Beneath the photos, Ciara's message glowed on the crystal screen:
"Everyone, I am so sorry for any trouble, especially to Neva and Dorian. I didn't mean to ruin the most important day of your lives. Dorian, thank you for being the best Alpha I could ever ask for. You always make me feel like the most important person in the world."
The reactions piled up beneath her words across the pack mind-link. Hearts. Moon-blessings. Adoring replies from warriors and den-staff alike. And then the bolder ones, the ones that twisted the knife.
"You two look so good together."
"If the Moon Goddess had willed it differently, you would make such a beautiful pair."
"The Goddess works in mysterious ways."
Ciara, Ciara. It was always Ciara that the whole pack favored. Ciara, the saint. Ciara, the angel. Ciara, the poor little orphan ward who could do no wrong.
Tears spilled down my cheeks before I could stop them. They fell onto the screen of my communicator, blurring Ciara's smiling face into a watercolor smear. I wiped them away with the back of my hand, but more followed, hot and relentless. Somewhere beneath my ribs, my wolf had gone silent, curled small, as if she too had run out of ways to fight.
Five years. I had waited five years, and all I had to show for it was the slow, sickening realization that I had been making a mistake this entire time. Loving Dorian Blackthorn had cost me my pride, my peace, and very nearly my sanity.
It was time to correct it. It was time to choose myself.
I opened a new message to Dorian. My fingers were steady now. The tears still fell, but something inside me had gone very quiet, very cold, the way a lake freezes over in the dead of winter.
"Call me."
I sent it. I knew he would not call unless I asked. Even then, there was no guarantee.
I sat on the edge of the bed and waited. The crystal on the nightstand ticked out the moments. Outside the window, the late morning sun cast long shadows across the pack estate's manicured grounds, where the ceremony grove still stood draped in ivory silk and red roses that no one would see.
Five minutes. Ten. Twenty. Thirty.
Nothing. No call. No reply. Not even the three pulsing lights that would have told me he was answering.
I was about to stand, to do what I did not yet know, when the communicator finally rang. His name filled the screen. I answered.
"Anything happen, Neva?" Dorian's voice was clipped. Distracted. Irritated, as though I had pulled him away from something far more important.
"Is that all you have to say?"
The hurt in my own voice surprised me. I had meant to sound cold, controlled, the way the she-wolves in this world were supposed to sound. Instead, I sounded exactly like what I was: a woman whose heart was breaking.
"Sorry." He exhaled. The sound was heavy, tired, the breath of an Alpha carrying the weight of a whole pack on his shoulders. "I can't think clearly right now. Ciara got hurt. I needed to make sure she'd be okay."
"Right. As expected from Alpha Blackthorn."
A beat of silence. When he spoke again, his voice had an edge.
"What's that supposed to mean?"
I closed my eyes. The tears had stopped. The cold, frozen thing inside me held firm.
"It means we're over. The Moon Oath is rejected."
I ended the call before he could draw another breath.
After Neva cut the link on me, the den felt like a sealed coffin. She had never done that before. Not once in all the years I had known her, in all the years our fathers' Moon Oath had promised her to me. The silence that followed the dead line was louder than any howl I had ever heard, and beneath it my wolf had gone unnaturally still, ears pricked toward a sound that would not come.
I set the communicator down on the blackwood desk, slow and deliberate, the way a man sets down a blade he is trying not to use. Then I leaned back in the leather chair and stared at the ceiling of my study, at the hand-carved fresco my grandsire had commissioned decades ago. Wolves and serpents, tangled together beneath a full moon. He'd always said that was the truest portrait of our pack ever made.
Her words had cut deeper than I wanted to admit. After everything we had been through, after all the years bound together by our fathers' Moon Oath, how had it come to this?
But what else could I have done? Ciara had been hurt during a training run, and as the Alpha, I had an obligation. The pack always came first. That was the weight I accepted the day they set my father's signet on my hand and every wolf in the hall bared his throat to me. I thought Neva, of all wolves, understood this. She was my Intended. She was supposed to stand beside me as Luna of this pack.
