The Villainess's Wolf Begged Me Not to Save Her Alpha

Isabella's POV

The first thing I felt was cold stone under my knees.

The second was the weight of a hundred eyes.

I was kneeling in the middle of a long hall lit by iron chandeliers, and the smell of roasted meat and wax hung over everything. Two tables full of people in dark formalwear stared down at me. Nobody looked surprised. They looked bored, like this was a show they'd seen before.

A man stood over me. He was tall, with dark hair and a jaw that looked carved out of the same stone I was kneeling on. In his hand was a thin silver chain with a crescent moon pendant.

My hand went to my throat before I understood why. The skin there was bare.

"Noah," a soft voice said behind him. "You really don't have to."

"I want to." He turned and fastened the necklace around the neck of a slim blonde girl in a pale blue dress. She lifted her hair for him and smiled down at me.

Noah. Evelyn. The crescent necklace that belonged to Isabella's dead mother.

I knew these names. I'd read them at two in the morning on my phone, hate-scrolling through a werewolf romance called *Moonbound* and yelling at the screen every time Isabella Vale let her Alpha husband walk all over her.

I looked down at my wrists. A silver chain circled the left one, tight enough that the skin beneath it was red and raw. The chain kept her wolf quiet. Kept *my* wolf quiet.

On the far wall hung the pack's lunar calendar, the full moon circled in black ink. Three days away.

Three days until Evelyn's ritual. Three days until they pulled Isabella's wolf out of her body to save the girl wearing her mother's necklace, and Isabella bled out on an altar while Noah held Evelyn's hand.

The girl who dies first. That was what the comments had called her.

That was me now.

"Apologize, Isabella," Noah said. "Then we can discuss whether you eat."

Behind me, a guard was already lifting my plate from the table. Potatoes, a slab of beef, a bread roll. He carried it away without looking at me.

"Apologize for what?" My voice came out rough, like I hadn't used it in a while.

Evelyn's eyes widened. "It's okay. She's probably still upset about this morning."

"You told the kitchen staff not to serve her," Noah said to me, as if I'd done it. "You told half the pack she's faking her illness. You've made her life miserable since she got here, and you're going to fix it in front of everyone."

I hadn't done any of that. The original Isabella hadn't either. But I remembered how this scene went in the book. She cried, she apologized, and he still sent her to bed hungry.

Noah stepped closer, and something inside my chest lifted toward him.

I hated it immediately. He smelled like cedar and rain and something warm underneath, and this body knew that smell the way a plant knows the sun. My chin came up on its own. My shoulders softened.

*He's going to kill you,* I told myself. *He signs the consent form. He watches.*

My body didn't care.

There was a fresh split across his knuckles, the skin torn and still pink. Before I made any decision at all, my hand was already moving, reaching for it.

He flicked my fingers away like a fly.

Then he turned his back on me, picked up a napkin, and knelt beside Evelyn, whose skirt had a streak of red wine across the hem. Someone must have knocked her glass when he'd stood. He dabbed at the stain carefully, gently, like it was the most important job in the world.

"Noah, it's fine," Evelyn murmured, touching his hair.

My hand was still hanging in the air. I pulled it back into my lap.

*Please.* The voice was so faint I thought I'd imagined it. It came from somewhere behind my ribs, thin and tired. *Please don't make him angry.*

I went very still.

"Who is that?" I asked silently.

*It's me. Ceci.* A pause. *Are you... Isabella? You feel different.*

Ceci. The wolf. In the book she barely had any lines, just a whimper here and there, usually right before Isabella did something stupid for love.

"Why are we reaching for him?" I demanded.

The answer came soft and simple, like a child explaining the sky is blue.

*Because we always do.*

A side door opened, letting in a draft of cold air. A young guard stepped through in a gray-and-black pack uniform, his hair cropped short, a scar through one eyebrow. He took up a post by the wall and let his gaze settle on me a beat too long.

Owen.

In chapter thirty-two, Owen stood in front of the council and swore he'd seen Isabella sneaking out of the barracks at night. That was the story that made the whole pack stop pitying her. Adulteress. Liar. A wolf nobody would miss.

I stopped thinking about being believed. There was no point arguing my innocence to a man who'd already decided I was guilty. I needed to get out of this hall with as much as I could carry.

"I'm sorry," I said.

The room murmured. Noah glanced back at me, a little surprised.

"I'm sorry Evelyn's had a hard time," I said evenly. "Now I want my mother's necklace back. And I'd like to stop scrubbing the floors with this chain on until my wrist heals."

Evelyn's fingers drifted up to the pendant. Her eyes went shiny on cue.

Noah stood and tossed the stained napkin onto the table. "That's not an apology. That's a list of demands."

"It's both."

"Where were you this afternoon? Why did Ruth find you by the east gate?" His eyes narrowed. "Who were you meeting?"

I lifted my wrist so he could see the raw ring of skin under the silver.

"I'll answer your questions when you take this chain off."

For a second the hall went quiet enough that I could hear the candles hiss. Something flickered across his face, too quick to name.

"The necklace stays where it is," he said. "The chain stays where it is. You can leave the table. That's what you get."

It was less than nothing. It was also exactly what I needed.

I got to my feet. My knees had locked from the stone and almost buckled, but I didn't let them. On my way toward the kitchen corridor, I passed Ruth, the gray-haired omega who ran the kitchens, standing by the serving cart with a basket of rolls. She didn't look at me. She also didn't move the basket when my sleeve brushed over it.

I walked out with a warm bread roll tucked against my forearm and nobody said a word.

---

The guard who followed me didn't bother with explanations. He shoved me into the back pantry, between shelves of flour sacks and jarred peaches, and the key turned in the lock.

I waited until his footsteps faded. Then I sat on an overturned crate and pulled out the roll.

It was still a little warm. I tore it in half and ate it slowly, because I had a feeling this body didn't get fed often, and throwing up the only food I had would be a tragic way to start.

"Ceci," I said out loud, quietly. "Do you know what happens at the full moon?"

*Evelyn's ceremony,* she said. *Noah says it will make her well.*

"Do you know what it costs?"

A long silence. *No. Nobody tells us things.*

"Okay." I brushed crumbs into my palm and looked at them. "What do you remember? About this whole year?"

*I remember trying.* Her voice wobbled. *I tried to be quiet. I tried to stay out of Evelyn's way. I tried so hard to make him stop being angry with us. Sometimes it almost worked.*

My throat tightened, and it wasn't from the bread.

"Listen to me," I said. "I know how this ends. He doesn't stop. He doesn't come back to us. So we're done. I'm never saving him, never forgiving him, never..."

*Will he come find us tonight?*

The question was so hopeful it stopped me cold.

*Sometimes he comes, after,* she went on softly. *When everyone's asleep. He doesn't say sorry, but he stays a little while.*

My hand had drifted up to my throat, to the empty place where the crescent necklace used to be. I left it there, feeling my own pulse under my fingers. Her pulse.

I'd come into this body ready to walk away from Noah without looking back. I hadn't counted on carrying someone who still loved him.

"If we leave," Ceci whispered, "who will take care of him?"