Chapter 3

The mission paperwork comes through fast.

The cancellation of my mating to Caden — I told my father to sit on that one. Tell Mira privately. Let her file her own ceremony request. The rest of the pack finds out the day of the ceremony.

Cruel? Maybe. Last life he buried me in a single line of carved stone. This life he gets a surprise of his own.

All the mission files burn in my fireplace the second I've memorized them.

Caden's been useless for days. Anyone can see it. He skips training, skips meals, haunts the Council chambers begging to be let in on the mission planning. They keep turning him away.

I cross the courtyard after dinner and there they are, tucked into the garden pavilion — Caden and Mira, his head bent over his hands, hers tipped toward his shoulder like a flower toward the sun.

He's weaving something out of long grass. His fingers know the pattern.

My mother taught him that pattern. She used to make me wolves out of grass when I was small, little carved wolf shapes that would last a week before they fell apart. After she died, Caden started making them for me. That's how he kept me from crying myself sick. Grass wolves.

Then Mira showed up, and there was suddenly a second pup in the garden, and the grass wolves started getting handed to *her* too.

"Caden, what're you making? I've never seen one of those before."

Lying, soft-eyed bitch. She's seen a thousand.

"Just something stupid," he mutters, hands still moving.

Mira's gaze slides past him and lands on me. Standing there in the path. Watching.

Her eyes light up.

"Oh — could you make me a little wolf? Just a small one?"

Caden's hands freeze.

He knows. He has to know what she's just done. The grass wolves are mine. The last one my mother ever made for me — the one she gave me the morning before the rogues hit our compound — that wolf is sitting on the shelf above my bed right this minute. It's the only thing I have of her left.

Caden looks up. His eyes find mine across the garden.

I don't give him anything. I turn around and walk away.

Let him weave her one. Let him weave her ten. I'm not going to stand there and watch.

That night there's a small wooden box outside my bedroom door.

I open it. A grass wolf, fresh, perfect, exactly the way my mother used to make them. Same little crooked ear. Same loop of stem for the tail.

"Childish," I say out loud, to no one.

I put the box down outside the door and close it.

In the morning the box is still there. Untouched. He didn't take it back.

I stare at it for a long minute.

Then I pick the wolf up and tuck it into my jacket pocket, right against my ribs.

I tell myself it's because my mother made the original. It has nothing to do with the wolf who wove this one. Nothing at all.

I walk out into the training yard and don't think about Caden Wolfe for the rest of the day.

I think about a wolf I've never met. Damon Ravencroft. Alpha of Ravencroft Pack. The wolf I'm going to crawl into bed with in nine days' time.

The reports say he hasn't taken a mate. Hasn't taken a Luna. Buries himself in war planning. Cold-blooded, brilliant, half a head taller than any wolf in his pack, and the rogues he's been doing deals with say even *they* are scared of him.

Good.

I'd rather be scared of my target than soft on him.