Prologue - Fifteen Years Earlier

It astounded him how different one side of the river was from the other.

On his side, the rain streamed down cobblestones in threads that caught the light. Women lifted their skirts over red leather boots to tiptoe through puddles. Men in cologne checked the rain-spotted glass of expensive watches before they hailed a taxi.

But on this side of the river, the rain turned the place to muck. The mud was heavy and cold. It slurped at his boots and splattered the hem of his trousers. And it smelled like a cracked coffin from hell: fish rot, piss, motor oil and cheap, pink-smelling perfume.

The perfume came from The Dice and Damsel, a brothel with yellow windows open to the rain. Women in nothing but multicoloured corsets leaned out and smoked long cigarettes between lipsticked teeth. They watched him cross under their windows; his hat worn low, collar flicked up to his ears, cane barely squelching a purchase in the mud.

Of all the places in the world to wedge an altar, the Old Mother had to choose this one.

It was a hovel of a building off the last door of the Damsel. The peeling white paint marked a different sort of establishment than the red and black stripes of the brothel.

Lewis hesitated, listening over the rain to the voices inside. Then he knocked three times with the gold knob of his cane.

Two women waited inside, holding candlesticks that stretched strange hands of light over their faces and deepened their frowns. The girl must be further inside.

"You came alone," said the first.

Lewis bowed his head. "So as not to frighten the girl, then." The altar was nothing but a closet compared to the cavernous, sprawling creatures of his side of the river. Eight kneelers; no electricity. Just candles melting into the floor and the heavy smell of incense coating his lungs.

"Well, you're not seeing her," the second woman snapped.

This human he knew immediately. Her voice held a cadence that soothed the animal in him. Frederica, the girl's grandmother; a potential mate of the Pack herself. Though faded with age, he caught her scent too, a mix of musk and honeysuckle.

Lewis bowed over his cane to her, pressing his dripping hat to his heart. "Madam Finn, as Alpha of White Pine, allow me to offer my deepest apologies to both you and your granddaughter for the breech of our contract."

Frederica merely watched him down the slant of her nose.

"My," the first woman clicked her tongue, wrapping a frizzy wooled shawl more tightly around her. "The alpha himself? What an honour." She must have been Old Mother Tamar, the founder of this small altar.

"You mated then, Alpha?" the grandmother asked, tilting her chin up slightly.

"Yes, madam. Tatiana has been my mate these last two years."

Frederica sniffed. "Makes no difference, no matter what they say. A wolf is a beast. And no beast will touch that child ever again."

"Honestly, Rica." Mother Tamar gestured for his coat and laid it over a kneeler. "He's come all this way. The Alpha. A grace from him might allow the girl a little peace."

Frederica watched him set his hat and cane gently over the coat. Lewis noticed a tremor in her hand before she crossed her arms. "This way, then."

Lewis followed the swoosh of skirts to a small storage room at the back. Past the altar, he could smell the girl hiding in the closet. She smelt soft and yellow, like a brush of sunlight.

He crouched by the door. Closer, he smelt the undercurrents of her scent: laced like poison with infection and the rot of a failed mark. One of his own wolves had done this to her. His own Pack.

A certain disgust filled him, slithering through his ribs and up his throat like a snake. His voice, however, betrayed none of his anger. "May I open the door, Miss Finn?"

There was a hiccup of a breath, then the heartbeat of terror. His shadow must look huge through the wooden mesh of the door.

"I won't hurt you. I promise that much."

The little ball of a girl in there didn't so much as breathe.

Lewis reached up to rest his hand on the handle. "I am opening the door now," he said quietly.

The handle turned, and he eased the door open, expecting a small lamb of a girl wrapped in her tears.

Instead, he got the muzzle of a gun pressed square to his forehead. It was a pocket gun; the metal digging into his skin, thin and cold like a needle.

She was breathing now, rough and rushed. Her hands were shaking and her black eyes were as watery and dark as the rain outside.

"There now, child," he said in his sweetest voice. He kept his breath as even as sleep. "You've been through a lot, now haven't you? Am I the first wolf you've seen since?"

She didn't answer, sniffling back her tears and holding the gun more firmly to his brow.

Lewis pressed his gaze gently into hers, like she were a pup about to turn feral. "I am going to move now," he said slowly, so she wouldn't startle. He stretched his neck up and to the left. Between his fingers, he carefully pinched the gun's barrel and dragged it down to his jugular.

Her eyes widened.

"I am baring my throat to you, pup. Do you know what that means?"

Her face twisted like she was about to cry. She nodded.

"I am not here to hurt you," he repeated.

She held the gun there for a moment, shaking. Then her breath fell out of her in a gush; she choked on a sob and the gun fell away to point to the floor.

He took a deep breath himself and folded his legs beneath him, watching her shrink from him in the closet's shadows.

She was all curls. He didn't know how he missed it before. But they spilled around her head in tight coils, running down her nightgown and knotting on the floor beneath her. Her skin was dark like her grandmother's, shadowed by a yellow shine of sweat and candlelight.

"Can I take a look at the mark?" he asked.

She curled a lip at him, almost like a snarl, and pressed her dress to her chest.

She would have made for a strong mate, he thought; born strong pups with strong hearts. Though it felt like a betrayal to think such things now, her frail human body shrouded in tears and fear.

Thirteen, someone had told him. Far too young to be considered a mate of anything. Let alone a wolf.

"I can help," he promised. Again, as slow as if she were feral, he pulled back the front of his jacket and withdrew a small flask and a handkerchief. "This is holy water from our altars. Should help with the pain and the infection. Though I won't touch you if you don't want it."

Old Mother Tamar spoke from behind him. "Let him see it, child."

The grandmother ground her teeth. "You don't have to, love."

The child looked to the women then back to the wolf sitting cross-legged at the closet's threshold. Lewis remained still, every muscle at ease.

Then she pulled a fist of her nightgown away from her chest and removed the pad of gauze over her shoulder. It came away sticky with pus and blood.

Alpha didn't move; he barely blinked.

There were scratches and bruises over her chest: teeth marks, hand marks, claw marks. But what drew the eye and tightened the throat was the mark itself, in that soft corner between collarbone and shoulder. Skin and a fist full of flesh had been torn off her little frame. With teeth.

It was angry, swollen, patched red and yellow, and slick with a wet sheen of infection. And stretching over her skin like spider's legs were the black and purple-green veins that smelled of a corpse. The rot of a beast's mark.

Emotion rose in Lewis like the crest of a wave; splashing into his mouth with words of anger and hate and shame. But he found nothing to say. So he silently poured the holy water on the handkerchief with trembling hands.

He folded the cotton fabric until the wolf embroidered in the corner was no longer visible and offered it to her.

She didn't take it at first. There was something about the way she looked at him while he took in her blood and flesh that made his insides shrink. All her edges seemed cut from hate, as if she blamed him.

But she took the handkerchief and eased the fabric over the swollen heart of the wound with a wince.

Alpha Lewis watched her for a moment, the black crawling back out of her wounds and spreading like ink on the fabric. Then he cleared his throat, "May I lay a hand on you, miss?"

She curled her feet further beneath her, slipping an alarmed glance to her grandmother.

"To bless you," Lewis explained, with a cringe. "A prayer. My role gives me some power, miss. My influence, of course, cannot reach back to undo what he did. But horrors like these have a long reach. A prayer might allow me to loosen the grip of these things for tomorrow, or the next day."

She forced her breathing to even out. Her scent was sharpened with fear and dampened with sweat. She reached her spare hand down and set it back on the pistol in the folds of her nightgown. But she inched a foot towards him.

Lewis took what he could get and gently laid a few fingers on her ankle. He was a large wolf, even in human form, and could have wrapped those fingers around her leg twice over. He licked his lips and allowed some of the alpha to creep into his voice, "What power I have in me, due to my merit and position, I now invoke to release this child — Lianne Finn — as much as possible from the actions of that beast William and any others that laid a hand on her."

She was shaking. He smelt her tears.

They tugged his voice up with emotion. "I speak against any infection that might try to kill this little body. I speak against any shame that might try to destroy this little heart. And I, I speak most firmly against any fear that might try to steal the life from this precious soul. Mother of all goodness, hear me. Father of all hope—"

Lewis' voice got lost somehow in his throat. What more could he say? Dear God. What more could one say in the face of such horror?

The little girl wiped tears from her face with the hand holding the gun. She sniffed and swallowed. "...deliver me." She finished the prayer, her voice bent in exhaustion and pain.

"Amen." Lewis gave her ankle a little squeeze and pulled back.

"Amen," the women behind him echoed. The girl herself only nodded.

She peeled the handkerchief off her shoulder, now black and red, with flecks of yellow the water had teased out. She looked at it for a moment, then handed it back to Lewis.

Lewis hesitated before he took it. He stood, saddened, as the child closed the door again. He could still hear her sniffle, rearranging herself among the piles of linens and tablecloths on the floor of the closet.

He decided to leave the flask of holy water, balancing it on one of the storage shelves behind him. He didn't know what to do with the handkerchief she gave back to him.

Clearing his throat, he faced the grandmother. "I came, also, to formally promise that nothing like this will ever happen again."

He searched the front pocket of his jacket, then the inner pockets; he withdrew a letter on well-pressed blue paper, sealed with the white wax of his Pack. "This here states no wolf can hold claim on Miss Lianne Finn ever again. She will live a normal life this-side without any interference from my wolves." He winced as he looked back at the closet. "No matter how strong her scent gets."

Frederica snatched the letter from him and tore it open. As she glanced over it, her lip curled. "That's it?" The woman waved the paper at him. "A contract? A mother-bleeding contract?!"

"Frederica, please." Mother Tamar's tone was disapproving.

Lewis didn't take his eyes off the grandmother as she challenged him with her look, her tone, her hate. Alpha drew himself to his whole height.

"We know what good your contracts do," she spat, stepping towards him. "Placatory remarks. Appeasement statements. You're all the same!" Old Mother put out a hand to soothe her, but the motion only made Frederica press her anger inside, deeper and deeper, until her voice was so tight it might as well have been a loaded gun. "All politics. No action. For that, my child will pay. Her whole life she'll pay? Raped and marked and—"

A gun shot sounded.

It was so sudden and loud and from the closet, Alpha's first thought, past checking his own vitals, was that the child had killed herself. They all seemed to have thought that and turned wide-eyed to the door, the moment nauseous with horror.

But a hole was splintered through the mesh. The smell of gunpowder rising with the scent of lavender oil. The bullet had shot to the shelves opposite and nicked a barrel of healing oil, which bled the thick stuff like a wound down the shelves.

From behind the mesh came a voice. Clear now and quiet. "He can leave," the child said.

Lewis was the first to come to his senses. He bowed, first to the closet, then to the women.

"Again, my deepest regrets." He then left, sick with a feeling of inadequacy to which he was unaccustomed. He shrugged on his coat as they closed the door behind him.

The rain was still pouring and the smell of lavender on his skin did little to cover that of fish and the piss of the mud. Pulling his hat low over his face, Lewis walked back to the patchy wood of the dockside under the watchful eye of the neighbourhood.

There. He stopped for a minute. The sight of the angry black river churning up frothy mouths of white seemed to echo a feeling for him. Darkness, pouring so fast the eye couldn't keep track of it, and the memory of the smell of her rotting skin and the blood.

Lewis gently unfolded his fist, where the handkerchief was still warm on his skin and unfurling in his fingers like a rose; the rain bled the blackness from it over his hand. Lewis watched for a moment, then turned back to the river and threw the handkerchief in. It was swallowed whole in a moment, pulled under without so much as a break in the stream.

Lewis looked around, feeling guilty. Turning up the collar of his coat, he went for a drink. Drowning didn't sound half bad.