After my mate consolidated the secondary bloodline succession, he took his brother's former mate and her two pups to the capital to build a new life.
My daughter and I survived on scraps and foraged roots outside pack territory, waiting for him in that freezing den for five long years.
The only news that ever came was that he'd inherited the Thornwood Alpha title.
I carried my daughter a thousand miles to find him, and the guards at the gate beat us with wooden clubs like we were feral rogues.
"Showing up at the Alpha's territory claiming to be pack? You must be tired of living. Don't you know how our Luna deals with stray she-wolves who come sniffing around?"
I lay in a heap of my own blood. "...Luna?"
When I lifted my head, I could just make out Edith Ashvale in the distance, dressed in a Luna's finery, her two pups raised as the young Alpha heir and she-wolf of the house.
Edith greeted us with a warm smile and set out a plate of pastries. They were laced with wolfsbane.
My daughter was starving. She wolfed down a piece and dropped dead on the spot.
I choked up a mouthful of black blood. As the world dimmed, I heard Edith's vicious laugh cutting through the haze.
"Narelle Silvercrest, you should never have come here to disrupt our pack. Finn has treated me as his Luna for years. If you showed up alive, how was I supposed to go on holding this territory?!"
My daughter and I died like dogs. They rolled our bodies in reed mats and dumped us in a mass grave beyond the territory markers.
After I was gone, Finn wrapped his arms around a weeping Edith and murmured comfort against her hair.
"She's dead. Let it go. Even if she'd lived, I would've burned the mating mark off her neck myself and told her to stay away from our pack."
The meal I'd once given a starving stranger, the vows he'd sworn under open sky, all of it erased from his memory as though it had never existed.
I died with hatred lodged so deep it followed me into the dark. When my eyes opened again, it was the very day Finn inherited the title.
I threw the foraged roots from my hands, sold the den for every coin it was worth, and carried my daughter to my father's territory compound, where I fell to my knees.
"Father. I've decided to reject the mating bond."
...
In my previous life, the moment I heard Finn had become the Alpha of the Thornwood Pack, I bundled up my daughter and traveled a thousand miles to find him. Edith killed us both with wolfsbane-laced pastries.
My last thought before the darkness took me was regret. Not for dying, but for severing the blood-bond with my father, Alpha Aldric Silvercrest, all for the sake of mating with Finn Thornwood.
This time, the moment I opened my eyes, I sold the den, packed what little money it brought, and set out for the capital.
But I was not going to the Thornwood territory.
I told the driver to take the long way around, and the carriage rolled to a stop before the gates of the Silvercrest Pack compound.
The driver took one look at us, my daughter and me in our threadbare rags, shuffling toward the Alpha's gates like a pair of packless rogues, and let out a snort.
"Takes all kinds. Now even rogues have the nerve to show up at the Alpha's door claiming to be blood."
I ignored him. I took Hildegarde Thornwood's small hand in mine, walked to the gate, and knelt.
"Father. Your daughter knows she was wrong."
My father was the Alpha of the Silvercrest Pack, the most powerful pack on the Northern Frontier. My mother had been a royal she-wolf of the Valdorian wolf nation.
I was born an Alpha-blooded daughter of the Silvercrest line, raised in moonstone and silver. Then one spring, on a hunt near the Greenshire borderlands, I stumbled upon Finn Thornwood, the unwanted second pup of the Thornwood Pack.
His brothers had been tearing each other apart over the Alpha succession, and he'd nearly been killed in the crossfire. They broke his leg and left him in a ditch, half-starved and wolfless, unable to shift.
I felt sorry for him. So I saved his life.
Then, sharing those cramped border dens day after day, I fell in love with him.
When I swore I would mate with Finn and no one else, my father was furious. His voice went cold as iron, and the weight of his Alpha aura pressed down on the room until the air itself seemed to thin.
"If you mate with that man, I no longer have a daughter."
Finn swore to the Moon Goddess he would cherish me for the rest of his life.
I stripped off my moonstone and silver, put on a plain cotton dress, and became his mate.
And over the years, lulled by his sweet words repeated day after day, I withered into a gaunt, hollow-eyed she-wolf whose inner wolf had gone so quiet I sometimes forgot she was there at all.
I never imagined that within five or six years, every one of his elder brothers would die, and the Thornwood Pack elders would offer Finn the Alpha title on a single condition: accept the secondary bloodline succession, and the territory was his.
Once he became Alpha, he simply slotted Edith into the role of his Luna and raised her pups as his own.
By the time I dragged myself to his territory gates, Finn had long since forgotten that my daughter and I existed.
