They gave me three winters to live. In our territory every unmated wolf loses a year each winter. I lose three. I have been losing three since I was nine, and this town finished grieving me a long time ago. So when the Alpha of the Vashti pack found me in the census yard and offered to buy my last winters, I laughed in his face. He was not joking. Ivar Vashti has until the Long Frost to take a Luna or lose his pack to his brother. I have three winters and no route left to drive. On paper it is a clean trade. Then the Reader counts me after the mark and nothing has moved. Not one day. And I learn the rule nobody mentioned before I signed. The bond does not run on paperwork. It runs on wanting. Real wanting. Both ways. Or it sits in my ledger and rots. Now I have to make a man I do not trust want me enough to keep me breathing. His brother is offering me a better deal and meaning it. The woman who waited eight years to be his Luna is kinder to me than my own family. And the old Reader who has counted me every winter since I was a child went back for a second count this year, for the first time in forty years, and then he would not look at me. Because my number is not short. It is going somewhere. And when I find out who has been taking it, I will have to choose between the person I have spent my whole life protecting and the man who is quietly spending his last years on me.