He cut 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.
Moments later, my crystal communicator pulsed against my palm. An image bloomed across its surface, edges sharp and damning.
A blood-oath of investment. My mother's name beside Mira's, bound together in ink and betrayal.
Carved deep in the center, the words screamed at me like a confession beaten out of a dying wolf:
All ventures carry risk. Every loss born of the bearer's own judgment is the bearer's own burden under the Moon.
My mother's mark sat at the bottom. Her clawprint pressed into the parchment like a vow she never understood she was making.
He'd been preparing for this. The Ravenpack's blood-scribe, that cold-eyed mouthpiece who had buried a hundred sins beneath mountains of sworn parchment, was ready to crush me as if I were nothing more than a rogue who'd wandered too close to the pack's borders.
Still, I went to the Ravenpack estate.
The lift inside their lawful front, a towering monument of glass and dark stone that housed their trading hold among the territories, carried me upward like a condemned she-wolf climbing to the stake.
The doors slid open on the fifteenth floor, and there she stood.
Mira.
She was draped in custom silks that clung to her like a second pelt. The pouch at her hip held more gold moons than most pack warriors earned in a year of border-killing. And there, glittering on her wrist like a trophy torn from a corpse, the Luna's bracelet.
My bracelet.
She looked like high-blood. Like someone born into the inner circle, not a base-born Omega who had clawed her way in through scent-games and bloodshed.
Her lips curled the instant our eyes met, a serpent's smile.
"Oh no, Selene..." she purred, her voice dripping with poisoned honey. Beneath the cloying jasmine and sugared decay of her, the faint trace of iron turned my stomach. "You look awful. Guess it's true what they say. When a she-wolf gets old, the bloom fades. No wonder Dorian lost interest."
She tilted her head, feigning concern with the skill of a wolf who'd learned to lie before she learned to run.
"Still haven't laid your mother to rest? Want me to help arrange the moonlit rites? I mean..." She pressed a manicured hand to her chest. "We are bloodline, 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. Beneath my skin my wolf rose with it, hackles lifting, a snarl coiling low and silent in my throat.
"You knew it was a trap," I hissed through clenched teeth. "You knew. It was a con. A scheme that tricked my mother into surrendering every coin she had saved. Every moon-credit she'd earned on her knees, scrubbing the Ravenpack floors."
Mira's expression shifted into wounded innocence, but the corner of her painted lips twitched with barely hidden 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 wolf?"
My chest tightened as if iron bands were being wrapped around my ribs. Blood rushed to my head, pounding in my ears like a war drum at a Blood Moon gathering.
"Pup," Mira 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 scent thick and sickly sweet, her breath hot against my ear.
"One day," she whispered, "I trampled the Old Alpha's favorite blooms. On purpose. Crushed them right into the soil." Her voice was velvet wrapped around a blade. "The den-keeper said he'd dock her three moons' pay. Your mother begged. On her knees. Right there in the garden, with dirt under her claws and tears running down her face."
My vision blurred. The world narrowed to a single point. Mira's smiling face.
"I learned later she hadn't taken a single moon's rest in seasons," Mira went on, giggling like she was sharing a delicious secret. "Just to hoard coin. For you. For your mating to a male who was already sharing my furs."
She drew back, her eyes glittering with malice.
"And when I told her to crawl through the garden like a beaten dog?" Mira'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 single thing while I prepared my mating to Dorian... all those times she'd insisted everything was fine, that the Ravenpack treated her well, that serving a powerful bloodline was an honor...
I never knew. I never knew what she had endured for my sake. Deep inside me, my wolf let out a low keening, a sound I'd never heard it make before, mourning a debt I had been too blind to see.
The lift doors slid open with a soft chime, and something inside me snapped clean in two.
I raised my hand, eyes blazing with three years of swallowed rage.
"Mira, you're a monster."
But before my palm could even graze her cheek, she flung 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, but you're still being so cruel. Do you truly want me dead that badly?!"
Pack members in fine coats, warriors and liaisons who knew better than to meddle in bloodline matters, turned to stare.
"If you want me dead so badly, then fine!" Mira staggered to her feet, swaying dramatically. "I'll die for your mother! I'll pay the life-debt under the Moon myself!"
She lurched toward the wall as if to crack her own skull against the stone.
"Mira!"
A figure rushed forward at the edge of my vision. Broad shoulders, and a scent I would have known anywhere, black pepper and cold ash, the familiar shape that had once meant safety and love.
Dorian.
He caught her in his arms, pulling her against his chest as if she were something precious. Something worth protecting.
Then he turned, and his shoulder slammed into me with the force of a male who'd learned violence at his sire's knee.
I wasn't braced for it.
My head whipped back, cracking against the lift's brass rail with a sickening thud that echoed through my skull.
The world tilted on its axis.
Warm blood, my blood, trickled down the back of my neck, soaking into the collar of my dress.
Dorian turned on me, his eyes bloodshot, the gold of his wolf flickering at the rims 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.
"Selene Hollowthorn," he spat my name like a curse, "how dare you? Apologize to Mira. Now."
It was as though she were his mate. 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 den-keeper's daughter who needed handling before she shamed the bloodline any further.
Mira sobbed against his chest, her fingers clutching the front of his coat, her body trembling with manufactured terror.
"I know she's only hurting," she whimpered, pressing her tear-streaked face into the hollow of his throat. "I already said I'd pay for it. I'd take every task they'd give me, even the ones no wolf else will touch. The filthy work. But she..." Her voice cracked beautifully. "She still struck me. And she cursed me. Said I should drop dead."
Dorian's arms tightened around her. His jaw clenched. His eyes, dark as the river where the pack sank what it wanted gone, fixed on me with undisguised fury.
"Have I not paid you enough?" he snapped, his voice carrying the weight of a male used to being obeyed, the edge of his Alpha-blood pressing the air down around me. "Look at yourself, Selene. You're just like your mother. Petty. Greedy. Always playing the victim, always begging for scraps."
He took a step toward me, and I could smell Mira's sickly sweetness clinging to his skin.
"You two deserved the punishment."
My breath caught in my throat as though a blade had been pressed to my windpipe. The corridor spun around me, but I stood rooted to the blood-slicked marble, too stunned to move.
"Petty and greedy?" I whispered, staring at the male I had loved, the male I'd been promised to since I was nineteen, as if I were seeing him for the first time. "Is that truly what you think of me? That seeking justice for my mother, a she-wolf who died in your bloodline's service, makes me some coin-hungry madwoman?"
Tears blurred my vision, turning the world to watercolor. But I refused to let them fall. I would not give them the satisfaction.
Something flickered in Dorian's expression 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 Mira whimpered against his chest, a soft, wounded sound built to twist the knife, his face hardened back into stone.
"I saw you try to strike her," he said flatly. "I don't care what excuse you give. I don't care what story you've convinced yourself is true."
He took another step forward, 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 if it were being crushed in a vice, squeezed until there was nothing left but pain and the bitter taste of betrayal.
I looked at him. At the male who had sworn to protect me. At the heir who would one day take an empire of 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.
