassandra and Lulu returned to Northwatch, the territory that had once belonged to her father’s pack.
The land was bleak, buried under fallen leaves. Half a year of neglect had let weeds grow taller than a person across what used to be a well-kept courtyard. The moment Cassandra crossed the border markers, her chest tightened.
Six months ago, she had collapsed the instant the news reached her, that her entire pack had been slaughtered in a single night. She had wept over her grandmother’s body and her mother’s, both gone cold, both drained of the warmth that used to fill this land. Blood had soaked into every corner of the territory. She could still smell it sometimes, faint and impossible, in dreams.
Memorial stones for her ancestors and her mother had been set into the earth behind the old pack house. Cassandra and Lulu laid flowers at the base of each one, their tears falling without pause. Cassandra sank to her knees before her parents’ markers. Her eyes were swollen from crying, but there was nothing soft left in the way she looked at the stones.
"Dad, Mom, if you can hear me, forgive your daughter for what she’s about to do. It isn’t that I don’t want a mate, a home, children someday. It’s that Adrian is not a man I can trust with my life anymore. I promise you, Lulu and I will live well."
Lulu knelt beside her, sobbing so hard her shoulders shook.
When they were finished, they climbed into the carriage waiting at the border and rode straight for the Alpha King’s stronghold. It was already noon by the time the towers came into view.
Under a scorching autumn sun, Cassandra and Lulu stood like carved statues before the gates. An hour passed. No one came to let them through.
Lulu’s voice cracked with worry. "My lady, the King might refuse to see you. He probably thinks you’ve come to fight the mating decree. You didn’t eat last night, and you haven’t eaten this morning either. Are you all right? Let me find you something."
"I’m not hungry."
The only thing Cassandra felt, standing there with the sun beating down on her, was the unbending will to end this marriage and go home for good.
"Please don’t punish yourself like this. It isn’t worth falling sick over." Lulu wrung her hands. "You’re still his rightful Luna, still lady of the Warren Pack. Even if General Yates is named his second mate, she’ll never be more than a glorified favorite. Maybe, maybe we should just endure it?"
Cassandra’s eyes went flat and cold. "Lulu. If that’s the kind of thing you’re going to say, don’t say anything at all."
Lulu sighed, out of arguments and out of hope. She had believed that once Adrian returned from the front, some peace would settle over the pack house. Instead, everything had gotten worse.
Inside the stronghold’s private study, Beta Derek Walker had already announced Cassandra’s arrival to the Alpha King three times.
"Your Majesty, Luna Warren is still waiting outside the gates," he said again.
Alpha King Salvador Quinton set down the report in his hands and pressed his fingers to his temples. "I can’t see her. The decree is already spoken. A King’s word to his warriors can’t be taken back. Tell her to go home."
"The guards tried. She won’t move. She’s been standing out there over an hour without so much as shifting her weight."
A flicker of guilt crossed Salvador’s face. "Adrian asked for this bond as a reward for what he did in the war. I didn’t want to grant it, but refusing him in front of his own warriors would have humiliated both him and General Yates. Their kills, their pack’s losses, they earned that request."
"If we’re speaking of what was earned in that war, no one earned more than the Alpha of Northwatch and General Sullivan," Derek said.
Salvador’s jaw tightened at the mention of Northwatch. Hector Sinclair, Alpha of that pack, had once mentored him, back when Salvador was still a young warrior clawing his way toward the throne, long before the fighting that put him there had turned his hands permanently red. He remembered Cassandra from those years too, a delicate pup trailing behind her father, fair-skinned, easily startled, easy to overlook. He hadn’t expected to still be dealing with her a decade later, kneeling outside his gates in the heat.
Apart from his own brother, the wolf other packs called the Hell Monarch on the battlefield, the kingdom of packs had no warrior more capable than Hector had been. In the last war against Westhaven, Dominic Sullivan’s third son had lost an arm to a Westhaven blade. His seventh son hadn’t survived at all, though that loss had been buried quietly, kept from spreading fear through the ranks.
Derek wasn’t wrong. Weighed against Hector’s record, against what the Sinclairs had bled for this kingdom, Adrian and Aurora’s contributions were nothing.
"Fine. Let her in." Salvador exhaled slowly. "If she agrees to the bond, I’ll grant her whatever she asks for. Land, rank, a title of her own if that’s what it takes."
Derek’s shoulders eased. "As always, you see clearly, Your Majesty."