He hadn't even called. Hadn't had the respect to let me hear his voice, to offer an explanation, an apology, anything that might have softened the blow. He had sent a mind-link message the way a wolf might cancel a hunt. Brief. Dismissive. As if the most important day of my life were an inconvenience he could pencil in for a later moon.
Five years. Five years of loyalty. Five years of standing beside him at pack councils and full-moon feasts, of pressing my lips shut when the whispers followed me through the halls of the Nightveil estate. She's not good enough for an Alpha. She's just a Frostmane girl. Her father was a warrior-captain, not a leader. What does the Alpha see in her? Five years of being his anchor, his confidante, the wolf who waited up for him on the nights he came home carrying the scent of cold iron and rain, who never asked questions she knew he couldn't answer. Five years of silence kept not out of duty but out of love.
And now, this.
I did not respond. What was there to say? My fingers trembled over the crystal screen. Somewhere beneath my ribs my wolf paced low and uneasy, hackles half-raised at a wound she could feel but not name. I wanted to call him and scream until my throat was raw, to demand he explain why he chose her, again, always her, over the woman he was sworn to bind his blood to under the Moon Goddess. But instead, I swallowed the rage like a mouthful of broken glass and hurled the communicator onto the bed.
It bounced once against the furs and lay still, its surface gone dark.
I paced. The bedroom was enormous, one of the finest dens in the Nightveil estate, with its high beamed ceilings and its tall windows overlooking the private moon-gardens below. Dorian and I had built a life together in these rooms. His coats hung beside my dresses in the dressing room. His scent of blackthorn smoke and cedar still clung to the pillows. His reading glasses sat on the nightstand beside a worn book of old pack lore. But lately this place had begun to feel less like a home and more like a gilded cage. I lived in his shadow, surrounded by his name, his bloodline, his oaths, and I was alone almost all the time.
A knock broke through the silence. Three sharp raps, unhesitant, the knock of someone who did not need permission.
I opened the door. Elder Lavinia Blackthorn stood in the hallway, her small frame wrapped in black lace, her silver hair drawn back in a severe knot. She was eighty-three years old. She had buried two mates, survived three challenges to her throat, and outlasted every enemy who had ever underestimated her. Her face was a map of decades spent moving through the treacherous currents of pack politics, and her dark eyes, still sharp as silver blades, held a sympathy that nearly undid me. Beneath her lace she carried the scent of aged oak and dried lavender, steady as cold hearthstone.
"I heard what happened, child," she said, stepping inside without waiting for an invitation. She never waited. In the Nightveil Pack, Elder Lavinia went where she pleased.
She settled herself into the armchair by the window as though she owned it. Which, in a sense, she did.
"You deserve better than this."
I bit the inside of my lip until I tasted copper. I would not cry. Not yet. But Lavinia had always seen through every mask I wore. She was the sharpest mind in the pack, sharper than the Beta, sharper even than Dorian himself, though she would never say so aloud. There was no hiding pain from a wolf who had spent a lifetime reading the faces of killers and liars.
"I thought today would be different." My voice came out smaller than I intended. I sank into the chair across from her, my knees suddenly too weak to hold me. "I thought he'd finally choose me over her."
Lavinia's eyes darkened. The sympathy did not leave her face, but something harder settled beneath it. Something cold and knowing.
"Dorian is a fool. He cannot see what he is losing." She paused, her gnarled fingers laced together in her lap. "But I know that Ciara Thornwood is not the innocent little lamb she pretends to be."
I stared at her. My pulse quickened, and my wolf went still and alert inside me. Everyone in the pack adored Ciara. The sweet orphan. The tragic oath-ward.
