Alaric's hand clamped down on the back of my neck, his grip bruising against my scent glands. Every trace of the bond warmth had vanished from his eyes, replaced by something cold and predatory.
"Revenge, of course." His voice was ice, his Alpha dominance pressing down on me like a physical weight. "You enjoy being mounted by enemy wolves, don't you? Then I'll make sure you spend the rest of your life as a living widow—bonded but abandoned, marked but untouched."
"Lyra." He leaned in close, his breath hot against the sensitive skin behind my ear where his claiming bite still throbbed. "I want your remaining years to hurt a hundred—no, a thousand times more than what I'm feeling right now."
The next morning, he departed for the Moonlit Isles with Seren.
Our mating journey. Our promised destination.
Alaric had always refused to be captured in memory-crystals, claiming an Alpha's image held too much power to share carelessly. But for her, he commissioned a pack chronicler to follow them everywhere. Hundreds of paired images—him gazing at her on white sand shores under the full moon, her draped against his chest as the sun bled into the sea—all shared through the pack network for every wolf in the territories to witness.
By then, my disgrace had spread across Capital Territory like wildfire through dry brush.
Desperate heat-slave. Insatiable she-wolf. The whispered condemnations were endless, carried on every breeze that touched pack lands. Meanwhile, Alaric became the noble Alpha who'd been betrayed by his intended mate yet still honored his claiming responsibility. And Seren? She was celebrated as the brave Omega who'd endured public scorn because her devotion to the Alpha was true and pure.
Their supporters flooded my mind-link with death wishes before I severed the connection entirely. Funeral wreaths woven with wolfsbane arrived at my den door. Someone glamoured my face onto pleasure-house advertisements, images so vile I couldn't look at them twice without my stomach heaving.
While I drowned in shame, Alaric took Seren to every sacred site I'd ever dreamed of visiting with him. Every single one.
And still—still—I couldn't let go of the bond.
How could I? In this entire world, after my mother, he was the only one who had ever truly wanted me. The only one whose scent had ever meant safety.
I was eighteen winters old when my father brought Seren and her mother into our den.
One moon cycle later, at my coming-of-age feast, my mother pressed a moon-blessing charm into my palm. Her hands were warm, her wolf-amber eyes soft with love.
Then she climbed to the highest ledge of our territory and stepped off the edge.
Her journal told me everything. Pages and pages of deliberate humiliation. Seren and Raven's calculated cruelty, their whispered campaigns to isolate her from the pack, to taint her scent-standing until no wolf would acknowledge her presence.
I brought the evidence to my father, Elder Dorian of the Ashvale Pack.
Seren wept, her Omega distress-scent flooding the room. Raven sobbed harder, clutching at my father's arm.
I was cast out of the den that same night.
That winter was brutal. The kind of cold that seeps into your bones and settles there like frost that never thaws.
I was hours away from becoming a lone wolf—packless, unprotected, prey for any territorial male who caught my scent—when Alaric found me. He'd searched every corner of the territory, tracking my fading trail through frozen forests and abandoned hunting grounds.
He pulled me into his arms so tightly I couldn't breathe, his wolf rumbling beneath his skin, his voice caught between fury and anguish.
"Why didn't you come to me?"
"Lyra." He tilted my chin up, forcing me to meet his storm-grey eyes. "Remember this. Even if every pack in existence turns their backs on you, I want you. I will always want you."
After that, Alaric poured everything he had into caring for me.
He brought me into the Nightfall Pack's elite training grounds, a world of Alpha heirs and pure-blooded wolves where I stuck out like a stray among thoroughbreds. Everyone waited for me to fail. To crumble. To prove I didn't belong among their ancient bloodlines.
At the opening gathering of the season, Alaric took the central stone as the pack's most promising young Alpha. He was supposed to give a speech about territory expansion and alliance strategies.
Instead, he looked directly into the assembled wolves and declared:
"Lyra Ashvale is my life. Touch her, and you touch me. Harm her, and I will personally ensure your line ends with you."
The whispers stopped after that.
He hunted for me every single day—bringing fresh kills, proper nutrition, determined to put healthy weight on my too-thin frame. Whenever the master craftswolves released their seasonal collections of ceremonial garments and enchanted accessories, he had everything sent to my quarters before I could even browse the offerings.
Once, after a run through the enchanted forests, I mentioned offhandedly how magical it would be to have a sanctuary like the ones in the old legends—a hidden place where no darkness could reach.
He claimed land in the most protected corner of his territory. Built me an estate. A secret sanctuary, warded and safe, just for me.
Every wolf in Capital Territory's elite circles knew how Alpha Alaric Nightfall treated me. It wasn't a secret—it was legend.
He made me bright again. Confident. Even a little spoiled, in ways I'd never imagined possible after everything I'd lost.
On the nights when the grief crept back—when I woke gasping from nightmares of my mother's fall, terrified that Alaric would reject our bond and leave me packless again—he would hold me through every sob, every irrational accusation, and repeat the same words with unwavering patience:
"Never worry, Lyra. Unless I'm dead, I will never stop loving you."
How was I supposed to let go of that wolf?
So when he returned from the Moonlit Isles with Seren, I swallowed my pride. I begged.
I dug out my healer records from the infirmary den—proof that I'd been poisoned with heat-inducing toxins, proof that I was innocent of willing betrayal—and brought them to him.
He wouldn't even look at them.
"Fabricated evidence," he said, his lip curling with disgust, his Alpha dominance pressing down until I could barely stand. "Is there anything you won't do to escape the consequences of your treachery?"
