Alpha Alex’s POV
The words hit me like a snapped rib. “She what?”
My secretary’s face drained under the cold desk light. “Sir… I-I’m sorry. Luna Thornclaw… Sofia… she-she killed herself.”
They should have been facts I could stack and shelve. Instead, they hooked into my ribs and pulled. The office tilted, the air conditioner hummed like a distant pack-call. I couldn’t breathe. “Where?” I demanded, my voice sharper than I meant, my wolf-quick.
“By the old pier. Police officers are there.”
I ran with the stupid, animal certainty of one answering the moon. Only this time my paws found concrete and salt, not forest. Ashley’s missed calls pinged and died against the drum of blood in my ears. Every step I took tasted like ash.
At the pier, lights slit the night into sterile strips. Tape snapped in the wind. Faces pressed at the barricade, small and human. The air hit me with the smell of tide and something foul: iron, the coppered tang of violence. Memory struck—this was ours once, the place the waves had kept our secrets. The wood knew our names.
“Alpha Alex.” Gideon’s voice cut through the static. He stood a few yards off, stone-faced, the older wolf to my simmering heat. Even before he spoke, I smelled him, sweat, cedar, the musk of a life that lived closer to the moon.
“They’re bringing her out,” he said. “They’re pulling her body now.”
Body. The word landed in my ears like a curse. When they lifted her, I saw Sofia stripped of motion, her hair glued to her face, skin milk-pale, lips bruised. A rational part of me catalogued evidence, waterlogged dress, hair, the guilty limp that gives no lie, while the rest of me remembered the laugh that used to light rooms, the way she’d stand for me like a blade. Each memory opened like a wound.
A detective approached, careful. “Sir, can you confirm if this is your wife?”
They offered a plastic bag. Inside, a crumpled scrap of paper. I took it like bone.
“I can’t do this anymore. The man I loved betrayed me. The perfect life I thought we had was a lie.”
The ink ran in my hands as if the paper bled. The words tilted, each line a wound. Pack protocol surged up like an old command in my marrow, deny, deflect, protect, muscle memory of a thousand shifts, and my throat obeyed before my heart could.
“She didn’t mean anything to me,” I spat, the lie tasting of metal and old excuses.
Gideon let out a short, hard laugh that smelled of smoke and iron. “Keep telling yourself that,” he growled, voice low as a threat. “See how long the pack lets that lie stand.”My beta’s accusation was not only human heat; beneath his words, I felt another current, something older and darker, like the rasp of claws under leather. In the pack, secrets are not merely sins; they are fissures in bone, places where the cold can enter. Sofia’s knowledge, what had she discovered? Had she found the ledger that named the sacrifices? The truth about the marking? About her mother? Or something smaller and more intimate, the single betrayal that would unravel a life?
“I don’t care,” I whispered. The words were a lie and a prayer at once.
A detective, patient in a way, police are when they lack cruelty, pressed. “Can you… Do you confirm this is your wife?”
“Yes,” Gideon answered for me, and a tremor ran through me so deep it felt like something in the marrow.
“No,” I said suddenly, hoarse and too loud. “It’s not her. This isn’t Sofia.”
The officers exchanged looks. A human being cannot look upon the corpse of someone they once touched and deny it without something snapping. I walked away because saying yes would be an admission, an alignment of the private and the public. To confirm would be to finalize. And I could not, would not make a ghost of what we had been if there remained the sliver of hope, the loophole, that she had been taken, that this had been staged, that the truth was still a thing I could hunt.
“Find everything about Sofia’s last movements,” I barked into my phone when I reached the car. My staff scrambled at the command, and under the mask of a man in control, my wolf began to stir. Fury rose behind my teeth, not only at what had been lost but at the violation of pack law. If Sofia had discovered what should have remained hidden, if she had learned the names passed beneath the moon, if she had been marked or denied a place by deceit, then whoever had done this had crossed a line they would pay for.
The tide pulled at the pier, indifferent to grief, to guilt, to the fragile bureaucracy of human justice. The moon hid behind a thin smear of cloud, coy and culpable. In that half-light, my throat tightened with the urge to howl, a sound that would have carried my claim, my rage, and a warning to any who’d think to kill without being ready to face a pack.
I told myself the howl would serve no purpose; I told myself it was only tragic theater. But the animal inside me knows its own hunger, and now that hunger had a name and a direction, I find the truth, find the hand that pushed, and decide whether justice would be human or wolves. Either way, there would be revenge.
I sat in the car while the city went on, indifferent and endless. My hands still shook. I read the note again and again, as if pages could be peeled back and new ink appear. The perfume on Sofia’s scarf lingered like a promise unkept. Somewhere beyond the sirens, beyond the tape and the flash of cameras, something older rose in me: an inherited sense that deaths do not happen in a vacuum.
If this was suicide, it was a wound I had made.
If it were murder, then someone had twisted my lies into their weapon. Either way, the truth gnawed; I had pulled her into my orbit, and now it had collapsed.
The moon broke through clouds, and the pack answered in a silence that rattled my bones. I drove, not to the police or the hospital, but to the warehouse by the river, the place where wolves spoke truth, where decisions carved futures.
Sofia was dead because of me. Whether by her hand or another’s, I would not let it stand. Someone had stolen what was mine.
