Chapter 2

Back home, I knocked back a handful of painkillers.

After ninety-nine rounds, my body had gone numb to pain a long time ago. But tonight, somehow, it hurt worse than any of them.

I sat staring at the portrait of us that had gone up on the wall not long ago.

When the Trials hit round ninety-nine, Cassian had taken me to have it done. I'd laughed and asked if that broke his own rules.

He'd scoffed. "My Trials. I'm the rule. And you'll always be the reason I break it."

Now, for someone else, he'd broken that rule for good. And he'd sat there and watched me go down like a clown.

That night, Cassian didn't come home.

Aria sent me a video of him going at her like an animal.

He had her in his most lavish den, taking her in every corner of it. The whole place reeked of them.

That black pearl he'd burned a fortune on for me last month—it was in his mouth now, dragging over her skin while she moaned under him.

I'd never seen him that wild. That far gone.

[Miss Wren, you saw how hooked Cassian is on me. Be smart. Walk away.]

I stared at the message, fingers gone white, holding the tears back.

When I first met Cassian, my grandmother was dying—wolfsbane in her blood, and not a coin for the cleansing she needed.

Cassian came down on us like a god. He paid for her treatment. Then, like it was nothing, he handed me a token into his Trials.

He looked at me the way a predator looks at prey, a smile pulling at his mouth.

"It's just a game. Play it right, and you've got nothing to lose."

Even outside the Alpha circles, everyone had heard Cassian was twisted.

He ran the Trials because someone he'd loved once betrayed him. After that, he stopped believing in love. He made a game out of it—seeing how low a she-wolf would crawl to mate him.

I took the token anyway.

I needed the coin. I needed to save my grandmother.

In the Trials, he called himself King, lounging on his throne, watching she-wolves tear each other apart for the Luna's place.

His twisted Trials—I gritted my teeth through ninety-nine of them.

Diving off cliffs. Locked in a box with vipers. Seven minutes underwater. Eating live roaches.

The ones that made everyone else scream and crack—I took them all without a sound.

One Trial was a jump from way up high.

A rival, eyes wild, slashed my arm and ripped away the only thing that would've slowed my fall. Bleeding, dropping toward the sea, I heard his voice crackle through the link in my ear, amused. "Over forty rounds in. Didn't think you'd die here, did you? Any last words?"

I closed my eyes. "Just make sure my grandmother gets her cleansing."

His low laugh came through the link, and I let go.

They fished me out, and I woke up in the healer's den, half dead.

Later he came to see me, his eyes dark and heavy.

"This one's yours. I changed my mind—the winner's whoever's bolder."

"Wren, you won. Not the round. You won me."

"Still want to keep going? Walk now, and you leave with a fortune."

He said it with a self-mocking smile, his eyes strangely hollow.

Something in me gave. I didn't say a word. I just put my arms around him.

The next second his whole face lit up, wild with it. He cupped the back of my head and kissed me deep.

"Wren. From now on, you're mine. I'll give you everything—the best of it all."

He bought me a mansion. He signed over a tenth of the pack's wealth to my name. He paraded me through the Alphas and made them call me his Luna.

And when the she-wolf he'd once wanted came crawling back—the one who'd betrayed him, the love he never got to have—and tore into me in front of everyone, crying, begging him to take her back—

He didn't blink. He cracked a bottle over her head, then had her dragged off and torn apart.

Then he left them with one line: "Anyone else want to insult my Luna? Step up."

He favored me so openly that everyone was sure I was the special one.

They had me believing it too—that I was the one who could make him believe in love again.

Until tonight. Tonight I finally got it. The whole thing was just a story I'd told myself.