"I'm sorry, Selene. I was wrong. I wouldn't dare dream of taking Darius as my mate anymore. I'll take the pup and go far away. Please, I'm begging you, just stop hurting us, okay?"
"What are you doing? Putting on another act?"
The pain in my abdomen was getting worse. A dark premonition crept through me, cold and certain, the way every wolf knows when the wind shifts before a storm rolls in off the coastline. Deep inside me my wolf went rigid, ears flattening at something she could sense and I could not. Terrified that something was actually happening to my pup, I moved toward the door to find a healer, but it swung open before I could reach it.
A crowd stood in the doorway. Pack warriors. Sworn wolves. The inner circle of the Ironclaw Pack, still carrying themselves with the quiet vigilance of those who lived inside a world where every threshold could turn lethal. And at the front, Darius. His scent reached me before his shadow did, scorched oak and old copper and that sour undertone of ambition gone rancid.
The moment he saw Vesper and the pup on the floor, the infant screaming in raw, bloodcurdling wails that bounced off the sterile walls of the Healing Hall and filled the corridor beyond, the color drained from his face. He dropped the bowl of broth in his hands without a second thought. The ceramic shattered against the stone, and not a single wolf behind him flinched. He rushed over and scooped the pup up, cradling the child against his chest with hands that had broken bones and ordered throats torn out and never once trembled the way they trembled now.
"What happened? We were gone ten minutes. What the hell happened?"
"Darius..."
Vesper lifted her face. The handprints across her cheek were vivid and unmistakable. Three of them, layered, the kind of marks that told a story all on their own.
She was trembling, tears streaming down her face. She tucked her hair behind her left ear with a slow, deliberate motion, and when she spoke, her voice cracked in exactly the right places. "It's my fault. I never should have come to you for help. If I weren't so afraid my pup would grow up without a father, I'd never have degraded myself like this!" She turned her wet eyes toward the wolves gathered in the doorway, making sure every one of them could see. "Luna, if you didn't want me and Darius to seal the mating bond and bring the pup into the Ironclaw name, then why did you pretend to agree and then turn around and try to drive us out? Striking me was one thing. But throwing a newborn pup on the floor?"
Her shrill sobs and accusations sent a chill through the room. The silence that followed was the particular silence of hardened wolves recalculating. I could feel it. The shift. The weight of judgment settling onto me like a physical thing, pressing the air from my lungs.
Everyone turned to look at me. "Selene, you..."
"Selene!"
Darius walked toward me with the pup in his arms and slapped me across the face.
The blow sent my vision black. I nearly passed out. The sound of it was worse than the pain. A sharp, flat crack that echoed in the small room, and behind it the absolute stillness of warriors who had watched their Alpha strike his Luna and understood that no one was permitted to react.
I was already unsteady on my feet. My body crumpled and I hit the floor. My knees struck the cold stone first, then my palms, and the shock of it traveled up through my wrists and into my shoulders. The lamp above me hummed. Someone's boot leather creaked. No one moved to help me. Inside, my wolf snarled and threw herself against the cage of my ribs, but my body had no strength left to answer her.
The pain in my abdomen sharpened. I pressed both hands against my stomach, hard, while cold sweat beaded across my forehead and rolled down my temples. The room tilted. I could hear the pup crying, could hear Vesper's practiced sobbing, could hear the low murmur of the wolves by the door. All of it reached me as if through water.
"I thought you were actually being generous when you agreed to break the bond! How can you be this two-faced? The pup is so small. He isn't even a day old, and you threw him on the ground!" His voice was a blade, each word precise and final, the voice of an Alpha delivering a sentence. "You're going to be a mother yourself. Aren't you afraid your own pup will pay for what you've done?"
My cheek burned. I turned my head slowly and saw the hatred carved into his face. I could barely process what I'd just heard.
For the sake of Vesper's pup, he had cursed ours.
The wolf I had loved for seven years. The wolf whose pack I had built from nothing, whose alliances I had secured with my own bloodline name, whose enemies I had kept beyond the borders by being an Ashthorne. He stood over me on that cold Healing Hall floor with another she-wolf's pup in his arms and cursed the life growing inside me.
"Yeah, Selene, how could you do that? She just whelped. You shouldn't have hit her!" One of the warriors' mates, someone who had eaten at my table, who had pressed her cheek to mine at the Blood Moon gathering.
"No wonder the Alpha says he's more at ease with Vesper. Selene's temper is way too much." Another voice. Quiet, but not quiet enough.
They all talked over each other, a chorus of noise that split my skull open. My breathing turned shallow and ragged. The room pressed in. Every face was turned away from me or turned against me, and I understood, in that moment, how completely Vesper had constructed this. She had given them exactly the story they wanted. The jealous Luna. The innocent widow. The helpless pup.
I pressed my hands harder against my stomach and forced myself to speak.
"Enough! All of you, shut up!" My voice tore out of me with a force that startled even me, a low growl threading beneath it that came from somewhere older than words. I saw two of the warriors step back. "'Selene' and 'Vesper'? Do none of you have any sense of right and wrong? A wolf doesn't get to keep a Luna and a kept she-wolf under the same roof and call it honor! Darius broke the bond first. That's on him! And even if I did hit Vesper, she had it coming!"
My outburst stunned the room into silence. Real silence. The kind where wolves stop breathing because they are not sure what happens next.
"Darius was only kind to me and the pup because of my late mate!" Vesper sobbed, crawling to Darius's legs. She pressed her face against his knee, and the gesture was so perfectly calibrated, so precisely the image of a grieving widow seeking shelter from her fallen mate's blood-brother, that I almost admired it. Almost. Beneath the overripe jasmine and sugared honey of her, I caught it again, that faint trace of decay and cold iron she could never fully mask. "The pup fell from a height. I don't even know if he'll survive. Darius, please, don't waste any more time. Call a healer!"
"Don't be scared. I won't let anything happen to him." His voice dropped low, tender, a register I hadn't heard him use with me in years. He cradled the child closer.
Darius turned to leave with the pup in his arms.
And in that moment, I felt something warm and wet sliding down between my legs.
The sensation froze me with terror. Everything else disappeared. The voices, the faces, the humming lamp, the smell of antiseptic and spilled broth. All of it fell away, and there was only the warmth spreading beneath me and the cold that followed it, a cold that started in my chest and moved outward until my fingers went numb. Deep inside, my wolf went utterly silent, the silence of an animal that has scented its own death.
I looked down. A shock of red was spreading beneath me. Bright against the white stone. Impossible to mistake for anything else.
"Darius, my pup... our pup!"
He didn't turn around. He didn't even slow down. His warriors parted for him in the doorway, and not one of them looked back at me on the floor.
"Selene, I've never been more disappointed in you. Get yourself home. I'll be staying at the Healing Hall with Vesper and the pup for the next few days." He paused in the doorway. The corridor light caught the edge of his jaw, and I could see the muscle there working, tightening. "And you'd better pray her pup is all right. Because if he's not, I won't let you off."
Every last one of them followed him out the door. The room emptied the way a den empties after an Alpha has spoken. Completely. Without hesitation. Without a single backward glance.
I stayed on the floor. The blood kept spreading. The lamp kept humming. Somewhere down the corridor, I could hear Vesper's voice rising in fresh sobs, and the low reassuring murmur of Darius answering her, and the quick footsteps of a healer being summoned.
No one summoned a healer for me.
I pressed my hands against my stomach and held on to what I was losing, and the stone beneath me grew warm and then cool and then warm again, and I understood, with a clarity that cut through everything else, that I was alone. That I had been alone for a very long time. That the name Ashthorne, which had protected everyone in this den, could not protect the one thing I needed it to protect most.
