"She's not just some servant's daughter. 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 the bars of me, snarling.
Mira didn't even have time to part her painted lips. Dorian's eyes went glacial, the cold, flat stare of an Alpha who'd learned to kill his own feelings 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 warriors and gave the order with the casual cruelty of a wolf born into blood. "Go to the burial grove. Bring her mother's body back here."
Every word was a blade 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 the Luna of the Ravenpack?"
"Feed the corpse to the rogues." He meant every syllable.
His warriors moved without hesitation, their heavy footsteps echoing through the great stone den like a death march. These weren't wolves who questioned orders. These were warriors who'd buried bodies in unmarked earth 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 consuming dry brush.
Tears blurred the high vaulted ceiling into smears of gold and shadow. I cried so hard I couldn't draw breath, couldn't think, couldn't do anything but beg.
"Dorian, please! Don't do this to my mother. She's. She's already gone. Isn't that enough?!"
Mira tilted her head with saccharine sweetness, the triumph she barely bothered to hide curving at the corners of her mouth. Her scent thickened, overripe jasmine and sugared decay, and my wolf gagged on it.
"Dorian… 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, little one. That's why she walks all over you."
Then his attention snapped back to his men, who had paused at the threshold. "Well? What are you waiting for? Must I draw you a map to the burial grove?" The bark of command rolled off the walls of the Ravenmoor den like the crack of a falling tree, and his Alpha aura pressed down through the room so hard the lowest-ranked warriors flattened where they stood.
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 knife straight through it.
I broke.
I bowed.
My spine bent, my head dropped, my pride bled out onto the cold stone floor at Mira's heels. My wolf, who had never once lowered her gaze for anyone, lay down inside me and went silent.
"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 under the Moon.
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 dress pulled away from my skin, baring the wounds beneath.
Dorian's eyes flickered. For a split second something almost living 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 aide. "Bring the oath."
Only when I pressed my bloody fingerprint onto the parchment, surrendering my claims in 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 the turn of the weather. "I'll send for a healer."
He released Mira 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 bedmate," I spat. "Better hurry. Wait any longer and those theatrical bruises might fade before anyone who matters sees them."
I turned to leave, my vision swimming, my legs threatening to buckle.
Mira's foot shot out with serpentine precision.
I tripped hard, crashing forward toward the unforgiving stone.
Dorian's instincts fired, the reflexes of a wolf trained since puphood to protect what was his. He reached out.
Then he stopped himself. His hand froze inches from my falling body.
He stepped back.
"Fine." His voice was ice. "Tend 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 doorway, Mira tucked possessively against his side. "I'll go with you to choose your gown tomorrow," he said, as if we were discussing nothing at all. "The Mating Ceremony won't plan itself."
The heavy carved doors swung shut on his impassive face.
My body swayed, the dizziness from blood loss rising in nauseating waves. The chandelier of antlers and crystal overhead fractured into a thousand spinning shards.
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.
Dorian was just nineteen when his father began grooming him to take the pack. He'd worked through endless nights learning what it meant to lead, the borderland patrols, the alliance pacts, the things done in shadow, his eyes perpetually rimmed with exhaustion. One evening I burned my hand making broth for him over the den's hearth. Just a small blister, barely worth mentioning.
Yet somehow he found out. He walked out of a sit-down with three pack capos and ran the forest trail home like the devil himself was at his heels, taking the ridge in his wolf form and tearing through brush and root all the way back.
He caught my hand and cradled it like I was made of spun glass.
"I'm so sorry, little wolf. I should have protected you," he said, his voice rough with guilt. "I swear it on my mother's grave, by 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 vow 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 Alpha 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, the one the den-keepers 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 a scent I didn't know, cedar and cold iron and the static charge that comes just before a thunderstorm. Something dangerous. And beneath the breaking-down dark of me, my wolf lifted her head for the first time in hours.
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 those claims you just signed away… I'll help you find the proof of who really killed your mother."
