I blocked his number the moment the invitations were sent across the pack lines.
Lucan.
After everything he had done—after taking my trust like it was something owed to him, after standing in the shadow of my life while building another beside Ellie—he still had the audacity to send his voice into my space as though he had never been the one to destroy it.
Calls came first, then messages carried through the mindlink like restless echoes I refused to answer. His presence pressed against my consciousness again and again, insistent, impatient, as though silence itself had wronged him more than betrayal ever did.
Jace had already announced it by then, the engagement written in ink blessed beneath the Moonstone altar and sent to every allied pack house: my joining to Alaric would be held under the next full moon.
That was when Lucan unraveled.
His first messages were disbelief wrapped in denial, each one arriving like a man refusing to accept the consequences of his own choices.
“What is this decree that bears your name?”
“You are to be bound in union? With whom?”
“This must be some jest between you and your brother, is it not?”
“Tell me this is not real.”
Then his tone shifted, softening into something more familiar, something he once used when he still believed I belonged to him.
“When you return, prepare the spiced river fish you used to make,” he wrote through the link, as though nothing had changed. “I have grown weary of every other meal. I miss the scent of your hearth. I miss you.”
And later, almost pleading in its familiarity, as though time could be reversed by tone alone.
“Elowen. Do not do this. Come back.”
As if months of silence, of absence, of betrayal beneath the same moon we once swore beneath, had simply never happened.
I did not answer him.
I sealed the link, binding my thoughts away beneath layers of will until even his voice could no longer reach me. The bond that once made my chest ache with warmth now felt like an old scar pressed too hard.
Even if there had been a time I loved him so deeply it felt carved into my bones, that version of me no longer answered his call.
She had been buried.
Along with the two small souls I would never hear call me mother beneath the moon.
**
Lucan’s mind was anything but silent.
Twenty-seven summons through the bond. Twenty-seven refusals that scraped against his pride like a blade he could not dislodge.
He paced his chamber beneath the hanging wolf pelts, the firelight casting restless shadows across stone walls carved by generations before him. Each unanswered call tightened something in him that had never learned how to be denied.
“Answer me,” he growled into the void, though the bond returned nothing but emptiness.
The door to his hall burst open without ceremony, Leo stepping in with the careless energy of someone untouched by consequence.
“Lucan, you need to see this,” Leo said, holding out a carved slate etched with a communication spell.
“I said not now,” Lucan snapped.
“It is now,” Leo insisted, forcing it into his hands. “Jace sent word through the northern runners. It is already being witnessed by half the allied houses.”
Lucan’s jaw tightened as his eyes dropped to the slate.
“What is it?”
Leo’s grin faltered into something uncertain. “The joining ceremony.”
A pause.
“For whom?”
Leo hesitated only a breath too long.
“For Elowen.”
The world did not change immediately. It simply stopped making sense.
Lucan took the slate, and the moment his gaze landed on the inscription beneath the ceremonial sigil—her name, bound beside another—the blood in his veins turned cold in a way no winter ever could.
Elowen of Moonridge.
To be bound in union with Alaric of the Iron Vale line.
For several heartbeats, he did not move. He did not breathe. The fire beside him cracked softly, but even that sound felt distant, as though it belonged to another man’s life.
Then something in him shifted.
Not grief.
Not acceptance.
Something far more dangerous.
Because Lucan had always believed silence meant waiting, and waiting meant she would return.
But the bond did not feel like waiting anymore.
It felt like loss.
And loss, in the old laws of the werewolf bloodlines, was never something fate was allowed to take without consequence.
