The message on Mateo's desk was time-stamped 9:47 p.m., three hours after he'd promised he'd be home for our anniversary dinner. I read it twice before my fingers went cold.
Coordinates. A cabin at the northern lake. And one name I hadn't heard spoken aloud in three years.
*Romina Watson.*
The candles I'd lit for us were guttering behind me. Mateo's favorite meal sat cold under a silver lid. I remember the exact way the paper felt—rough, real, not a nightmare I could shake off. And then, somewhere deep in the hollow place my wolf had lived silent for three years, something *stirred.* Not a warm stir. A low, soundless vibration. Like ice cracking on a lake in the middle of the night.
I took the keys off the hook and I ran.
---
The forest smelled wrong the whole way there. Wolfsbane, faint but layered under something floral I'd never scented before—a woman's skin, close to Mateo's, mixed with the sweat of a body that had been pressed against his. My wolf didn't rise. My stomach did.
I found the cabin exactly where the coordinates said it would be. One window, warm and yellow in the black trees.
I didn't need to look for long.
Mateo was standing with his forehead bowed to hers. Her fingers were curled around his jaw the way a woman touches a man she owns. His face—the face I had woken up beside for a thousand mornings—was crumpled in a kind of anguished relief I had never once seen him wear for me.
I could have turned around. I could have.
Instead I opened the door.
"Mateo."
He went rigid, like something inside him had snapped taut. Romina's mouth curved. Slowly. As if she had been waiting for this exact moment and had rehearsed the shape of the smile.
"Explain," I said.
He didn't.
He didn't look at me. He looked at the floor between us. And then his eyes flickered—the specific flicker I recognized as a mind-link going out—and I understood, in a single cold second, that he was not going to speak a word to me at all.
He was calling his warriors.
---
They came fast. Six of them, half-shifted, ringing the clearing outside the cabin in a horseshoe of muzzles and shoulders. Caden, his Beta, arrived last, and I watched the exact instant Caden registered what was happening. His face went white. He did not step forward. He did not step back. He just—stood.
Mateo turned to me.
"Jenna Simmons." His voice came out wrapped in Alpha tone, and the sound went through my jaw like a nail. My throat closed. My voice died mid-breath. "You will not speak."
I could not speak.
He stepped close. He tilted my chin. He pressed his canines to the mark on my neck—the mark he had put there three years ago, on this same night, with my hands in his hair and the moon on the water—and he spoke the unbinding words softly, almost tenderly, the way you'd whisper a lullaby to something you were putting down.
The mark went cold first. Then empty. Like a door closing on an empty room.
Inside my head my wolf—dormant, silent, the wolf I had grieved as absent for three whole years—*screamed.* One raw tearing sound. And then she was gone. Just gone. A silence so total I staggered.
My knees hit the pine needles.
Mateo straightened. He did not look at me when he spoke to the assembled warriors. He looked at Romina.
"She was never my true mate," he said. "Only a placeholder. She is stripped of pack access as of this moment. Escort her to the Omega quarters."
Romina made a small, wounded sound and pressed her face into his shoulder.
I did not cry. I did not beg. I could not have if I'd wanted to—the Alpha tone was still locked around my throat like a collar. Caden was the one who stepped forward and gripped my elbow, and his hand was trembling. I looked up at him. His mouth worked once. He said nothing.
They walked me back through the forest I had run through.
---
The Omega quarters were under the pack house, in a hallway with a bulb that flickered. My cot smelled like other people's sweat. There was no window. When Caden shut the door I heard the lock turn, and then his footsteps did not move for a long time. Then they did.
I sat on the edge of the cot.
I pressed two fingers to the place on my neck where the mark had been. The scar was there, pale and dead, like a coin someone had left on my skin. I could not feel the pack bond. I could not feel my wolf. I could not feel anything at all except the fact that I was still, somehow, breathing.
I took my leather journal out of my inside pocket. I opened it to a blank page.
I wrote one line.
*Find out how Romina came back.*
I closed it.
---
The door opened again before dawn. I braced. But it was Eleanor—Mateo's mother, the former Luna—slipping in with her shawl clutched at her throat and her eyes red and a small cloth bundle of herbs pressed to her chest.
"Jenna," she whispered. She took my hands. Her fingers were freezing. "What he has done is not lawful. The Council will hear of it. I swear to you on the Moon—"
"Eleanor." My voice came back small, but it came. I held her hands harder. I asked the only question that mattered. "Three years ago. When Romina drowned. Was a body ever recovered from the river?"
Eleanor went very still.
"No," she whispered. "Never."
