In Stone City, a pack of vicious wolves pins down a young white she-wolf whose wolf spirit is too weak to fight back, and tears into her without mercy. Her brother arrives under orders to bring her home. She is Vera, the adopted daughter of the Beren wolf clan.
3 years earlier, the family brought home Hailey, their long-lost "true heiress." Soon after, the clan's grandmother was attacked and fell into a coma. The clan decided Vera had done it out of jealousy over Hailey, bound her, and banished her to Stone City, the penal territory where the clan dumps its worst criminals. There she was hunted and mauled by beasts again and again, fighting to stay alive through endless torment. In the end they took one of her legs and chewed her tail down to a stump. Among wolves, a broken body means the bottom of the pack. Vera has walked on a crude prosthetic ever since.
With the Alpha succession ceremony approaching, the family brings her home to save face. They order her to tell everyone she has been away studying, and forbid her from ever mentioning Stone City. At the ceremony, Hailey slashes her own cheek open with her claws and bribes a servant to testify against her. In tears, she accuses Vera of attacking her out of jealousy.
The old Alpha, Vera's kind-hearted grandfather, is the only one who believes her and stands by her. But her father, next in line for the Alpha title, sides with her mother and her siblings to break her down. They call her cold-blooded and ungrateful and force her to her knees to confess. Vera finally breaks, sobbing out everything she survived in her 3 years in Stone City, and the whole family dismisses it as a lie told to get sympathy. Her enraged father threatens to cast her out of the clan and cut her off for good. During the altercation, her prosthetic is torn away and her ruined body is exposed in front of everyone. The hall erupts. And Hailey's conspiracy is far from over. The truth about her bloodline has yet to surface.
