Chapter 1 — **Prologue**
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Silas
His footsteps echo as he walks down the endless prison corridor. A chilling draft snakes through the stone, carrying the distant clank of chains that sets his nerves on edge. Shadows coil around his arms and legs, almost as if they are alive. They slink around his ankles like cats, brushing against his skin with an eerie, knowing touch.
His nostrils flare as a sweet, familiar scent hits them.
She’s peering through the barred window of one of the cells ahead, her back to him.
He tilts his head to one side. Is this his dream, or hers? Has he merely imagined her? Or is this a consequence of the bond between them—a tether that has bled into their sleep before, leaving marks on the waking world?
Her red hair burns like blood in the gloom. It’s as if she’s been plucked from her bed and dropped here. She’s wearing his shirt, the one he gave Thorne for her to put on after Caelan bit her. It’s too big for her, caressing the soft curve of her behind and brushing her thighs. Her calves and feet are bare. He swallows.
She stiffens like prey, and he wonders if she senses him watching. Then he follows her gaze. A writhing mass of shadow surges toward her. The jailer of this prison is coming. His heart lurches at the sight, a primal warning tightening his chest.
Silas prowls toward her as she edges back, the shadows whispering at his heels. She bumps into his chest, and he hooks an arm around her waist—clamping a hand over her mouth before she can scream.
He brings his lips to her ear. “You shouldn’t be here, little rabbit.”
She stiffens in his arms.
And how it torments him. Every touch, every scent, is a blade he loathes yet craves. Her fragrance washes over him—even here. She smells like the slither of moonlight that would drift through the grate of the cell beneath the palace. Freedom, taunting him. The broken promise of something he cannot have. A pang of something he refuses to name flickers through him, swiftly buried beneath the familiar weight of resentment.
Footsteps approach.
He drags her through an open cell door. It clicks shut behind them. Her attention shifts to the emblem carved in the obsidian beneath the barred window; a key with two crescent moons in the bow. He wonders if she knows what it means. Most Wolves would—it’s a remnant of when the acolytes rose a century ago—but this symbol is not common in the Elarion. They don’t worship the darker gods there, and he doubts her sheltered upbringing would have touched such lore.
Her elevated pulse drums in his ears. His arm tenses against her torso. “Shh.”
The temperature drops, and Silas’s breath mists in front of his face. Elowen inches back, as if desperate for warmth, even from him. He holds her tighter.
The footsteps fade, and Silas exhales. He removes his hand from her mouth. She twists in his grasp to look up at him, and the soft swell of her breasts presses against his chest. A crease forms between her eyes. “What—”
Her attention jerks back to the door.
The figure stalks back. Thick, unnatural darkness bleeds through the barred windows, and a faint whisper—Varethwild—hisses through the air, gone before he can grasp it.
“Wake up. Wake up. Wake up.” She’s muttering under her breath, her voice trembling, her hands clutching at his arm. “It’s just a dream. Wake up.”
It’s not just a dream.
He shuts his eyes. He wrenches her back. He doesn’t hit the wall—instead, it dissolves. The cell door bursts open in front of them, but they’re already falling through endless darkness, a cold wind biting at his skin.
He lands on his feet in the cell beneath the palace, and he knows they’re inhabiting his dream now. A memory. He doesn’t like it here, but it’s not as dangerous as the place before.
There’s a cot against one wall, the mattress stained brown with old blood. A bucket of waste sits in the corner. There are books piled against one wall, a candle flickering beside them. The scent of lemons mixes with iron and the cloying odor of bodily fluids.
Elowen stands in the center of the space. She’s perfectly poised, her back straight, her chin slightly raised so she can look down her nose at her surroundings. Only her slightly elevated pulse and the faint thread of light he feels through their bond—like a whisper inside him—tells him she is not as unfazed as she seems.
It galls him, that polished veneer. She’s always so well put together, yet he’s sensed the violence simmering beneath her skin since he first set eyes on her. It makes him want to provoke her.
When he was a child, some of the older boys from the village used to throw stones at the ducks in the river. He didn’t understand why they did it—even at six years old it had seemed juvenile to him—until he met her. His hands clench now, as they did then, remembering the sting of restraint, the lash of control enforced by others.
He’d do anything to ruffle her feathers. He wants to see what happens when she unleashes herself.
Perhaps it torments him so much because he knows, deep down, he’s the same. He wears many masks, too. He knows what dark secrets lurk within his soul, but he doesn’t know what lies behind the mask she wears. He thinks it might be magnificent.
She faces him, and he steps closer. He studies her face, her cheekbones, her blue eyes that peer up at him through thick eyelashes. Fuck, she’s beautiful.
“Are you really here?” he asks.
She frowns. “Where else would I be?” Her tone hesitates, uncertainty threading through the surreal weight of the dream. A dazed look flickers over her features. “Are you?”
Footsteps approach the cell door behind her, and he sighs. “You should go. I’d rather you didn’t see this next bit.”
She glances over her shoulder. When she turns her attention to him once more, his damned subconscious has dressed him in a blood-drenched shirt. His feet are bare and dirty, and his breeches are torn.
“Are you hurt?” There’s a hint of concern in her voice, and it cuts him deeper than he’d like: she sounds like she might actually give a shit.
“Time to wake up, little rabbit.”
“Where are we?” Her eyebrows knit together. “Where *were* we?”
“If you remember this in the morning, I’ll tell you.”
He grabs her arms and shuts his eyes. He needs to wake up.
He pushes her into the wall.
They fall into endless darkness once more, that cold wind howling around them.
Silas’s eyes jolt open.
He’s in his bed at Lowfell, and the crescent moon slithers through his window, a haunting echo of the dream. His heart is pounding. He’s not sure what is more disturbing: the prison of his dreams, or Elowen’s presence in them.
He dresses swiftly, boots half-laced, and slips from his chambers, drawn to the chapel as if fleeing the cage of his own mind—or the thread of light still pulsing within him.
He pads through Blackthorn Hold. The darkness is almost as thick as it was in the prison. He passes the room he put Elowen and Thorne in. Thorne is talking in hushed tones, and he feels a twinge of her panic, sharper and frayed through their bond. She has woken as unsettled as him.
When he’s outside, he crosses the small courtyard to the land beyond the Blackthorn Hold walls. The loch that surrounds Lowfell is as black as the sky, rumored to hide drowned souls in its depths. The mountains on either side are shrouded with shadow.
Cold wind ruffling his hair, he delves into woodland and wanders through the ash trees until a chapel comes into view, its ancient stone a cage of another kind.
He enters. The gloom is thick within. Fragments of glass crunch beneath his boots as he passes the rotting pews and makes his way down the aisle. The stained windows once showed the story of Night’s triumph over the Moon Goddess, and how he trapped her within his prison.
He tenses when a flapping sound echoes around the space, but it’s just a bird nesting in the rafters. He pulls himself onto the altar, brushing dust from the stone before lying back, knees raised, hands clasped behind his head. His fingers trace the edge of a carving as he stares up at the emblem in the stone arch above—a key with two crescent moons within. The symbol of Night’s prison. He remembers his father whispering of it as a child, a warning of a lock that must never be broken, a key that devours souls.
The door creaks open, though he’d sensed the familiar presence moments before.
“I thought I heard you walking around.” Jack’s low voice rumbles around the small chapel as he strolls toward him. Silas’s second in command drops onto one of the pews at the front, stretching his legs out and crossing them at the ankles. “Trouble sleeping?”
Silas makes a noncommittal sound before turning his head. Jack’s dreadlocks are tied back from his face, revealing fading bruising around one of his eyes. Thorne’s handiwork, no doubt. Jack was responsible for keeping Thorne out of the way while Silas persuaded Caelan—the Wolf King—to ask for Elowen’s hand in marriage. His sleeves are rolled up so Silas can see the tattoos curling around his corded forearms. Silas knows what that ink hides.
“She was in my dream.”
Jack releases a soft chuckle. “You shouldn’t have done it, you know.”
Silas sighs. “Probably not.”
Jack runs a hand over his mouth. “Word is, Night’s acolytes are stirring. Maybe even an army in Varethwild.”
Silas pulls a face. “The Night Prince? Alex, then?”
“Probably. I’ll send someone to monitor the Grey Keep. He could make things difficult for us.”
The thread of light that Elowen gave Silas wraps around his soul and pulses inside him. He shifts on the stone, stretching one leg and arching his back slightly, his fingers curling involuntarily as if to grasp—or crush—the bond.
Jack frowns. “What’s wrong with you?”
“I can feel her.”
Jack’s nostrils flare, then he chuckles. “Luckily for you, she’s not a half-wolf who’s just about to go through the transition . . . oh, wait. . .”
“Go haunt someone else, Jack.”
“I remember when I was first bitten. I didn’t leave my bed for a week.”
“Spend some quality time with your right hand, did you?”
Jack laughs as he stands. “And the left.” He walks over to Silas and clasps his shoulder, then hesitates at the door, hand lingering on the frame before he speaks. “Learn to block it out or it’ll drive you insane.”
Silas grunts, and Jack steps outside. The door swings shut, sealing Silas in a crushing silence with the darkness. He rubs his face with both hands. He imagines a cage around his soul, so that Elowen’s thread of light cannot touch the rawest parts of him. The worst of the feeling eases, though his blood still runs hotter than usual.
Exhaling, he stares at the carving in the stone above his head—the key with two crescent moons within. The symbol for Night’s prison. The Varethwild wind slips through the caved-in roof, stirring the scent of old blood. He wonders how many were sacrificed on this altar, how many the former alpha of Lowfell offered in vain to Night. The fool thought innocent blood could buy power. Silas’s jaw tightens—he knows he’d trade almost anything for freedom, even, perhaps, her. The thought is a poison he can’t shake.
Night doesn’t want blood, though. He wants souls.
More than anything, he wants the key to his prison so he can escape it and unleash his violence upon the world.
Night wants the Heart of the Moon.
He would offer unimaginable power to whoever brought it to him.
And as Silas lies there, caged by stone and memory, he wonders if Elowen remembers the dream at all.
