Janine's POV
I remained frozen outside the office door, my fingers brushing the cold wood as the voices inside drifted toward me like poison on the air. My wolf stirred uneasily beneath my ribs, picking up the tension I didn’t yet understand, a warning prickle racing down my spine.
“Lester, are you absolutely certain the pack doesn’t suspect anything?” John murmured, trying—and failing—to keep the anxiety out of his tone.
“There isn’t a soul who knows,” Lester replied, his voice flat and unfeeling. “Janine still believes our son was taken out by a raid from a rival pack.”
The hallway tilted. My heart slammed so violently I thought the entire floor would hear it.
Our son.
Tommy.
My sweet boy, whose laugh used to echo through the Moonfall estate, whose tiny wolf had only just begun to surface in his dreams.
“And the healers at Silverpine Infirmary?” John persisted. “You’re sure none of them will talk?”
Lester gave a short, contemptuous laugh. “They were compensated well enough to forget how to breathe. They’ll guard that secret until their bones turn to dust. I’m the blood heir of the Blackclaw Alpha—no healer is foolish enough to challenge me.”
A secret.
My pulse thundered in my ears. What in the Moon Goddess’s name was he talking about?
John lowered his voice, but I still heard every word, each one slicing into me deeper than the last. “You ended your own son’s life just to harvest his liver. All so Avery could survive.”
The walls closed in. My lungs seized as if the air itself had turned to ash.
No. That couldn’t be right.
Tommy… dead… not because of some ambush, not because of rival wolves storming our territory—but because his own father had cut him open like prey?
“For Avery?” My sister?
“You think I wanted this?” Lester snapped, the veneer of calm finally cracking. “I was cornered. Avery was dying, and Tommy was the closest match. One life had to be chosen over another, and hers is worth more than his ever was.”
I staggered back from the door, my claws threatening to rip through my palms as I dug my nails into my skin. My child. My baby. He hadn’t fallen in battle. He had been sacrificed—by the very Alpha who swore to protect him.
“Lester…” John sounded unsteady now. “He was only seven. His wolf hadn’t even fully awakened.”
“And Avery is my legacy,” Lester retorted sharply. “Tommy was sickly from the start. He would’ve been culled by this world sooner or later. I only accelerated the inevitable—for the greater good.”
My vision blurred. I pressed a hand to my chest, gasping for air that wouldn’t come. For years I had mourned what I thought was fate’s cruelty, believing some rogue pack had torn my family apart.
Instead, it was my mate.
“There were other options,” John argued weakly. “If you’d waited even a day, another compatible wolf might’ve surfaced.”
“I will not gamble with Avery’s life,” Lester said, final as a guillotine. “She is everything to me.”
Tears streamed down my face in silence, soaking into the folder clutched against my stomach. Only an hour ago I had sat in the infirmary, heart racing with joy as the healer confirmed what I’d barely dared hope for—I was pregnant again. After losing Tommy, the Moon Goddess had given me another child.
I had come here glowing with that miracle.
Now, that happiness felt like something from another lifetime.
My grip tightened on the doorknob until the metal bit into my skin. He had murdered our son. Our flesh and blood.
“And Avery?” John asked hesitantly. “How did she take it—knowing her nephew died for her?”
Lester sounded bored as he answered. “She shed a few tears for the poor boy. But she understood. He was already weak. His time was coming anyway.”
A raw snarl tore through my chest, my wolf raging inside me. My own sister—who had grown up curled beside me beneath the same moon—had accepted my son’s death as collateral.
“I just pray Janine never learns the truth,” John muttered. “If she does, you’re finished.”
“She won’t,” Lester said, smug and certain. “She’s too trusting. Too dependent. Even if the truth finds her, she has nowhere to run. She’s powerless.”
Powerless.
The word detonated something dark and feral inside me.
A mother stripped of her cub is never powerless.
I slipped away from the door like a shadow, my legs trembling beneath me as I fled the building. The moment I reached the car, I collapsed into the driver’s seat, sobs ripping from my throat as if my wolf itself was howling in grief.
I drove without direction, the road blurring beneath a curtain of tears, the voices replaying in my head again and again. Each mile carried me farther from the lie I had lived—and closer to the truth I could no longer escape.
By the time I realized where I was, dusk had fallen. The iron gates of Moonrest Cemetery loomed ahead, the place I had avoided since Tommy was laid to rest. I parked with shaking hands and stepped out, the cool night air slicing through me.
His grave waited at the edge of the clearing.
I collapsed before it, my knees hitting the soil hard as my fingers traced the carved letters.
Tommy Campbell
Beloved Son. Forever in the Moon’s Embrace.
A broken sound tore from my chest as memories surged back—the night Lester had come home soaked in blood, claiming our boy had been caught in a cross-pack attack.
“He was struck down before I could shift,” he’d told me, his eyes wet, his hands trembling. “I watched him fall, Janine. There was nothing I could do.”
I had shattered then, screaming until darkness swallowed me whole. When I awoke, Tommy was already buried. Lester said it was mercy—that he wanted to spare me the agony of seeing our son’s lifeless body.
Lies.
All lies.
He hadn’t buried Tommy to protect me.
He had buried him to hide his crime.
“I’m sorry, my little wolf,” I whispered into the cold stone, tears streaking down my face. “I failed you. I trusted the wrong Alpha.”
I pressed my forehead to the grave, my voice shaking as rage and grief braided together inside my chest. “But I swear on the Moon Goddess herself—you will not fade into silence. They will answer for this. Every single one of them.”
Slowly, I rose to my feet. The night wrapped around me like a cloak, my sorrow hardening into something sharp and lethal.
Lester believed I was weak.
He believed I had no claws left.
He was about to learn just how vicious a betrayed Luna could become.
