At moonrise, Adrian stopped being Alpha.

Nothing shook. No thunder rolled over Ironclad. I only felt the pack pressure change, a weight I'd lived under so long I had mistaken it for weather.

The next morning he came to the east guest wing alone—no guards, no Gamma, no Alpha tone.

Four months later, a woman sat across from my desk twisting a paper bracelet around her wrist.

"He never hit me," she said.

I had learned that sentence usually meant someone had already told her she needed a worse one.

I opened a fresh page. "Then we don't write that