In my previous life, the moment I heard Finn had become the Alpha of the Thornwood Pack, I bundled up my daughter and traveled a thousand miles to find him. Edith killed us both with wolfsbane-laced pastries.
My last thought before the darkness took me was regret. Not for dying, but for severing the blood-bond with my father, Alpha Aldric Silvercrest, all for the sake of mating with Finn Thornwood.
This time, the moment I opened my eyes, I sold the den, packed what little money it brought, and set out for the capital.
But I was not going to the Thornwood territory.
I told the driver to take the long way around, and the carriage rolled to a stop before the gates of the Silvercrest Pack compound.
The driver took one look at us, my daughter and me in our threadbare rags, shuffling toward the Alpha's gates like a pair of packless rogues, and let out a snort.
"Takes all kinds. Now even rogues have the nerve to show up at the Alpha's door claiming to be blood."
I ignored him. I took Hildegarde Thornwood's small hand in mine, walked to the gate, and knelt.
"Father. Your daughter knows she was wrong."
My father was the Alpha of the Silvercrest Pack, the most powerful pack on the Northern Frontier. My mother had been a royal she-wolf of the Valdorian wolf nation.
I was born an Alpha-blooded daughter of the Silvercrest line, raised in moonstone and silver. Then one spring, on a hunt near the Greenshire borderlands, I stumbled upon Finn Thornwood, the unwanted second pup of the Thornwood Pack.
His brothers had been tearing each other apart over the Alpha succession, and he'd nearly been killed in the crossfire. They broke his leg and left him in a ditch, half-starved and wolfless, unable to shift.
I felt sorry for him. So I saved his life.
Then, sharing those cramped border dens day after day, I fell in love with him.
When I swore I would mate with Finn and no one else, my father was furious. His voice went cold as iron, and the weight of his Alpha aura pressed down on the room until the air itself seemed to thin.
"If you mate with that man, I no longer have a daughter."
Finn swore to the Moon Goddess he would cherish me for the rest of his life.
I stripped off my moonstone and silver, put on a plain cotton dress, and became his mate.