He severed the mind-link. Cold. No hesitation.
The silence that followed was absolute, the kind that settles over a den when a death sentence has been passed before the Moon Goddess.
Seconds later, my communicator pulsed against my palm. A crystal-clear image bloomed across its surface, edges sharp and damning.
An investment pact. My mother's name beside Mirella's, bound together in ink and betrayal.
Bold letters burned at the center like a confession beaten out of a dying wolf:
All claims of fortune carry risk. Every loss born of personal misjudgment is the bearer's own burden.
My mother's mark sat at the bottom. Her paw-seal pressed into the parchment like a blood oath she never understood she was making.
He'd been preparing for this. The Bloodfang Pack's bound advocate, that cold-eyed arbiter who'd buried a hundred sins beneath mountains of sealed parchment, was ready to crush me like I was nothing more than a stray sniffing too close to the bloodline's business.
Still, I went to the Bloodfang territory.
Their lawful front rose at the heart of the lower grounds, a towering monument of glass and black stone that housed the empire of trade they showed the rest of the world. The lift carried me upward like a condemned she-wolf climbing toward the executioner's stone.
The doors parted at the fifteenth floor, and there she stood.
Mirella.
She was draped in custom silks, the fabric clinging to her like a second pelt. The pouch at her hip held more gold moons than most warriors earned in a year of bloody work. And there, glittering on her wrist like a trophy torn from a corpse, the princess bracelet.
My bracelet.
She looked like a Luna born. Like someone whelped inside the inner circle, not a baseborn half-blood who'd clawed her way in through seduction and blood.
Her lips curled the moment our eyes met, a serpent's smile. Beneath it her scent reached me first, overripe jasmine with that sweet rot rising underneath, honey drizzled thin over something gone foul.
"Oh no, Selene," she cooed, her voice dripping with poisoned honey. "You look awful. Guess it's true what they say. When a she-wolf gets old, the bloom fades. No wonder Lucan lost interest."
She tilted her head, feigning concern with the skill of a wolf who'd learned to lie before she'd learned to walk on two legs.
"Still haven't laid your mother to rest beneath the moon? Want me to help plan the rites? I mean," she pressed a manicured hand to her chest, "we're nearly packmates, after all."
My hands curled into fists at my sides. Rage, white-hot and blinding, boiled up from somewhere deep in my chest until it threatened to burn me alive from the inside out. My wolf surged against my ribs, a snarl building low in my throat that I swallowed whole.
"You knew it was a trap," I hissed through clenched teeth. "You knew. It was a slaver's con, a scheme that tricked my mother into surrendering every coin she'd saved. Every gold moon she'd earned on her knees, scrubbing the Bloodfang floors."
Mirella's expression shifted into wounded innocence, but the corner of her painted lips twitched with barely concealed amusement.
"How could you accuse me like that?" she breathed, pressing her hand to her heart. "I was only trying to help. Your mother wanted to earn more for your mating dowry. She came to me, Selene. What was I supposed to do, turn away that sweet old Omega?"
My chest tightened like silver chains were being drawn around my ribs. Blood rushed to my head, pounding in my ears like the war-drums before a Blood Moon hunt.
"Goddess," Mirella sneered, dropping the pretense like a mask she'd grown tired of wearing, "that old bitch loved you like you were the whole world, didn't she?"
She leaned in close, her breath hot against my ear, that cloying jasmine thick enough to choke on.
"One day," she whispered, "I trampled the Alpha-Patriarch's favorite peonies. On purpose. Ground them right into the soil." Her voice was velvet wrapped around a blade. "The head of the Omega servants said he'd dock her three moons' wages. Your mother begged. On her knees. Right there in the garden, dirt under her claws and tears running down her face."
My vision blurred. The world narrowed to a single point, Mirella's smiling face.
"I learned later she hadn't taken a single rest-day in moons," Mirella went on, giggling like she was sharing a delicious secret. "Just to hoard coin. For you. For your mating to a male already warming my bed."
She pulled back, her eyes glittering with malice.
"And when I told her to crawl through the garden like a beaten cur?" Mirella's smile widened. "She did it. Just like that. Hands and knees through the mud, while I watched."
My world crumbled.
All those times my mother had smiled and told me not to worry over a thing while I planned my mating to Lucan. All those times she'd insisted everything was fine, that the Bloodfangs treated her well, that serving a powerful pack was an honor for an Omega like her.
I never knew. I never knew what she had endured for my sake.
The lift doors parted with a soft chime, and something inside me snapped clean in two. Deep beneath my skin my wolf let out a sound I'd never heard her make, a low keening with no name.
I raised my hand, eyes blazing with three years of swallowed rage.
"Mirella, you're a monster."
But before my palm could even graze her cheek, she hurled herself backward out of the lift, crying out like a wounded animal as she clutched her unmarked face.
"Selene, I said I was sorry!" she sobbed, her voice carrying down the marble corridor with theatrical precision. "I even knelt to you, and still you're so cruel. Do you truly want me dead that badly?!"
Pack members, warriors in fine coats, bound advocates who knew better than to step into bloodline business, turned to stare.
"If you want me dead so badly, then fine!" Mirella staggered upright, swaying. "I'll die for your mother! I'll pay the blood debt myself before the Moon Goddess!"
She lurched at the wall as though to crack her own skull against the stone.
"Mirella!"
A figure rushed in from the edge of my vision. Broad shoulders, the scent of scorched oak and copper, that faint sour note of ash gone cold. The silhouette that had once meant safety and love.
Lucan.
He caught her against his chest like she was something precious. Something worth protecting.
Then he turned, and his shoulder drove into me with the force of a male who'd learned violence at his sire's flank.
I wasn't braced for it.
My head whipped back, cracking against the lift's brass rail with a sickening thud that rang through my skull.
The world tilted on its axis.
Warm blood, my blood, trickled down the back of my neck and soaked into the collar of my dress.
Lucan rounded on me, his eyes bloodshot, the edges flickering gold with rage. The same eyes that had once looked at me with tenderness. The same hands that had once cradled my face now curled into fists at his sides, knuckles whitening as if claws strained to break free.
"Selene Thornwood," he spat my name like a curse, "how dare you. Apologize to Mirella. Now."
It was as though she were his mate already. His Luna. The she-wolf who would stand at his side when he took his sire's territory.
And me? Just some maddened thing. Some hysterical servant's daughter to be dealt with before she shamed the pack further.
Mirella sobbed against his chest, her fingers clutching the front of his coat, her body trembling with manufactured terror.
"I know she's just hurting," she whimpered, pressing her tear-streaked face into the hollow of his throat. "I already swore I'd pay for it. I'd take on every job I could, even the ones no other wolf will touch. The filthy work. But she," her voice cracked beautifully, "she still struck me. And cursed me. Said I should drop dead."
Lucan's arms tightened around her. His jaw clenched. His eyes, dark as the river where the pack drowned its problems, fixed on me with undisguised fury.
"Have I not repaid you enough?" he snapped, his voice carrying the weight of a wolf used to being obeyed. The air around him thickened, his Alpha-heir aura pressing down on the corridor until the watching wolves dropped their gazes. "Look at yourself, Selene. You're just like your mother. Petty. Greedy. Always playing the wounded one, always begging for a scrap."
He took a step toward me, and Mirella's jasmine clung to his skin, sour beneath the sweetness.
"You two earned the punishment."
My breath caught in my throat as though a blade had been laid to my windpipe. The corridor spun, but I stayed rooted to the blood-slicked marble, too stunned to move.
"Petty and greedy?" I whispered, staring at the male I'd loved, the male I'd been promised to since I was nineteen winters old, like I was seeing him for the first time. "Is that truly what you think of me? That seeking justice for my mother, an Omega who died in your pack's service, makes me some coin-hungry creature gone mad?"
Tears blurred my vision, turning the world to watercolors. But I refused to let them fall. I would not give them the satisfaction.
Something flickered in Lucan's face when he saw me fighting to hold myself together. A shadow of the male he used to be. A ghost of whatever conscience still haunted him.
But the moment Mirella whimpered against his chest, a soft, wounded sound built to twist the knife, his expression hardened back into stone.
"I saw you try to strike her," he said flatly. "I don't care what your excuse is. I don't care what story you've talked yourself into believing."
He took another step, close enough that I could see the vein pulsing at his temple.
"This is the last time I'll say it. Apologize."
My heart clenched as though it were being crushed in a vice, squeezed until nothing remained but pain and the bitter taste of betrayal. Somewhere far beneath it, my wolf had gone utterly silent.
I looked at him. At the male who had sworn to protect me. At the Beta-blooded Alpha-heir who would inherit a territory built on blood and broken oaths.
At the stranger wearing my intended mate's face.
"And what if I don't?" I said coldly.
