I headed to the palace archives after cleaning up.

If I was going to be Luna Queen, if I was going to be worthy of standing beside an Alpha King, I needed to understand pack politics, history, strategy. Everything I'd never learned because I'd been too busy scrubbing floors and surviving.

The archives were massive, filled with centuries of records. I lost myself in books about Lunar Alphas, about pack dynamics, about the responsibilities of a Luna.

"You're studying."

I looked up to find a ...