He severed the mind-link. Cold. No hesitation.

The silence that followed was absolute, the kind that settles over a den when a death sentence has been passed before the Moon Goddess.

Seconds later, my communicator pulsed against my palm. A crystal-clear image bloomed across its surface, edges sharp and damning.

An investment pact. My mother's name beside Mirella's, bound together in ink and betrayal.

Bold letters burned at the center like a confession beaten out of a dying wolf:

All claims of fortune carry risk. Every loss born of personal misjudgment is the bearer's own burden.

My mother's mark sat at the bottom. Her paw-seal pressed into the parchment like a blood oath she never understood she was making.

He'd been preparing for this. The Bloodfang Pack's bound advocate, that cold-eyed arbiter who'd buried a hundred sins beneath mountains of sealed parchment, was ready to crush me like I was nothing more than a stray sniffing too close to the bloodline's business.

Still, I went to the Bloodfang territory.

Their lawful front rose at the heart of the lower grounds, a towering monument of glass and black stone that housed the empire of trade they showed the rest of the world. The lift carried me upward like a condemned she-wolf climbing toward the executioner's stone.

The doors parted at the fifteenth floor, and there she stood.

Mirella.

She was draped in custom silks, the fabric clinging to her like a second pelt. The pouch at her hip held more gold moons than most warriors earned in a year of bloody work. And there, glittering on her wrist like a trophy torn from a corpse, the princess bracelet.

My bracelet.

She looked like a Luna born. Like someone whelped inside the inner circle, not a baseborn half-blood who'd clawed her way in through seduction and blood.

Her lips curled the moment our eyes met, a serpent's smile. Beneath it her scent reached me first, overripe jasmine with that sweet rot rising underneath, honey drizzled thin over something gone foul.

"Oh no, Selene," she cooed, her voice dripping with poisoned honey. "You look awful. Guess it's true what they say. When a she-wolf gets old, the bloom fades. No wonder Lucan lost interest."

She tilted her head, feigning concern with the skill of a wolf who'd learned to lie before she'd learned to walk on two legs.

"Still haven't laid your mother to rest beneath the moon? Want me to help plan the rites? I mean," she pressed a manicured hand to her chest, "we're nearly packmates, after all."

My hands curled into fists at my sides. Rage, white-hot and blinding, boiled up from somewhere deep in my chest until it threatened to burn me alive from the inside out. My wolf surged against my ribs, a snarl building low in my throat that I swallowed whole.

"You knew it was a trap," I hissed through clenched teeth. "You knew. It was a slaver's con, a scheme that tricked my mother into surrendering every coin she'd saved. Every gold moon she'd earned on her knees, scrubbing the Bloodfang floors."

Mirella's expression shifted into wounded innocence, but the corner of her painted lips twitched with barely concealed amusement.

"How could you accuse me like that?" she breathed, pressing her hand to her heart. "I was only trying to help. Your mother wanted to earn more for your mating dowry. She came to me, Selene. What was I supposed to do, turn away that sweet old Omega?"

My chest tightened like silver chains were being drawn around my ribs. Blood rushed to my head, pounding in my ears like the war-drums before a Blood Moon hunt.

"Goddess," Mirella sneered, dropping the pretense like a mask she'd grown tired of wearing, "that old bitch loved you like you were the whole world, didn't she?"

She leaned in close, her breath hot against my ear, that cloying jasmine thick enough to choke on.

"One day," she whispered, "I trampled the Alpha-Patriarch's favorite peonies. On purpose. Ground them right into the soil." Her voice was velvet wrapped around a blade. "The head of the Omega servants said he'd dock her three moons' wages. Your mother begged. On her knees. Right there in the garden, dirt under her claws and tears running down her face."

My vision blurred. The world narrowed to a single point, Mirella's smiling face.

"I learned later she hadn't taken a single rest-day in moons," Mirella went on, giggling like she was sharing a delicious secret. "Just to hoard coin. For you. For your mating to a male already warming my bed."

She pulled back, her eyes glittering with malice.

"And when I told her to crawl through the garden like a beaten cur?" Mirella's smile widened. "She did it. Just like that. Hands and knees through the mud, while I watched."

My world crumbled.

All those times my mother had smiled and told me not to worry over a thing while I planned my mating to Lucan. All those times she'd insisted everything was fine, that the Bloodfangs treated her well, that serving a powerful pack was an honor for an Omega like her.

I never knew. I never knew what she had endured for my sake.

The lift doors parted with a soft chime, and something inside me snapped clean in two. Deep beneath my skin my wolf let out a sound I'd never heard her make, a low keening with no name.

I raised my hand, eyes blazing with three years of swallowed rage.

"Mirella, you're a monster."

But before my palm could even graze her cheek, she hurled herself backward out of the lift, crying out like a wounded animal as she clutched her unmarked face.

"Selene, I said I was sorry!" she sobbed, her voice carrying down the marble corridor with theatrical precision. "I even knelt to you, and still you're so cruel. Do you truly want me dead that badly?!"

Pack members, warriors in fine coats, bound advocates who knew better than to step into bloodline business, turned to stare.

"If you want me dead so badly, then fine!" Mirella staggered upright, swaying. "I'll die for your mother! I'll pay the blood debt myself before the Moon Goddess!"

She lurched at the wall as though to crack her own skull against the stone.

"Mirella!"

A figure rushed in from the edge of my vision. Broad shoulders, the scent of scorched oak and copper, that faint sour note of ash gone cold. The silhouette that had once meant safety and love.

Lucan.

He caught her against his chest like she was something precious. Something worth protecting.

Then he turned, and his shoulder drove into me with the force of a male who'd learned violence at his sire's flank.

I wasn't braced for it.

My head whipped back, cracking against the lift's brass rail with a sickening thud that rang through my skull.

The world tilted on its axis.

Warm blood, my blood, trickled down the back of my neck and soaked into the collar of my dress.

Lucan rounded on me, his eyes bloodshot, the edges flickering gold with rage. The same eyes that had once looked at me with tenderness. The same hands that had once cradled my face now curled into fists at his sides, knuckles whitening as if claws strained to break free.

"Selene Thornwood," he spat my name like a curse, "how dare you. Apologize to Mirella. Now."

It was as though she were his mate already. His Luna. The she-wolf who would stand at his side when he took his sire's territory.

And me? Just some maddened thing. Some hysterical servant's daughter to be dealt with before she shamed the pack further.

Mirella sobbed against his chest, her fingers clutching the front of his coat, her body trembling with manufactured terror.

"I know she's just hurting," she whimpered, pressing her tear-streaked face into the hollow of his throat. "I already swore I'd pay for it. I'd take on every job I could, even the ones no other wolf will touch. The filthy work. But she," her voice cracked beautifully, "she still struck me. And cursed me. Said I should drop dead."

Lucan's arms tightened around her. His jaw clenched. His eyes, dark as the river where the pack drowned its problems, fixed on me with undisguised fury.

"Have I not repaid you enough?" he snapped, his voice carrying the weight of a wolf used to being obeyed. The air around him thickened, his Alpha-heir aura pressing down on the corridor until the watching wolves dropped their gazes. "Look at yourself, Selene. You're just like your mother. Petty. Greedy. Always playing the wounded one, always begging for a scrap."

He took a step toward me, and Mirella's jasmine clung to his skin, sour beneath the sweetness.

"You two earned the punishment."

My breath caught in my throat as though a blade had been laid to my windpipe. The corridor spun, but I stayed rooted to the blood-slicked marble, too stunned to move.

"Petty and greedy?" I whispered, staring at the male I'd loved, the male I'd been promised to since I was nineteen winters old, like I was seeing him for the first time. "Is that truly what you think of me? That seeking justice for my mother, an Omega who died in your pack's service, makes me some coin-hungry creature gone mad?"

Tears blurred my vision, turning the world to watercolors. But I refused to let them fall. I would not give them the satisfaction.

Something flickered in Lucan's face when he saw me fighting to hold myself together. A shadow of the male he used to be. A ghost of whatever conscience still haunted him.

But the moment Mirella whimpered against his chest, a soft, wounded sound built to twist the knife, his expression hardened back into stone.

"I saw you try to strike her," he said flatly. "I don't care what your excuse is. I don't care what story you've talked yourself into believing."

He took another step, close enough that I could see the vein pulsing at his temple.

"This is the last time I'll say it. Apologize."

My heart clenched as though it were being crushed in a vice, squeezed until nothing remained but pain and the bitter taste of betrayal. Somewhere far beneath it, my wolf had gone utterly silent.

I looked at him. At the male who had sworn to protect me. At the Beta-blooded Alpha-heir who would inherit a territory built on blood and broken oaths.

At the stranger wearing my intended mate's face.

"And what if I don't?" I said coldly.

"She's not just the daughter of some servant. She's the reason my mother is dead. And you expect me to bare my throat and beg her forgiveness?!" The words tore from my throat like shrapnel, and somewhere beneath my ribs my wolf threw herself against her cage.

Mirella didn't even have time to part her painted lips. Lucan's eyes went glacial, the cold, flat stare of a wolf who'd learned to kill his own instincts long before he'd learned to kill anything else.

"I warned you," he said, his voice like steel dragged across frozen stone. "Don't test my patience."

Then he turned to his enforcers and gave the order with the casual cruelty of a wolf born into blood. "Go to the funeral den. Bring her mother's body back here."

Every word was a fang dipped in venom.

"She won't learn until she's broken." His lip curled with contempt as he looked at me, looked through me. "You think someone like you deserves to stand as Luna of the Bloodfang Pack?"

"Feed the corpse to the dogs." He meant every syllable.

His pack moved without hesitation, their heavy footfalls echoing through the stone foyer like a death march. These weren't wolves who questioned orders. These were enforcers who'd buried bodies in unmarked graves at the edge of the territory and slept soundly after.

"No! No, please!" I lunged forward in blind panic, only to be seized by another enforcer. His grip crushed my arm with practiced brutality. I heard the crack before I felt it.

Agony exploded through me like wildfire through dry brush, and my wolf's snarl twisted into a sound I'd never heard her make.

Tears blurred the carved beams overhead into smears of gold and shadow. I cried so hard I couldn't draw breath, couldn't think, couldn't do anything but beg.

"Lucan, please! Don't do this to my mother. She's, she's already gone. Isn't that enough?!"

Mirella tilted her head with saccharine sweetness, barely concealing the triumph curving at the corners of her mouth. Beneath that overripe jasmine of hers, the sweet rot underneath turned my stomach.

"Lucan… the dead deserve their rest. Perhaps we should show mercy?"

He turned to her with a theatrical sigh, his hand finding the small of her back with easy possession. "You're too soft. That's why she walks all over you."

Then his attention snapped back to his enforcers, who had paused at the threshold. "Well? What are you waiting for? Do I need to draw you a map to the funeral den?" The bark of command rolled off the walls of the Bloodfang den, and his Alpha aura cracked through the air like a whip, every lower wolf in the room flinching toward the floor.

His voice cut through me like shattered glass, scattering the last fragments of the love I'd clung to for ten desperate years.

He knew. He knew my mother was my only weakness, the single soft place in my armor. And he didn't hesitate to drive the fang straight through it.

I broke.

I bowed.

My spine bent, my head dropped, my pride bled out onto the cold stone floor at Mirella's designer heels. My wolf went silent inside me, and that silence was worse than any howl.

"Please," I whispered, tears falling in hot rivers down my cheeks. "Please just leave my mother in peace. Let her rest."

Each word was a razor in my throat. "I'm sorry. I was wrong."

Wrong for hoping for fairness in a world built on blood debts and Moon Goddess oaths.

Wrong for believing, foolishly, pathetically, that maybe, just maybe, he'd choose me over her.

As I bent forward in supplication, the blood-soaked collar of my robe pulled away from my skin, baring the wounds beneath.

Lucan's eyes flickered. For a split second, something almost human surfaced in those dark depths, surprise, perhaps, or the ghost of the boy he'd once been.

"Is this enough for you?" I straightened with every last ounce of strength left in my shattered body, meeting his gaze with a disgust I could barely keep behind my teeth.

His jaw tightened. He gestured sharply to his Beta's bound advocate. "Bring the oath."

Only when I pressed my bloody fingerprint onto the parchment, signing away my bloodline claim to the pack's holdings, signing away my mother's legacy, did the tension finally ease from his brow.

"You're bleeding," he observed, as if noting a change in the wind. "I'll send for a healer."

He released Mirella and moved toward me, reaching out with the hand that had once cradled my face like I was something precious.

I slapped it away.

"Save your concern for your precious half-blood," I spat. "Better hurry. Wait any longer and those theatrical bruises might fade before anyone important sees them."

I turned to leave, my vision swimming, my legs threatening to buckle.

Mirella's foot shot out with serpentine precision.

I tripped hard, pitching forward toward the unforgiving stone.

Lucan's instincts fired, the reflexes of a wolf trained since pup-hood to protect what was his. He reached out.

Then stopped himself. His hand froze inches from my falling body.

He stepped back.

"Fine." His voice was ice. "Handle your wounds yourself."

I forced myself upright, swallowing the scream that clawed at my throat as pain lanced through every nerve.

He watched me from the threshold, Mirella tucked possessively against his side, the scorched-oak and copper of his scent now soured with cold ash. "I'll accompany you to choose your ceremonial robe tomorrow," he said, as if we were discussing the night's hunt. "The mating ceremony won't plan itself."

He turned and was gone, the door of the den swinging shut on his impassive face.

My body swayed, the dizziness from blood loss rising in nauseating waves. The lanterns above fractured into a thousand spinning shards of light.

In the blur of agony, memory dragged me backward, back to a different time. Back to when we were young and the world hadn't yet taught us its cruelest lessons.

Lucan was just nineteen when his sire began grooming him to inherit the pack. He'd worked through endless nights learning to lead, the running of the territory and the darker dealings both, his eyes perpetually rimmed with exhaustion. One evening, I burned my hand making broth for him in the den's kitchen. Just a small blister, barely worth mentioning.

Yet somehow, he found out. He broke off a sitting with three of the Council Elders and ran the whole way home as if a rogue pack were at his heels, tearing through the dark of the territory in his fur.

He took my hand and cradled it like I was made of spun glass.

"I'm so sorry. I should've protected you," he said, his voice rough with guilt, a low rumble breaking under the words. "I swear before the Moon Goddess, as long as I'm breathing, I'll never let anything hurt you again."

Then he pulled me into his arms. Warm. Strong. Trembling just slightly with the force of his conviction. That embrace, and that oath sworn under the moon, had branded themselves into my memory like a scar.

But that boy was long dead.

He'd grown into a cold, calculating wolf who looked at me like I was nothing. Like I was disposable. Like I was a loose thread waiting to be cut.

Now, he was the one hurting me the most.

I stumbled toward the side entrance of the den, the one the Omega servants used. The edges of my vision darkened, collapsing inward like a dying star.

But before I hit the ground, I fell into someone's arms.

A stranger's arms. Firm and unfamiliar, carrying cedar and cold iron and the static hush before a thunderstorm. Something darker beneath it. Something dangerous.

Before the blackness swallowed me whole, I heard a single whisper against the shell of my ear, a voice like smoke and shadow.

"Do you want revenge?"

The words curled around me like a devil's bargain, offered at the crossroads of desperation and death.

"In exchange for that bloodline claim you just signed away… I'll help you find the proof of who really killed your mother."

Tears carved silent rivers down my face as I clung, half-conscious, to the stranger's shirt, the fine wool damp beneath my trembling fingers. His scent wrapped around me, cedar and cold iron and the static hush before a thunderstorm, the only solid thing in a world that had gone to ruin.

"Re… venge…" The word escaped my lips like a dying Moon Goddess invocation, barely formed, yet heavy with the weight of a blood oath. Somewhere deep inside me, my wolf stirred against the dark and answered with a low, broken sound.

When I opened my eyes again, all I saw was white, too bright, too sterile. The bitter sting of healing herbs and silver-scrubbed stone flooded my senses, the air of the Healing Hall a stark contrast to the darkness that had swallowed me whole.

I turned my head slowly, wincing at the dull ache that radiated through every fiber of my body, and reached for my crystal communicator. A message from Lucan waited on the screen, sent the night before.

[I've got Pack business to handle tomorrow. Go try on the ceremonial robe by yourself. Our bonding is approaching, so pull yourself together. Stop with the dramatics and bind yourself into the Bloodfang Pack with some dignity.]

I stared at the message for a long moment, my face an unreadable mask, then dragged my finger across the screen and watched the words disappear into oblivion.

But just beneath it, something else caught my eye, a post from Mirella's spirit-network account.

Lucan had taken her on the Pack's storm-hawk to chase the northern lights in some frozen corner of the wildlands, far from prying eyes.

In the ethereal green haze of the aurora, their silhouettes stood close together, intimate as conspirators. Matching moonstone bands glinted on their fingers, fingers tightly intertwined like the roots of a poisonous vine.

The caption pierced through me like a stiletto blade:

[He told me I'm the only one for him. He promised to protect me from all the cruelty in this world. How could I ever let go of a man like that?]

Below it, a cutesy account bearing cartoon couple avatars had commented:

[And no matter how far you try to run from me, I'll find you. I'll tie you to my side forever. So don't even try, silly girl.]

I didn't need to verify the source. I knew that tone, that possessive flair, that dark promise wrapped in honeyed words. That was Lucan.

I could tell from the typing style alone.

I remembered the day I asked him to use matching couple avatars with me. He had rolled his eyes, his handsome face twisting with contempt.

"What are you, a fresh-shifted pup? Can't you see I'm handling Pack affairs? Now leave!"

And yet I had once dreamed of running beneath the stars with him along the high ridges, a stolen moonlit moment away from the shadows that governed our lives. I had planned every step of it. He said he was too busy. Every time, that was the excuse: too busy.

Now I finally understood the truth that had been staring me in the face all along. He could be romantic. He could be tender and devoted. He just never chose to be that way with me.

I set the communicator down on the stiff Healing Hall linen, trying to blink back the sting behind my eyes.

That's when I noticed the envelope sitting quietly on the bedside table, cream-colored and costly.

Inside it was a storm-hawk passage. Departure in two days.

And a small note, written in an elegant hand:

[You're welcome. Hope you like the gift. For your mating —D.]

So I was right. The man who had carried me through the darkness and delivered me to safety was none other than Dorian Ashmoor, the ghost who had returned from the dead to become Lucan's worst enemy. The sole survivor of a slaughtered bloodline, come back to collect.

I sent him a quiet thank-you, my fingers hovering over the keys longer than necessary, and signed myself out of the Healing Hall not long after.

Then the mating coordinator called. The ceremonial robe my mother had ordered for me, commissioned from the finest Omega seamstress on the edge of the territory, paid for with years of her modest savings, had been altered to fit. It was ready.

It was the last gift she left me before the Bloodfang Pack let her die. I had to claim it.

But when I stepped into the seamstress's den, the soft chime above the door ringing out, I froze.

There stood Mirella, twirling in my robe. The air went thick with overripe jasmine and that sweet rot beneath it, honey poured over something dead.

"Selene… you came." She spun before the gilded mirror with a saccharine smile, her voice dripping with venom disguised as honey.

"I just had to make sure it fits, you know. Trying to help you out."

She tugged the neckline lower with deliberate provocation, revealing fresh marks scattered across her chest like a constellation of sin, the bruised imprint of teeth at her throat where no true bond should sit. Her tone turned mockingly bashful.

"Oh no, it's Lucan's fault, he's just too passionate. I told him to be gentle…"

I stared at her performance, cold and unblinking as a statue carved from marble. My wolf had gone utterly still beneath my skin, the way prey goes still.

"You really did inherit your mother's talent for stealing other females' mates."

Her smile twitched, then curved into something crueler, the mask slipping to reveal the predator beneath.

"Oh? Didn't you hear?" She placed a hand over her stomach with theatrical tenderness. "I'm carrying Lucan's pup. His heir."

"And your blood oath?" She laughed, the sound like shattering crystal. "It's fake."

She flashed a recording on her crystal orb. The dim back room of some pack hall. Mirella draped across Lucan's lap like a trophy.

He was drinking, his lips brushing against her temple with casual affection.

"Do your best and bring the pup into this world. When it's born, I'll gift him the Bloodfang territory. Everything. Every hunting ground, every claim."

Mirella asked in a coy voice: "But… what about my sister?"

Lucan chuckled, the sound dark and dismissive. "I never truly bound myself to her. There's no mark on her neck and there never will be. I've been slipping wolfsbane suppressant into her milk for moons. She can't conceive, can't even take a heat. When the time comes, I'll just claim we took in a stray pup."

It was like being struck by lightning. My head spun. My legs nearly buckled beneath me, and I had to grip the edge of a display case to stay upright. Inside me my wolf let out a single thin whine and folded down into silence, as if it too had finally understood there had never been a bond to grieve.

So that was it.

Whatever love had existed between us had died a long time ago. I was just too blind, too desperate to believe in the fairy tale, to notice the corpse rotting at my feet.

I sucked in a sharp breath, straightened my spine with the dignity my mother had taught me, and forced a smile onto my face.

"Well, congratulations. Becoming the next Luna of the Bloodfang Pack is just around the corner."

"But that robe is mine. Take it off," I said, my voice dropping to ice.

I lunged forward to reclaim it, but before my fingers could even brush the fabric, one of her guards, a brute Lucan himself had set at her side, drove his boot into my stomach.

The force knocked me flat against the polished floor. Pain exploded through my gut like a grenade. I could feel everything twisting, shifting, as though my organs had been rearranged by the brutal impact.

Mirella picked up a pair of shears from the seamstress's table. Her tone was gleeful as she traced the blade over the delicate silk, savoring the moment.

"Lucan said no matter what I do, he'll clean up my mess. That's what it means to have the protection of the Pack."

The sharp edge tore through hand-stitched lace. Slashed through soft silk that my mother had saved for years to afford. With each cut, she shredded the last gift my mother had ever given me, the only piece of her I had left, and beneath the shears I caught the fading ghost of her scent woven into the cloth, silver cherry-blossom and warm hearthsmoke and clean linen left in the sun, thinning into nothing with every stroke.

I just lay there on the cold floor, watching the pieces flutter down like snowflakes in a graveyard.

Even my hatred felt dull now, numbed by the crushing weight of everything I had lost.

Mirella strutted out of the den, her heels clicking against the stone like a victory march, leaving nothing but wreckage in her wake.

I dragged myself back to the cliffside den… or rather, what used to feel like home.

Once I got there, I tore open every drawer and chest with trembling hands, yanked out every gift Lucan had ever given me, the jewels that now felt like silver shackles, the fine pelts and bags that were nothing but gilded cages, the soft stuffed creatures from those early days when I still believed his lies.

One by one, I threw them all in the refuse.

Behind me, I heard footsteps approaching.

Familiar ones.