CHAPTER ONE
I WAS A Chosen one in the city of the Sworn.
I’d kept my mark hidden from everyone but my grandmother until I revealed it in a desperate bid to save my boyfriend, Neil.
Then, he’d tried to kill me as thanks.
I’d learned that half the truths that shaped my life were lies. That people I’d believed dead were alive. I’d been taken by the enemy, set upon by treecrawlers, and stalked by bandits. I’d come through wilderness and water, through storm and near-starvation, and turned from hatred to hesitant friendship with the most fearsome and famed Sworn of all—the Silver Wolf.
He’d kissed me. I’d kissed him. Something had flamed between us, something unexpected and addictive and bright as the sun. But then, he’d revealed the truth to me. Another truth that cut me like the slash of a knife to the heart. I had come here to rescue Kassian, but it turned out that he was not a prisoner in need of rescuing. He, the one I’d loved most, was now one of the enemies I hated.
Liar, my heart whispered to me. If you hate him, why do you still dream of him every night?
I didn’t know what to think. My beloved Kassian was not only a Sworn, he the Silver Wolf, the favorite of the Alpha and terror of the land.
And yet…
I’d seen his hidden self, his unguarded soul, during moments in the forest as we struggled to survive. I’d seen his true nature, and he was not who I’d thought he would be even when I believed him to be Vixor. I’d seen kindness in him when I had expected only ruthlessness. I’d seen thoughtfulness when I’d expected violence.
But he was still a Sworn. He was still one of them. He’d chosen to be here. He’d joined them, and he remained with them. My Kassian, working for the Alpha, serving the enemy.
And that, more than anything, filled me with both anger and confusion.
How could Kassian have changed so much? What had they done to him to twist his soul into the shape of the Silver Wolf?
I was still reeling from it.
Now, he was gone, and I was in the capital city of the Sworn.
Alone.
The doors slammed shut behind me as I stepped inside the tower that stabbed at the sky like the end of a bayonet. It was dark inside. Cold. Muffled from the outside world, like I’d slipped beneath the dark waters of an icy lake.
Like a cage. A crypt. A hole.
I glanced around me at the cavernous darkness. Walls thick with tangled vines stretched upward to a high ceiling that was also thick with vines. It was as if the Thorn Trees had consumed the building entirely, feeding on the human-made pieces like a leech drawing blood from a vein.
Isabel, the female Sworn who’d been my escort the last leg of the journey to the capital, was gone. I was alone now. I was officially a Chosen. Prey in the grip of my captors.
And worst of all, I’d walked into this trap of my own free will.
My chest constricted with a sudden pang of cold fear. What if I didn’t succeed? What if my rescue plans failed? What if I was forced to marry a Sworn and give birth to his children?
Nausea drenched me. I pressed a fist to my lips as the contents of my stomach threatened to jump up my throat.
“Stand still and let me examine you, girl,” my newest jailor said.
The woman who spoke was obviously human, with a hatchet-shaped face and a voice like gravel grinding against steel. Dressed in bone-white robes from her toes to her throat, she carried a pronged stick that she leaned on like a cane. As a belt, she wore a whip coiled around her waist.
She stood before me, her gaze scraping over me with the exacting precision of a flaying knife.
I did my best not to shudder.
“My name is Mother Shade,” the woman said after making a thorough visual inspection of me. “And you will address me as ma’am, or Mother Shade. Speak only when spoken to, girl. Do you understand?”
I jerked my head in a nod.
“Speak, girl,” Mother Shade commanded like I was a dog. An animal.
I glared at her. I didn’t want to call her Mother Shade as if she were some kindly character from a children’s storybook. I didn’t want to grant her the dignity of ma’am, either. I wanted to spit in her face.
Mother Shade’s fingers dropped to the whip wrapped around her waist.
I was here to find my mother. Cooperation might get me further than furious defiance—if I could manage to stomach it.
“Yes, ma’am,” I ground out. The title felt like a stone in my mouth, grating over my tongue and against my teeth in a way that made my entire body tense in disgust as I pronounced it.
The skin around the woman’s eyes tightened. She pursed her lips. “That hesitation is defiance, girl. Don’t hesitate again.”
“Yes, ma’am.” The word felt like vomit.
There was no way I was going to be able to stomach it, I feared.
“Stand with your head up, looking at that far wall,” Mother Shade commanded.
I did as she ordered, trembling. My stomach twisted with hunger, and my limbs ached with exhaustion from the long ride.
Mother Shade paced around me, looking me over. She brushed my hair away from my neck, pinched the meat of my arms, and then grabbed my chin between her fingers and ordered me to open my mouth so she could inspect my teeth and gums.
I felt like a horse. An animal being looked over for defects before being sold to the highest bidder. Anger and humiliation burned inside me, but the feelings were muted by a hundred other thoughts.
Kassian.
No, Vixor.
Since we’d parted in the forest, I’d been in mental torment. I’d thought a thousand times about what I wanted to say to him when I saw him again—if I saw him again. Sometimes the words that filled me like a flood were angry, sometimes hurt, and sometimes they were filled with disbelief. How could he be my Kassian?
I still hadn’t fully accepted it. It was like a nightmare I couldn’t wake from.
Her hand still gripping my chin, Mother Shade drew a metal device from her waist and pressed the blunt muzzle of it to the back of my neck.
“Hold still,” she commanded.
I felt a bone-jarring click, then a blinding pain. I gasped audibly.
Mother Shade dropped her hand from my chin and stepped back as I reached back with my fingers and felt the place that throbbed like a bee sting.
“That’s your seed,” Mother Shade said. “It makes you trackable. All humans here in the capital must have them injected. Don’t try to escape. Your seed will betray your location. And don’t try to remove it. Humans found without seeds are killed upon sight, no matter who they are.”
My fingers traced a raised nub at the base of my neck. I wanted to be sick.
Injected trackers? This wasn’t part of the plan.
“Come,” she ordered then. “I will take you to your quarters.”
I followed her numbly as she led me to the elevators in the center of the tower. My grandmother had told me about them as a child—little rooms that, by some seeming magic that was really technological wonder, rose on their own from floor to floor, delivering passengers up and down the towers of the cities at the press of a glowing button.
Those elevators had long been dismantled, for the power to run them was mostly nonexistent now, except in a few privileged places in the city. Instead, a platform operated by pulleys traveled the vertical tunnel, manned by a muscled and silent human male who never looked at me. It was as if I was invisible to him. I wondered if he were a Sworn sympathizer or a human slave.