Kirastasia liked to think she loved her brother . . . except, ever since Kavik had humiliated her in front of Kahlan, an insidious sort of rage had slithered inside of her: a vicious snake of a thing. It spread its hood whenever her eyes—jewels of maple given by her mother—fell upon the prince’s skull-white face. She could barely hold back the bile of disgust in her throat. How dare he be so pitifully different, so broken and useless. She’d protect him forever, let no harm come to him while she drew breath, but damn him for interfering with her glorious infatuation! Yes, Kira supposed she loved Kavik just as any good sister should . . . and perhaps that meant she was allowed to hate him a little, too.

It certainly wasn’t affection for Malignant’s youngest male heir that pushed Kirastasia to leave him yesterday. Coldly furious, the Ice Princess had driven Kavik outside of Saw Tooth’s borders, her frigid visage warning him that no mercy resided in her heart. “You will stay here until I come back,” Kira had decreed. Her brother cowered mutely before her: infuriatingly silent as always. Funny . . . it had never bothered her until now. Pathetic. “I mean it, Kavik. You will not go near any of Kah’s family. And you will not follow me. Understand?”

A pleading gaze from her sibling. Kirastasia could see the nascent fear of losing her again beginning to flicker behind those familiar eyes. And that’s how she left him, running toward Malignant Felicity without a backward glance.

The snowy damsel carried gifts from both of her savage parents; it was Kershov’s tundra endurance that fueled her tireless overnight journey across no-wolf’s land and to the shaded doorstep of her mother’s sinful kingdom. Even before Kira crossed the border, Malignant’s deathly quiet seeped into her chest. She felt its yawning emptiness as if a pit had dropped open in her abdomen. Her mother’s scent . . . everyone’s scent, the signature of the entire pack, so achingly faded from her senses that for a moment Kirastasia felt as if she’d been blinded. Alabaster hackles spiked like icicles along her sleek spine; the lovely girl’s travel-warm muscles suddenly froze beneath her flesh. What had happened? She’d grown accustomed to her mother’s frivolous absences as a pup, but this . . . this was wrong. Malignant was meant to be haunted by the souls it had shredded to feed itself, not the ghosts of those that called its dungeons home.

Swallowing a fearful sob, the fishnet punkette gathered her courage and plunged into the forest castle. Immediately Kira set to work hunting for fresh trails, any sign at all that someone still gave life to the territory. It seemed far too long for her to capture a single familiar perfume mingled in the cloying cologne of winter decay—yet once she found it, Kirastasia followed it like a fish hooked on a line. She struggled to match a face to the female scent the led her into Malignant’s heart. Had she ever really properly met this packmate? Kira remembered the she-wolf’s presence at the last pack meeting, a vague notion that the woman was off-kilter in some way—

What had been one scent abruptly meshed into three: two unknown males had also crept into the shadows. The winter bird’s pace increased, lean limbs flying over the terra until she’d broken from the cover of the woods at last. Her dark-lined eyes were so stunned by the sight of the pair of brutes—one wearing a rich robe of crimson, the other dressed in sable—that she barely heard what her muttering packmate said. Slowly, not quite taking her astonished stare from the knights, Kirastasia turned her muzzle toward Carnival. She wanted desperately to stand closer to this maniacal creature she recognized, yet wondered it that would be completely safe at the moment.

“Well, if this isn’t a pretty picture,” the heiress dared murmur. “Two handsome gentleman I’ve never met and a family friend advertising for a crown. How long have I been gone, again?”