"Take your hand off me."

Adrian Vale didn't have to raise his voice.The guard's fingers were already slipping from his arm.

They stood in the eastern corridor of Vale Hall,rain streaking the glass windows three stories above the street.Below them,Marrow Street was a river of brake lights,the city holding its breath as it waited for the building where Adrian would be crowned in eleven minutes.Somewhere beyond the doors,a bagpiper was tuning up for the old Vale tradition no one could explain,and Adrian didn't know why his father insisted on it,so he'd never asked.

The guard cleared his throat."I'm sorry, Alpha.Your cousin sent for you. Downstairs."

"My cousin knows I don't leave a coronation rehearsal eleven minutes before the ceremony."

"He said it was urgent."

Adrian studied the man's face,the sweat darkening his collar despite the chill in the corridor,where his own breath curled visibly in the air.His wolf had been pacing in his veins since sunset,but this was something else.Something colder. Something that made his teeth ache.

"Where is he?"

"Lower service level."

The lower level had been sealed for security checks since dawn.Adrian's jaw tightened. "Take me."

Colton didn't move fast enough to be truthful,and he didn't move slow enough to be innocent,and Adrian noted it all as he followed him toward the service elevator,his boots making loud noises against the marble.The crowd below swelled,but the sound was muffled,three stories away,and he was already thinking of the three hundred people who would be waiting to see him crowned in eleven minutes.The elevator doors opened onto a floor without lights.

Adrian stopped in the doorway and pulled out his phone.No service,which was not surprising,since the lower levels were on the private network.He turned back to ask Colton about it,and the doors slid shut in his face.

He heard the click before he registered it,a manual lock engaging from the other side.Something metal caught the emergency lighting three feet to his left.

He didn't see the hand that tossed it,but he felt the shift in the air and threw himself sideways,and the knife that would have taken his heart went wide, opening his ribs instead,a cold,wet sensation followed by a warmer one,the dull ache of his body realizing it's been hurt.

Adrian drove his elbow into the attacker's face,hearing cartilage crack,and the man went down,choking on his own blood.Two more came at him from the darkness,but for three seconds,all Adrian saw was the distance between his ribs and the business end of a knife.He caught the nearest attacker by the collar and drove him backward into the drywall,and the second one's knife skidded down the elevator door,and Adrian buried his fist in the man's ribs and felt him fold.

He grabbed the man by the front of his shirt. "Who sent you?"

The man grinned,his teeth gleaming in the dark,the expression of someone who already had his payment and knew he'd live to collect the second. "You're not walking out of this building."

The needle went into Adrian's neck before he saw the hand that held it.

He ripped it out,but it was too late.Whatever was in it began working its way through his system,and his vision wavered,the edges going gray,and his knees buckled,and he landed on his backside with a thump he knew was concrete.

Footsteps.Slow ones.A man's silhouette was outlined in the doorway,the shape of him familiar enough Adrian recognized the coat he was wearing, if not the man himself.

"Forgive me, Adrian."

The voice was a knife to his ribs,sharper than the wound in his side,and he knew it.He'd heard it once, a lifetime ago,reading him a bedtime story in a house that no longer existed.

He tried to speak,tried to say the name he knew,but his tongue refused him.

Someone else came forward,holding a velvet case, and even half-dead,Adrian knew what was in it.The crown had been secured in a vault two floors above an hour ago,and he'd worn it himself,felt the weight of it in his hands,thought about the twenty-three years it had been since a Vale that young had worn it in coronation.

The man carrying it turned and walked away as if it were nothing,as if it weren't the single most important object in the kingdom.

Adrian's wolf screamed at him to kill,to maim,to protect what was his,but his body refused to obey. He felt something like his heart tearing itself from his chest.

The last thing he saw before the dark took him was the black velvet swallowing the proof that he was who he said he was.

He woke to the smell of bleach and mildew and,beneath it,the scent of onions being fried two floors below.

The ceiling fan above him had a water stain the shape of nothing in particular,and he lay still for a moment,cataloguing the pain.His ribs, sharp and localized,then a dull ache in his side where he'd landed.His shirt was torn,and the wound was bound with gauze,but it was the wrong gauze,three different kinds,as if they'd been scavenged from the nearest cabinet.

A woman stood by the bathroom door,a kitchen knife in her hand.Not a hunting knife.Not silver,not even pretty.A cheap chef's knife with a nick in the black handle,the kind that came in a six-piece set from a discount store.Her hands didn't shake.

She looked to be about his age,maybe a year or two younger,her dark hair falling away from a knot at the back of her head.The kind of tired around her eyes that came from a bad week,not a bad night.A gray shirt,black pants,an apron still tied at her waist as if she'd been interrupted in the middle of a shift.

He sat up.

"Don't." The knife came up an inch.

"Where am I?"

"My bedroom."

"Whose apartment?"

"Mine." She said it as if it were obvious.

He took in the room as his brain caught up to his body,a narrow bed,a folding chair,a wardrobe with a broken hinge someone had patched with tape,one window with a curtain thin enough to see the streetlights beyond.Nothing here belonged to a man who lived in a palace.

"Who are you?"

"You bled through my bathroom floor and passed out on my landing, and you're asking who I am?"

"I didn't break in."

"Then you'll have to explain how you got here, because I sure as hell didn't invite you."

He had nothing to say to that,because his memories ended in a dark corridor with a needle in his side.He looked toward the bathroom,the tile still dark with blood,more than he liked to think about,all of it his.

He pushed himself up despite the knife.

"Sit down," she said,but she didn't stop him. "I need a phone."

"You don't have one."

"My security team,then.They'll have people out looking-"

"No wallet, no phone, no ID.Just a suit that costs more than my rent and a hole in your side." She lowered the knife an inch,more out of curiosity than anything else. "Do you have any idea how strange you look sitting in my bedroom right now?"

"No."

"Strange."

There was a long pause,filled only by the murmur of a television in the next room,before her eyes narrowed. "What's your name?"

He hesitated,and he didn't know why, because something about her scent curled into his wolf, familiar and foreign at the same time,the smell of rain on hot pavement,and burnt sugar,and something else he couldn't place,no matter how hard he tried.His wolf,drugged and tired,still turned toward her, as if she mattered.

"Adrian."

"Just Adrian."

"Yes."

"Fine." She didn't sound convinced. "I'm Sera."

The television volume suddenly jumped,as if the channel had changed,and a news caster's voice came through the wall. " - confirming reports that Alpha Adrian Vale was killed tonight in an attack at Vale Hall,less than fifteen minutes before his scheduled coronation-"

Adrian went still.

Sera turned toward the sound first,then back to him, her eyes tracking from his face to the television and back again,as if doing some quick math. " - officials have sealed the building.The territory council is asking the public to remain calm as investigators-"

"You're him," Sera said.

He said nothing, which was answer enough.

"You're dead.The television just said you're dead."

Adrian pushed himself off the bed,ignoring the sting in his ribs. "My crown. Where is it?"

"What?"

"The crown.Tell me you saw where it went."

"I don't know what you're-"

She stopped,her eyes going to the corner of the room by the door,and Adrian's breath caught in his throat.

A box sat there,cardboard,the top askew,something inside catching the light.

Adrian's chest tightened. "Where did that come from?"

Sera crossed the room,slower than was necessary. "I found it outside my door this morning.Before any of this."

She opened the box.

Adrian knew the deep blue of the velvet lining before he saw it,knew the silver thread along the edges because he'd traced it with his thumb an hour ago, the same hour that had ended with him bleeding out on a service elevator.He'd worn nothing this heavy in his life,and he never expected to again.

But the band inside the box wasn't clean.It was dark with something sticky,and the silver filigree was smudged with it in places,and he knew,with a sudden,cold certainty,that it wasn't blood.

He reached for it.

Sera didn't stop him.

His fingers curled around the metal,and for a heartbeat,neither of them moved,waiting for something,neither of them sure what.

Then the crown shifted.

Not fell. Not slipped. Moved, a tiny sound like breath coming from inside it.

Sera's hand shot back,knocking the box against the wardrobe.

A sound came from the metal,something like a voice.

"Adrian."

He stared at it,his pulse hammering in his ears.

Then the sound came again, and this time,it wasn't his name.

"Sera."