How ironic.

I yanked the bedroom door open and stormed out. The moment I reached the great hall of the den, one of the household omegas hurried toward me, her bare feet quick against the cold flagstones. "Luna Ironclaw, you're awake! The second Luna went into her birthing-time without warning. The Alpha carried her to the Healing Hall himself!"

I stopped dead. "'Second Luna'? Who taught you to call her that?"

I snatched the carved moonstone vase from the console beside me and hurled it to the floor. It shattered across the stone in a spray of blue and silver. My chest heaved. The sound rang through the hall, and somewhere deeper in the den, a set of footsteps paused mid-stride.

The omega flinched, her gaze dropping to the floor the way everyone's did in this den when the air shifted. "It was Lady Nightvale's instruction. She said the Alpha agreed she's also a lady of the den. You're the first Luna, and she's the second..."

She was still talking when I pulled my keys from the hook by the side passage and drove to the Healing Hall. The two warriors posted at the gate didn't try to stop me. They knew better. But in the mirror I caught one of them lifting his communicator to his ear, and I knew Darius would have my scent on the wind long before I reached the doors.

By the time I crossed the threshold of the Healing Hall, Vesper had already whelped.

The private chamber was packed. Nearly all of Darius's inner circle had crowded inside, pack-captains and warriors and their mates, laughing and talking over one another like it was a celebration. Like it was already a Naming feast. Armed wolves stood at the corridor's mouth, but they parted for me without a word. I didn't go in. Not yet. I stood just outside the doorway, and I listened.

That was when the wrongness hit me. Vesper's scent hung thick in the chamber, overripe jasmine and sugared honey, and beneath it, threading through everything, that faint cold note that had never once smelled right to me. My wolf pressed up beneath my skin, hackles rising, a growl building low in my chest that I forced back down.

"Darius, does your Luna even know Vesper's had the pup?"

"Don't bring her up." Darius was bent over the cradle, teasing the sleeping newborn with one finger. A soft, doting smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. "This pup's gorgeous."

"Honestly, Darius. Look close enough and he even favors you a little!"

"Keep your voice down. If Selene hears that kind of talk, she'll overthink everything."

Vesper lay propped against the pillows, her glamour still flawless. She didn't look like a she-wolf who'd just given birth. She looked like one who had won something. "Overthink what? Whether she agrees or not, I'm keeping my promise. This pup will carry your name and be entered into the Ironclaw bloodline registry."

The chamber shifted at that. Even the laughter dimmed for half a breath. Every wolf in that room understood what entering a pup into a pack's bloodline registry meant. It was not a formality. It was a claim on the hunting grounds, on the territory, on the right to one day stand where Darius stood. And it required the Alpha's formal recognition before the Moon Goddess.

"But you'd have to break your bond with Selene first. That doesn't feel right..."

"It's no great matter. Once the pup's registered under my name, I'll formally sever the arrangement with Vesper and re-bind with Selene. Simple. If she won't agree, I'll do it behind her back."

Vesper sniffled, dabbing at the corner of her eye. "Selene is so kindhearted. She'll say yes. I'd be so grateful to her. Truly, however long I'm allowed to be your mate, even just in name, I'd be more than happy."

"Relax. You all know how much she loves Darius. Remember when she went to that sit-down with the Calabrese Pack and spent the whole night charming their old Alpha, glass after glass of moon-wine, just so Darius could close that border arrangement?"

"And that time Darius took ill from a wolfsbane trace in his blood? She thought it was something far worse. Got down on her knees and begged the moon-healer, then knelt outside the Healer's Den for hours until it was done. She's mad about him. She'd never leave. A small thing like this is nothing to her, set against losing Darius."

"Exactly what I was thinking."

Darius's lips curved. He pulled Vesper closer against him, his arm tightening around her shoulders. "Whatever it takes, I'll give Vesper and this pup a home."

I stood in the doorway and watched the male I'd loved for seven years hold another she-wolf in his arms.

My fingers curled at my sides until my nails bit into my palms, and somewhere beneath the human grief my wolf went very still, the way a beast goes still when it finally understands the trap it stepped into.

He had it all figured out. He'd been planning to give Vesper a home all along. Sever me, register the pup, re-bind me like a trade of territory shuffled across a map. And every wolf in that room had already accepted it as the natural order of things. Because that was what Selene did. Selene bent. Selene knelt. Selene loved him so much she'd swallow anything.

Well then. Who was I to stand in his way?

I stepped into the doorway and spoke quietly. "A male pup? Congratulations."

The moment I appeared, every face in the room went white. The laughter died like someone had cut the air from the chamber. A pack-captain set his glass down too carefully. Vesper's hand drifted toward the cradle, a reflex she couldn't quite hide.

Darius released Vesper at once and crossed the room in three quick strides. His voice turned gentle, almost tender. "What are you doing here? You're carrying our pup. You should be resting at the den."

"I heard everything you just said."

I looked up at him. "You want to sever our bond so you can register Vesper's pup under your name. Enter him into the Ironclaw bloodline."

"Selene, I only feel for her. You know she has nowhere else to go. I'm doing this because she was Fenwick's mate. He was a brother to me. He took a silver round meant for me..."

His hand moved as he spoke, and I saw it. His fingers drifted to his right palm, tracing the faint scar there. The blood-oath mark, sworn to the Moon Goddess. Fenwick's name, raised like a shield, the way it always was.

He scrambled to explain. I cut him off, my face blank. "I agree. Let's sever the bond."

"Truly?"

His eyes lit up. He hadn't expected me to say yes so easily.

None of them had. I could feel the silence in the room behind him pressing against my back like a held breath. The Alpha's Luna had just agreed to sever the blood-alliance between the Ironclaw and Ashthorne lines, and she'd said it the way one orders the evening meal. Darius didn't understand what he'd just been handed. He wouldn't. Not yet.

His pack-mates all wore expressions that said they'd scented this coming a mile downwind.

"Really."

I nodded. "Have the bond-rejection drawn up and sworn for me. Darius, the hunting grounds you hold now are ones we claimed together. If we're severing the blood-oath, I'm taking half. That's fair, isn't it?"

"More than fair. Take all of it if you want. It's just a formality anyway!"

He shot his pack-mates a cocky look, and the whole group broke into rough applause and whistles. The sound bounced off the tiled walls of the Healing Hall corridor, sharp and hollow, the way wolves bay when they think they've already won the kill.

"Darius, you legend! A she-wolf on each arm. Can't even be jealous of you!"

My eyes were ice. He didn't notice.

The warriors around him clapped his shoulders, grinning like a war-band after a clean border raid. Not one of them looked at me. Not one of them caught the shift in the air. They saw a Luna agreeing to step aside. They didn't scent the Ashthorne blood in my veins turning cold and quiet, the way it does before a reckoning. My wolf had gone utterly still beneath my skin, the stillness of something that has stopped pacing and begun to wait.

Vesper said she was hungry. She wanted some broth.

Darius rounded up his pack-mates and left at once to fetch it for her. On his way out, he turned back to me. "Selene, are you hungry? Want me to bring you something?"

"I'm fine. Don't bother."

"Then take good care of Vesper for me, will you? She said her chest is sore from the milk coming in..."

The door clicked shut. The warrior posted outside shifted his weight, leather creaking faintly, and then there was nothing. Just the two of us now.

The crystal-light hummed overhead. Somewhere down the hall, a healer's pulse-stone chimed in steady rhythm. The private wing Darius had secured for her was quiet as a den sealed for the night.

Vesper didn't have to pretend anymore. She turned to me with a look that was pure provocation. The softness she wore for Darius fell away like a mask lifted, and what was underneath had teeth. Beneath the cloying overripe jasmine and sugared honey of her, I caught it now: the faint trace of decay and cold iron she could never quite scrub away.

"Well, well. I have to say, I'm impressed. Your mate is bedding another she-wolf, talking of severing the blood-oath to put another wolf's pup under his name, and you don't even flinch? That's some next-level doormat energy."

I watched her in silence.

Her lips curled. One by one, she undid the ties of her healing-gown, slow and deliberate, the way she tucked her hair behind her left ear when she was performing. Everything about this she-wolf was choreography.

"You know what the difference between us is, Selene?"

The figure she revealed made my brow tighten.

"Your body? Let's see how long that lasts after you're done nursing pups."

"Oh, I won't be nursing. You think these are natural? Why would I ruin them? You know what Darius told me?" She tilted her chin up, the crystal-light catching her collarbone like she was posing for a portrait. "He said you're boring. No fun at all. And your body doesn't compare to mine."

So even that was glamour-bought.

Darius truly had no standards. The Alpha of the Ironclaw Pack, the male I had raised from nothing, couldn't tell the difference between a she-wolf who would die for him and one who was performing for his hunting grounds.

"Are you done?"

"Not even close. I'm telling you to get lost. Stop standing between us, or I'll make your life a living hell. My mate is dead. I need a new one, and Darius is the male I picked. I'm never letting him go—"

Before she could finish, my hand was already in the air.

The slap cracked across her face.

The sound was clean. Final. It cut through the hum of the crystal-light and the distant chime of the pulse-stone and left a silence so absolute that the room seemed to hold its breath. My mating mark warmed once at the junction of my neck, then went cold. I turned the thought over once. Twice.

Then I stopped.

"You struck me?!" She froze, one hand flying to her cheek. The red was already blooming across her skin, vivid against the white healing-sheets behind her. She lunged to strike back, but I caught her arm and swung again.

"You—"

"Yeah, I struck you." My voice was steady. Not raised. Not shaking. Steady the way my father's voice was steady when he passed judgment beneath the old cedar of the Ashthorne den, the way Ashthorne she-wolves have always sounded when they've stopped asking and started telling. "That first one was for being shameless enough to seduce another she-wolf's mate."

A second slap landed clean. Her head snapped to the side. The room was so quiet I could hear the warrior outside shift his weight again, uncertain, listening.

"That one's for climbing into a mated male's bed when your own mate hasn't been dead five moons and you were heavy with pup. Fenwick took a silver round meant for Darius, and this is how you honor his memory."

Then a third.

The sound of it hung in the air like the last note of a howl fading off the ridge.

"And that's for destroying a family and not feeling an ounce of remorse."

Three slaps. She stood there, stunned stupid. Her cheek was scarlet and swelling. Her gown hung open. The provocation was gone from her face, replaced by something raw and animal, the look of a she-wolf who had never been struck back before.

The silence settled over us like ash after fire.

Then she screamed, clawing her way off the bed. "Selene, I'll kill you!"

She shoved me hard. I hit the floor, and a sharp pain shot through my lower belly. Not a bruise. Not a cramp. Something deeper. Something wrong. Dread flooded through me instantly, cold and total, like ice water poured into my chest. Inside me my wolf came surging up out of her stillness, a low whine breaking from her that I felt in my own throat. I gritted my teeth and dragged myself up, bracing against the wall to stay on my feet. My hand pressed against my stomach. My fingers were shaking.

She swung at me, her palm connecting with my face. "You struck me? You think I'm someone you can push around? Those three slaps? I'm paying them back double!"

She raised her hand for a second blow, but footsteps echoed in the corridor outside. Multiple sets. Heavy. The sound of males returning.

Her arm froze mid-swing.

The rage vanished from her face so fast it was like watching the wind change. In one fluid motion she snatched the pup from the bassinet, dropped him onto the floor from a low height, then threw herself down beside him, curling over the infant and wailing as if the world were ending.

The transformation took less than three breaths. From fury to theater. From predator to prey. She tucked her hair behind her left ear with a trembling hand and screamed louder, the sound pitched to carry through the door and down the corridor to where Darius's footsteps were getting closer.

The pup's screams tangled with hers, filling the room.

I stood there clutching my stomach, my body locked in place. The pain in my belly pulsed in time with my heartbeat, but I couldn't move. I couldn't process what I'd just witnessed.

Vesper had hurt her own pup.

He'd just been born. Hours old. Still wrinkled and red and carrying that milk-warm cedar pup-scent that had barely begun to find itself. And she'd thrown him to the ground without a second thought, the way a warrior discards a spent silver casing. Not out of madness. Not out of desperation. Out of calculation. Because the footsteps were coming, and she needed a story, and her own newborn son was nothing more than a prop in the performance.

I stood against the wall with my hand pressed to my stomach, and I understood, with a clarity that cut through the pain like a silver-edged blade, exactly what kind of she-wolf had moved into my den.

"I'm sorry, Selene. I was wrong. I wouldn't dare dream of taking Darius as my mate anymore. I'll take the pup and go far away. Please, I'm begging you, just stop hurting us, okay?"

"What are you doing? Putting on another act?"

The pain in my abdomen was getting worse. A dark premonition crept through me, cold and certain, the way every wolf knows when the wind shifts before a storm rolls in off the coastline. Deep inside me my wolf went rigid, ears flattening at something she could sense and I could not. Terrified that something was actually happening to my pup, I moved toward the door to find a healer, but it swung open before I could reach it.

A crowd stood in the doorway. Pack warriors. Sworn wolves. The inner circle of the Ironclaw Pack, still carrying themselves with the quiet vigilance of those who lived inside a world where every threshold could turn lethal. And at the front, Darius. His scent reached me before his shadow did, scorched oak and old copper and that sour undertone of ambition gone rancid.

The moment he saw Vesper and the pup on the floor, the infant screaming in raw, bloodcurdling wails that bounced off the sterile walls of the Healing Hall and filled the corridor beyond, the color drained from his face. He dropped the bowl of broth in his hands without a second thought. The ceramic shattered against the stone, and not a single wolf behind him flinched. He rushed over and scooped the pup up, cradling the child against his chest with hands that had broken bones and ordered throats torn out and never once trembled the way they trembled now.

"What happened? We were gone ten minutes. What the hell happened?"

"Darius..."

Vesper lifted her face. The handprints across her cheek were vivid and unmistakable. Three of them, layered, the kind of marks that told a story all on their own.

She was trembling, tears streaming down her face. She tucked her hair behind her left ear with a slow, deliberate motion, and when she spoke, her voice cracked in exactly the right places. "It's my fault. I never should have come to you for help. If I weren't so afraid my pup would grow up without a father, I'd never have degraded myself like this!" She turned her wet eyes toward the wolves gathered in the doorway, making sure every one of them could see. "Luna, if you didn't want me and Darius to seal the mating bond and bring the pup into the Ironclaw name, then why did you pretend to agree and then turn around and try to drive us out? Striking me was one thing. But throwing a newborn pup on the floor?"

Her shrill sobs and accusations sent a chill through the room. The silence that followed was the particular silence of hardened wolves recalculating. I could feel it. The shift. The weight of judgment settling onto me like a physical thing, pressing the air from my lungs.

Everyone turned to look at me. "Selene, you..."

"Selene!"

Darius walked toward me with the pup in his arms and slapped me across the face.

The blow sent my vision black. I nearly passed out. The sound of it was worse than the pain. A sharp, flat crack that echoed in the small room, and behind it the absolute stillness of warriors who had watched their Alpha strike his Luna and understood that no one was permitted to react.

I was already unsteady on my feet. My body crumpled and I hit the floor. My knees struck the cold stone first, then my palms, and the shock of it traveled up through my wrists and into my shoulders. The lamp above me hummed. Someone's boot leather creaked. No one moved to help me. Inside, my wolf snarled and threw herself against the cage of my ribs, but my body had no strength left to answer her.

The pain in my abdomen sharpened. I pressed both hands against my stomach, hard, while cold sweat beaded across my forehead and rolled down my temples. The room tilted. I could hear the pup crying, could hear Vesper's practiced sobbing, could hear the low murmur of the wolves by the door. All of it reached me as if through water.

"I thought you were actually being generous when you agreed to break the bond! How can you be this two-faced? The pup is so small. He isn't even a day old, and you threw him on the ground!" His voice was a blade, each word precise and final, the voice of an Alpha delivering a sentence. "You're going to be a mother yourself. Aren't you afraid your own pup will pay for what you've done?"

My cheek burned. I turned my head slowly and saw the hatred carved into his face. I could barely process what I'd just heard.

For the sake of Vesper's pup, he had cursed ours.

The wolf I had loved for seven years. The wolf whose pack I had built from nothing, whose alliances I had secured with my own bloodline name, whose enemies I had kept beyond the borders by being an Ashthorne. He stood over me on that cold Healing Hall floor with another she-wolf's pup in his arms and cursed the life growing inside me.

"Yeah, Selene, how could you do that? She just whelped. You shouldn't have hit her!" One of the warriors' mates, someone who had eaten at my table, who had pressed her cheek to mine at the Blood Moon gathering.

"No wonder the Alpha says he's more at ease with Vesper. Selene's temper is way too much." Another voice. Quiet, but not quiet enough.

They all talked over each other, a chorus of noise that split my skull open. My breathing turned shallow and ragged. The room pressed in. Every face was turned away from me or turned against me, and I understood, in that moment, how completely Vesper had constructed this. She had given them exactly the story they wanted. The jealous Luna. The innocent widow. The helpless pup.

I pressed my hands harder against my stomach and forced myself to speak.

"Enough! All of you, shut up!" My voice tore out of me with a force that startled even me, a low growl threading beneath it that came from somewhere older than words. I saw two of the warriors step back. "'Selene' and 'Vesper'? Do none of you have any sense of right and wrong? A wolf doesn't get to keep a Luna and a kept she-wolf under the same roof and call it honor! Darius broke the bond first. That's on him! And even if I did hit Vesper, she had it coming!"

My outburst stunned the room into silence. Real silence. The kind where wolves stop breathing because they are not sure what happens next.

"Darius was only kind to me and the pup because of my late mate!" Vesper sobbed, crawling to Darius's legs. She pressed her face against his knee, and the gesture was so perfectly calibrated, so precisely the image of a grieving widow seeking shelter from her fallen mate's blood-brother, that I almost admired it. Almost. Beneath the overripe jasmine and sugared honey of her, I caught it again, that faint trace of decay and cold iron she could never fully mask. "The pup fell from a height. I don't even know if he'll survive. Darius, please, don't waste any more time. Call a healer!"

"Don't be scared. I won't let anything happen to him." His voice dropped low, tender, a register I hadn't heard him use with me in years. He cradled the child closer.

Darius turned to leave with the pup in his arms.

And in that moment, I felt something warm and wet sliding down between my legs.

The sensation froze me with terror. Everything else disappeared. The voices, the faces, the humming lamp, the smell of antiseptic and spilled broth. All of it fell away, and there was only the warmth spreading beneath me and the cold that followed it, a cold that started in my chest and moved outward until my fingers went numb. Deep inside, my wolf went utterly silent, the silence of an animal that has scented its own death.

I looked down. A shock of red was spreading beneath me. Bright against the white stone. Impossible to mistake for anything else.

"Darius, my pup... our pup!"

He didn't turn around. He didn't even slow down. His warriors parted for him in the doorway, and not one of them looked back at me on the floor.

"Selene, I've never been more disappointed in you. Get yourself home. I'll be staying at the Healing Hall with Vesper and the pup for the next few days." He paused in the doorway. The corridor light caught the edge of his jaw, and I could see the muscle there working, tightening. "And you'd better pray her pup is all right. Because if he's not, I won't let you off."

Every last one of them followed him out the door. The room emptied the way a den empties after an Alpha has spoken. Completely. Without hesitation. Without a single backward glance.

I stayed on the floor. The blood kept spreading. The lamp kept humming. Somewhere down the corridor, I could hear Vesper's voice rising in fresh sobs, and the low reassuring murmur of Darius answering her, and the quick footsteps of a healer being summoned.

No one summoned a healer for me.

I pressed my hands against my stomach and held on to what I was losing, and the stone beneath me grew warm and then cool and then warm again, and I understood, with a clarity that cut through everything else, that I was alone. That I had been alone for a very long time. That the name Ashthorne, which had protected everyone in this den, could not protect the one thing I needed it to protect most.