Midnight Heiress (Part I)

Synopsis

They buried Marcus Thorn beneath the old oak at the edge of his own land, and half of Edgewood came out to watch a man nobody had ever really known go into the ground. His study had always felt like a door held shut. Riley finds what he left her behind a loose panel at the back of the bottom drawer — one heavy envelope, sealed with wax and pressed with the shape of a crescent moon, her name on the front in his hand. You are not what you believe you are, and neither was I. Our blood is old, and it is bound to something older still — to the forest past our fence line, and to the pack that has guarded it for longer than anyone remembers. There is a debt on our name. I believed I could settle it myself and spare you the weight of it. I was wrong. Go into the forest. Find the pack. They will not trust you. And whatever you do, do not make my mistake and try to stand against this by yourself. Beside the letter lies the pendant she has seen a thousand times at her father’s throat and never once been allowed to hold: a crescent moon worked in dark silver. It warms against her palm, briefly, the way something does when it is taking your measure. Everyone in Edgewood knows the rule about those woods — people who go in after dark do not always come back, or do not come back the same. Riley goes in at sundown. What the forest gives her is the Lunar Wolves, who have guarded it since before the village had a name, and Elias, their alpha, who takes one look at the crescent moon and knows exactly whose daughter she is. Trust has to be earned here, and some of the pack has no intention of granting it. We’ll learn what Thorn blood is worth, one of them tells her, when the forest comes to collect it. The pack is not the only thing watching the treeline. The men out there are not bandits, whatever Edgewood prefers to believe — they are hunters, generations of them, fathers teaching sons, and they have spent a century learning how to cut magic out of a wood and carry it away. Everything they have taken so far is scraps, because the forest gives its power one way only. Thorn blood and a crescent moon, one of them says, looking at her throat. That’s the old key, isn’t it. Her father asked her to break a debt he could not, and warned her in the same breath not to try it the way he did. The village wants the trees left alone. The pack wants her to go home. The forest has been waiting a long time to be asked. Book One of the Midnight Heiress series.