"She's not just the daughter of some servant. She's the reason my mother is dead. And you expect me to bare my throat and beg her forgiveness?!" The words tore from my throat like shrapnel, and somewhere beneath my ribs my wolf threw herself against her cage.
Mirella didn't even have time to part her painted lips. Lucan's eyes went glacial, the cold, flat stare of a wolf who'd learned to kill his own instincts long before he'd learned to kill anything else.
"I warned you," he said, his voice like steel dragged across frozen stone. "Don't test my patience."
Then he turned to his enforcers and gave the order with the casual cruelty of a wolf born into blood. "Go to the funeral den. Bring her mother's body back here."
Every word was a fang dipped in venom.
"She won't learn until she's broken." His lip curled with contempt as he looked at me, looked through me. "You think someone like you deserves to stand as Luna of the Bloodfang Pack?"
"Feed the corpse to the dogs." He meant every syllable.
His pack moved without hesitation, their heavy footfalls echoing through the stone foyer like a death march. These weren't wolves who questioned orders. These were enforcers who'd buried bodies in unmarked graves at the edge of the territory and slept soundly after.
"No! No, please!" I lunged forward in blind panic, only to be seized by another enforcer. His grip crushed my arm with practiced brutality. I heard the crack before I felt it.
Agony exploded through me like wildfire through dry brush, and my wolf's snarl twisted into a sound I'd never heard her make.
Tears blurred the carved beams overhead into smears of gold and shadow. I cried so hard I couldn't draw breath, couldn't think, couldn't do anything but beg.
"Lucan, please! Don't do this to my mother. She's, she's already gone. Isn't that enough?!"
Mirella tilted her head with saccharine sweetness, barely concealing the triumph curving at the corners of her mouth. Beneath that overripe jasmine of hers, the sweet rot underneath turned my stomach.
"Lucan… the dead deserve their rest. Perhaps we should show mercy?"
He turned to her with a theatrical sigh, his hand finding the small of her back with easy possession. "You're too soft. That's why she walks all over you."
Then his attention snapped back to his enforcers, who had paused at the threshold. "Well? What are you waiting for? Do I need to draw you a map to the funeral den?" The bark of command rolled off the walls of the Bloodfang den, and his Alpha aura cracked through the air like a whip, every lower wolf in the room flinching toward the floor.
His voice cut through me like shattered glass, scattering the last fragments of the love I'd clung to for ten desperate years.
He knew. He knew my mother was my only weakness, the single soft place in my armor. And he didn't hesitate to drive the fang straight through it.
I broke.
I bowed.
My spine bent, my head dropped, my pride bled out onto the cold stone floor at Mirella's designer heels. My wolf went silent inside me, and that silence was worse than any howl.
"Please," I whispered, tears falling in hot rivers down my cheeks. "Please just leave my mother in peace. Let her rest."
Each word was a razor in my throat. "I'm sorry. I was wrong."
Wrong for hoping for fairness in a world built on blood debts and Moon Goddess oaths.
Wrong for believing, foolishly, pathetically, that maybe, just maybe, he'd choose me over her.
As I bent forward in supplication, the blood-soaked collar of my robe pulled away from my skin, baring the wounds beneath.
Lucan's eyes flickered. For a split second, something almost human surfaced in those dark depths, surprise, perhaps, or the ghost of the boy he'd once been.
"Is this enough for you?" I straightened with every last ounce of strength left in my shattered body, meeting his gaze with a disgust I could barely keep behind my teeth.
His jaw tightened. He gestured sharply to his Beta's bound advocate. "Bring the oath."
Only when I pressed my bloody fingerprint onto the parchment, signing away my bloodline claim to the pack's holdings, signing away my mother's legacy, did the tension finally ease from his brow.
"You're bleeding," he observed, as if noting a change in the wind. "I'll send for a healer."
He released Mirella and moved toward me, reaching out with the hand that had once cradled my face like I was something precious.
I slapped it away.
"Save your concern for your precious half-blood," I spat. "Better hurry. Wait any longer and those theatrical bruises might fade before anyone important sees them."
I turned to leave, my vision swimming, my legs threatening to buckle.
Mirella's foot shot out with serpentine precision.
I tripped hard, pitching forward toward the unforgiving stone.
Lucan's instincts fired, the reflexes of a wolf trained since pup-hood to protect what was his. He reached out.
Then stopped himself. His hand froze inches from my falling body.
He stepped back.
"Fine." His voice was ice. "Handle your wounds yourself."
I forced myself upright, swallowing the scream that clawed at my throat as pain lanced through every nerve.
He watched me from the threshold, Mirella tucked possessively against his side, the scorched-oak and copper of his scent now soured with cold ash. "I'll accompany you to choose your ceremonial robe tomorrow," he said, as if we were discussing the night's hunt. "The mating ceremony won't plan itself."
He turned and was gone, the door of the den swinging shut on his impassive face.
My body swayed, the dizziness from blood loss rising in nauseating waves. The lanterns above fractured into a thousand spinning shards of light.
In the blur of agony, memory dragged me backward, back to a different time. Back to when we were young and the world hadn't yet taught us its cruelest lessons.
Lucan was just nineteen when his sire began grooming him to inherit the pack. He'd worked through endless nights learning to lead, the running of the territory and the darker dealings both, his eyes perpetually rimmed with exhaustion. One evening, I burned my hand making broth for him in the den's kitchen. Just a small blister, barely worth mentioning.
Yet somehow, he found out. He broke off a sitting with three of the Council Elders and ran the whole way home as if a rogue pack were at his heels, tearing through the dark of the territory in his fur.
He took my hand and cradled it like I was made of spun glass.
"I'm so sorry. I should've protected you," he said, his voice rough with guilt, a low rumble breaking under the words. "I swear before the Moon Goddess, as long as I'm breathing, I'll never let anything hurt you again."
Then he pulled me into his arms. Warm. Strong. Trembling just slightly with the force of his conviction. That embrace, and that oath sworn under the moon, had branded themselves into my memory like a scar.
But that boy was long dead.
He'd grown into a cold, calculating wolf who looked at me like I was nothing. Like I was disposable. Like I was a loose thread waiting to be cut.
Now, he was the one hurting me the most.
I stumbled toward the side entrance of the den, the one the Omega servants used. The edges of my vision darkened, collapsing inward like a dying star.
But before I hit the ground, I fell into someone's arms.
A stranger's arms. Firm and unfamiliar, carrying cedar and cold iron and the static hush before a thunderstorm. Something darker beneath it. Something dangerous.
Before the blackness swallowed me whole, I heard a single whisper against the shell of my ear, a voice like smoke and shadow.
"Do you want revenge?"
The words curled around me like a devil's bargain, offered at the crossroads of desperation and death.
"In exchange for that bloodline claim you just signed away… I'll help you find the proof of who really killed your mother."
