Seven days.

Seven days since Alpha Asher Scott walked out of our pack house with nothing but his coat and his keys, telling me he was going to the shrine. Seven days since I stood at the window and watched his truck disappear into the tree line, telling myself he was fine. He always came back from the shrine.

He always came back to me.

By day three, I'd stopped sleeping. By day five, I'd stopped pretending I wasn't scared. On day seven, I walked into Gamma Damien's office, sat down across from him, and said four words.

"Find my husband. Now."

Damien didn't argue. That's one thing I've always respected about him—he reads a room. He took one look at the hollows under my eyes and the white-knuckled grip I had on the edge of his desk, and he started making calls before I'd even finished speaking.

We tracked Asher's scent northeast, toward the mountain. Toward the shrine.

The shrine where we used to go together, every year, to light a candle for the pup we lost.

I don't talk about that much. The miscarriage. I was seven months along when the rogues hit our eastern border—the same rogues that Lycan King Winston Brown had quietly pointed in our direction, though I didn't know that yet. I fought them off. I saved Asher from their ambush. And I paid for it in blood and silence and a grief so deep it still lives in my chest like a stone I can't cough up.

Asher had given me a locket after. Custom-engraved. A tiny crescent moon on the front and our pup's would-have-been name etched on the inside. I wore it every day.

I was wearing it now, my fingers finding it automatically as our convoy climbed the mountain road, headlights cutting through the dark pines.

Damien's hand on my arm stopped me when we reached the cabin.

"Luna. Let us go first."

"No."

I stepped past him.

The cabin sat back from the shrine path, half-hidden by old spruce trees. A light burned in the window. Asher's truck was parked outside, and there was another vehicle beside it—sleek, expensive, with plates I didn't recognize.

My wolf went still inside me. Not the stillness of calm. The stillness of something bracing for impact.

I kicked the door open.

The smell hit me like a physical blow.

It was thick and warm and intimate in a way that made my stomach lurch—the unmistakable, heavy scent of mating. Of two wolves who had been together. Recently. More than once.

I stood in the doorway and I took in the room in pieces, the way your brain does when it's refusing to assemble the full picture all at once.

The overturned wine glass on the floor.

The tangle of sheets.

Asher, scrambling upright, his bare chest catching the lamplight, his expression doing something I had never seen it do before.

Panic.

Alpha Asher Scott—the man who had stood before the Lycan King at eighteen and bled without flinching—was looking at me with naked, animal panic.

And beside him, pulling a sheet up over herself with wide dark eyes, was a young she-wolf I had never seen before.

Pretty. Young. Smug, even now, even caught.

"Scarlet." Asher's voice came out rough. He stood, reached for his shirt. "This isn't—I need you to listen to me. This is political. There are things happening with the Lycan territories that I couldn't tell you about yet, and Nadia is—"

"Nadia."

The name came out of my mouth flat and quiet. The she-wolf—Nadia—held my gaze. She didn't look afraid. She looked like she was watching something she'd been waiting to see.

I heard my warriors behind me. Damien. Three others. All of them witnesses.

Good.

I reached to my hip and drew my sidearm.

Asher took a step forward. "Scarlet—"

I didn't point it at him. I pointed it at the votive candle burning on the shelf across the room. The one he lit every year. The one we lit together for our child.

I pulled the trigger.

The candle exploded. Wax and glass and flame scattered across the wooden shelf, and the light in the room shifted, dimmer now, colder.

The silence afterward was absolute.

I lowered the gun. My hand was steady. I was almost surprised by that.

"I, Scarlet Adams, Luna of Midnight Shadow Pack"—my voice came out clear, carrying the full weight of my title, every syllable deliberate—"reject you, Asher Scott, Alpha of Midnight Shadow Pack, as my fated mate."

The pain hit immediately. It always does, they say. Like something tearing loose from the center of your chest.

I didn't let it show on my face.

Asher's expression broke open. For one second, he looked exactly like the ten-year-old boy who had pressed a blood-stained piece of bread into my hands and told me it would be okay.

I looked away from him.

"Finish it," I said. "Say the words, Asher. In front of everyone."

He didn't move.

I waited.

I didn't leave the Luna's quarters for two weeks.

That's not entirely true. I left to handle pack business—approving patrol schedules, mediating disputes between the Delta warriors, signing off on supply orders. I showed up. I performed. I kept my face blank and my voice steady and my hands from shaking.

But the moment those meetings ended, I came back here. To these rooms. To the space Asher and I had shared for six years.

He hadn't come back.

Not once.

The pack house felt different now. Quieter in some ways, louder in others. Whispers followed me down hallways. Eyes tracked my movements. Everyone knew. Of course they knew. Half the warrior unit had been there when I pulled the trigger on that candle. When I said the words.

When Asher didn't say them back.

Beta Marcus tried to talk to me on day four. Knocked on my door with that careful, diplomatic tone he uses when he's trying to manage a crisis.

"Luna, the Alpha asked me to tell you—"

"I don't care what he asked you to tell me."

Marcus paused. I heard him shift his weight outside the door. "He's still at the cabin. He says he needs time to handle the situation with the Lycan territories before—"

"Get away from my door, Marcus."

He left.

I spent those two weeks doing small, stupid things to keep myself from breaking. I reorganized the bookshelves. I deep-cleaned the bathroom. I went through Asher's closet and pulled out every shirt that still smelled like him and shoved them into garbage bags that I couldn't bring myself to actually throw away.

I touched the locket around my neck so often that the metal grew warm against my skin.

The pack rumors started on day six.

I heard them in fragments. The Alpha's new companion. A young she-wolf. Very beautiful. Staying at the mountain cabin. Some kind of political arrangement with the Lycan King.

That last part almost made me laugh.

Political.

As if politics required him to fuck her.

On day twelve, Elena came to check on me. Our pack healer. The woman who had delivered my pup's stillborn body and held my hand while I bled and screamed and broke into pieces on a medical table.

She didn't knock. She just walked in, set a tray of food on the table, and looked at me with those sad, knowing eyes.

"You need to eat."

"I'm fine."

"Scarlet."

I met her gaze. "I said I'm fine."

She stayed for twenty minutes, sitting in the chair across from me in silence. When she finally left, the food was still untouched.

I lasted fourteen days before I convinced myself I was handling this. That I was strong. That I could endure the silence and the rumors and the empty space beside me in bed every night.

Then the letter came.

Gamma Damien brought it himself. I was in the study, reviewing territory maps, when he knocked. His expression told me everything I needed to know before he even opened his mouth.

"This was delivered to the gate an hour ago." He held out a cream-colored envelope. Expensive paper. No return address. "It's addressed to you personally."

I took it.

Damien hesitated. "Luna, if you want me to—"

"Leave."

He did.

I sat there for five full minutes, staring at that envelope. My name written across the front in unfamiliar handwriting. Neat. Feminine. Deliberate.

I opened it.

The ultrasound image slipped out first. Black and white. Grainy. The unmistakable shape of a growing pup, maybe eight or nine weeks along. A tiny bean of life with a flickering heartbeat visible in the frozen frame.

My hands started shaking.

There was a note underneath. Short. Handwritten on matching cream paper.

*Dear Scarlet,*

*I thought you should know. Asher and I are expecting. He's been so attentive—visiting every day, making sure I'm comfortable, talking about names. He says he's always wanted to be a father.*

*I hope this doesn't upset you too much. I know you tried once.*

*Best wishes,*

*Nadia Brown*

I read it three times.

Then I stood up, walked to the window, and stared out at the territory I had bled to protect. The forests Asher and I had run through as wolves. The borders we had defended together.

I touched my locket.

I thought about the pup I had lost. The one I had traded for Asher's life. The one we were supposed to honor together every year at that shrine.

The shrine where he was now praying for a different child. With a different woman.

Something inside me went very, very cold.

I turned away from the window and walked to my desk. I picked up my phone and called Damien.

He answered on the first ring. "Luna?"

"I need you to gather your most loyal warriors. The ones who won't question orders."

A pause. "How many?"

"Four. Maybe five. Wolves who can move fast and stay quiet."

"What are we doing?"

I looked down at the ultrasound image on my desk. At that tiny, flickering heartbeat.

"We're going hunting."

The territorial border river was black in the early morning dark. Not the peaceful kind of black—the kind that swallowed sound, that churned and foamed against the rocks below with a violence that made even my warriors take a half-step back when they first looked down.

Nadia Brown did not take it well.

She was screaming before Damien's men even finished securing the rope around her wrists. High, desperate sounds that scattered birds from the pines overhead. Her dark hair whipped across her face in the wind off the water. She twisted against the rope, her feet dangling, the icy spray already reaching her from thirty feet below.

I stood at the edge of the cliff and watched her.

"Luna." Damien's voice was low, steady, the way it always was when he was waiting for a command. "She's secure."

"Good."

I pulled out my phone and opened the pack mind-link.

It's a strange thing, sending a message through the link rather than speaking it aloud. It goes everywhere at once—every wolf in the pack feels it like a vibration behind their eyes. I'd used it to coordinate battle formations. To call retreats. To announce births and deaths and territorial shifts.

I'd never used it like this before.

I let my voice carry through it the way a Luna's voice is supposed to—clear, cold, and absolute.

*Asher. I know you can feel this. Come to the northern border. The river crossing at Marker Seven. You have thirty minutes. If you're not here, I cut the rope.*

A pause. Then:

*Don't come alone. Come with your Beta, your Gamma, whoever you want. Bring witnesses. I want witnesses.*

I closed the link.

Nadia had stopped screaming. She was staring up at me now, her arms straining above her head, her face pale and wet from the spray. Her eyes were calculating even now, even dangling over freezing water. That bothered me more than the screaming had.

"You won't do it," she said. Her voice shook, but her chin was up. "You're a Luna. You have a code."

"I have a dead child," I said quietly. "My code died with her."

Something flickered across Nadia's face. Not fear, exactly. Something more like reassessment.

Good. Let her reassess.

I heard him before I saw him. The sound of a truck engine pushed past its limit, tires skidding on the gravel access road. Then footsteps—fast, heavy, purposeful. The kind of footsteps that shook the ground a little, that made wolves step aside automatically without being told.

Asher burst through the tree line with Marcus at his shoulder and two Delta warriors behind him.

He stopped when he saw her.

For one second, I watched something move across his face. Relief that she was still alive. Fury at me. And underneath both of those, something rawer and more complicated that I refused to examine.

"Scarlet." His Alpha aura hit me like a wall of heat, aggressive and commanding. It pressed against my skin the way it always had—but I was a Luna, and I had my own aura, and I had stopped flinching at his a long time ago. "Cut her down. Right now."

"Say the words." I kept my voice even. "That's all I want. Say what you wouldn't say at the cabin. Finish the rejection. In front of your Beta, your warriors, your—" I glanced at Nadia "—companion. Say it here, say it now, and I'll pull her up myself."

"This isn't the way—"

"Say the words, Asher."

His jaw locked. That muscle in his cheek jumped, the one that only appeared when he was fighting himself. I knew every tell he had. I had spent six years learning them.

He took a step toward the edge.

I moved my hand to the rope.

He stopped.

"Don't." The word came out rough, stripped of Alpha authority. Just a man's voice. "Scarlet, please don't."

"Then say the words."

The silence stretched between us like the rope itself—taut, trembling, capable of snapping.

And then Nadia screamed.

Not the desperate screaming from before. This was different. Deliberate. Aimed.

"I'm pregnant!" Her voice cracked across the clearing like a gunshot. "Asher, tell her—tell her I'm carrying your heir! Tell her what you told me at the shrine—that you wanted this—that you prayed for this—"

I felt the words hit Asher before I saw him move.

He launched himself forward with a force that sent Marcus stumbling sideways. He hit my warriors like a wave hitting a seawall—one down, then another, his Alpha strength operating on pure instinct, pure animal drive, the kind that didn't negotiate or calculate.

Damien stepped in front of me.

Asher went through him.

His hands found the rope.