The Stand In Bride's Revenge I Never Loved You

In the third year of my mating bond with Alpha Fenris Blackthorn, I received good news.

I could finally leave him.

"One more moon cycle, and your sister will return to the territory. You keep wearing her identity until then." My mother's voice crackled through the pack bond totem, cold as it had always been. "Once it's done, I'll give you the cache of moonstones and the territorial deeds. Then you can cross the border and live whatever life you choose."

"Understood." My reply was barely a whisper, my voice flat as dead water.

I severed the connection and lifted my gaze to the massive mating portrait mounted above the stone hearth.

In the painting, Fenris stood tall in ceremonial black leather, his jaw carved from granite, his dark eyes burning with an authority that made lesser wolves drop to their knees. He was devastatingly handsome — almost cruel in his perfection, every inch the reigning Alpha of the most feared pack in the Capital Territory. And there I was beside him, draped in a moonsilk gown worth more than my entire childhood, smiling softly, the picture of a devoted Luna.

"Three years..." I murmured, my fingertip tracing the gilded edge of the frame. "It's almost over."

My inner wolf stirred faintly — a weak, thin presence at the back of my mind, more shadow than beast. She had been quiet for so long that sometimes I forgot she was there at all.

Three years ago, the mating alliance between the Blackthorn Pack and the Ashvane bloodline had sent shockwaves through every territory in the realm. My twin sister, Umbra Ashvane, was the mate the Blackthorn Pack had handpicked — a rare female Alpha born to a declining bloodline, a prize meant to strengthen both packs through bonded blood.

But the night before the mating ceremony, Umbra left a letter and ran.

Mother, Father — I refuse to be shackled by an arranged mating, but I know the alliance is my burden to bear. Give me three years to run free as a rogue. After that, I'll come back.

To salvage the critical alliance between the two packs — the only thing keeping the Ashvane territory from being absorbed by rival packs — my parents had no choice. They sent a desperate howlmessage across the territories and summoned me overnight. Me — the daughter they had exiled to live with her elderly grandparents in a remote human settlement when I was five years old. The Omega twin whose wolf had been stunted from years of neglect and wolfsbanelaced food in childhood.

Just like that, the girl who had grown up outside pack lands, who had never once been invited to a pack gathering or a full moon run, stepped into Umbra Ashvane's name and became a substitute mate.

"Fenris isn't in love with your sister. He's in love with a girl his pack once took in — a turned wolf from nothing, bitten during a Moon Goddess festival out of charity." The night before the ceremony, my mother's warning had been ice against my skin. "Your life within the Blackthorn Pack won't be easy. Just keep your head down, wear your sister's scent mask, and survive three years."

I had nodded obediently.

Of course I knew who Alpha Fenris Blackthorn was. His name echoed through every territory from the Capital to the coast. The most celebrated Alpha heir in the realm's elite circles. The wolf whose dominance aura alone could force an entire room to bare their throats. Every unmated shewolf in the land would have killed to receive his mating bite.

And I had heard the story about him and Seraphina Holloway.

The Blackthorn Pack Elders had been overjoyed. They arranged Fenris's mating immediately.

Life within the Blackthorn Pack Den turned out to be harder than I had ever imagined.

He never marked me. No mating bite graced my neck. The bond between us was incomplete — a hollow thing, a political arrangement sealed with blood oaths and nothing more.

I walked on eggshells, pouring everything I had into playing Umbra's role. For the sake of the alliance between our two packs, I spent those three years bending myself into knots to please him.

I memorized his preferred hunt routes. I learned the precise way he liked his den arranged during full moons — furs folded just so, the window cracked to let in the silver light, a basin of cold water by the bed for when the moon fever made his skin burn. I wrote all of it down in a scroll and kept it close, a record of devotion he never asked for and would never know existed.

Gradually, whispers spread through the pack: The Luna is hopelessly devoted to her Alpha. And the way Fenris looked at me seemed to shift — something subtle, something new. A flicker of warmth in those cold, dark eyes when he caught me waiting by the hearth. A pause in his step when my scent reached him across the hall.

The portraits of Seraphina disappeared from his study. The secret border crossings stopped. He started remembering the day of my birth. He came back to the den early when I fell ill with a fever. He even began sleeping beside me — his massive body radiating heat in the dark, his breathing slow and steady, close enough that I could feel the rumble of his wolf settling beneath his ribs.

My own wolf — fragile, halfformed thing that she was — had trembled with something dangerously close to hope. Mate, she had whispered once, so faintly I thought I'd imagined it.

I almost believed that something real had grown inside this counterfeit mating.

Then, three months ago, Seraphina came back.

Everything reset to zero.

I remember the exact moment. The waning crescent moon hung thin as a scar in the sky the night she walked through the Blackthorn gates. Her scent hit me before I saw her — sweet and fragile, like crushed violets and something wounded. My wolf flinched and retreated deep inside me, curling into a tight, silent ball.

Fenris's heart was consumed by Seraphina all over again. He stopped returning to the den at night. The portraits reappeared in his study, more of them now, covering every wall. Whispers and snickers rippled through the pack — rival pack spies spread word of the Alpha's public devotion to the turned wolf, and gathering gossip painted me as the most pitiful Luna in the territory's history. Every wolf in the Blackthorn Pack knew. Every wolf watched me with either pity or contempt.

But I just smiled quietly. I never made a scene. I never bared my teeth or let my wolf — what little of her existed — rise to the surface in anger.

Because I had never loved him.

The only reason I had stayed by his side was for the moonstones and territorial deeds my parents had promised. For the freedom that waited beyond the border. If Fenris loved me, it made things easier to endure. If he didn't, I didn't care.

No one knew that although Umbra and I were twins, the Moon Goddess had dealt us entirely different fates.

She was born first — an Alpha, rare and powerful, her wolf howling within minutes of her first breath. I came after, tearing my mother apart on the way out, a hemorrhage that nearly killed Fiora Ashvane and permanently weakened her wolf. I was an Omega. Small. Quiet. Blamed.

Umbra was raised in the pack, trained, celebrated. I was sent away at five years old to live among humans, my wolf starved and stunted until she was barely more than a flicker behind my ribs.

But a flicker was still a flame. And in one more moon cycle, I would be free to let it grow.

I pulled my hand away from the mating portrait and turned toward the window. Outside, the halfmoon hung over the Blackthorn territory, casting pale silver light across the ancient pines. Somewhere in the distance, a wolf howled — long and mournful, carrying across the cold night air.

It wasn't Fenris. I knew his howl. I knew everything about him.

And in thirty days, none of it would matter anymore.

My mother nearly bled out bringing me into this world. Her wolf was permanently damaged — the hemorrhage during my delivery left her inner beast weakened, limping through the bond like a wounded animal that would never fully heal. After that night, she could never look at me without revulsion burning in her eyes. And my father, the aging Alpha of the Ashvane Pack who worshipped his Luna like she was the Moon Goddess made flesh, treated me as though I were a curse wrapped in skin and bone.

When I was five, they exiled me. Shipped me off to my elderly grandparents in a remote human settlement far beyond pack lands, where no wolf howled at the moon and no pack bond hummed through the earth beneath my feet.

I still remember that first winter. The old woodburning stove cracked in the cold and went dead. I shivered beneath a threadbare blanket, my body too small, my wolf too stunted from the wolfsbane they'd been slipping into my food since birth to generate any warmth. Meanwhile, Umbra was in the heated Ashvane estate, twirling in a fine furlined dress, basking in the golden warmth of our parents' adoration — their Alphablooded firstborn, the pride of the bloodline.

Eighteen years of that will grind the hope right out of you. I stopped expecting anything from family a long time ago. My wolf, that quiet, halfstarved presence curled deep inside me, had learned to stay silent too.

Now, all I had to do was survive one more month. Thirty days of pretending to be Umbra — the mate Alpha Fenris Blackthorn believed he'd been bonded to for three years — and I would collect the cache of moonstones and territorial deeds owed to me for this performance. Then I would cross the border for good and finally live a life that was mine.

The thought lifted my spirits. My wolf stirred faintly, something close to hope flickering in the hollow place where she lived.

Then my pack bond totem buzzed with an incoming message.

The name that pulsed through the enchanted stone: Fenris Blackthorn.

I drew a deep breath and answered. "Hello?"

"Twenty minutes. Bring sanitary supplies to the Nightfall Den." His voice cut like a blade dragged across frost — cold, commanding, every syllable dripping with the authority of an Alpha who had never once been refused. "Overnight pads."

The connection severed. I stared at the totem, knowing instantly who they were for.

He remembered Seraphina Holloway's cycle more precisely than the dates of his own Pack Council Gatherings.

Rain hammered the windows of the Blackthorn estate. Beyond the glass, the waning moon was swallowed by storm clouds. From the pack estate to the Nightfall Den was at least a fortyminute run by car through the territory roads under normal conditions.

I grabbed a cloak and walked out the door anyway.

Halfway there, the roads flooded and the vehicle ground to a standstill behind a line of others. I checked the time — twelve minutes left. My jaw clenched so hard my teeth ached. I shoved the door open and plunged into the downpour.

The rain soaked through my clothes in seconds, plastering the thin fabric to my skin. The cold hit me like silver — sharp and burning. My boots skidded on the slick stone of the territory road once, twice — then my ankle buckled and I slammed into a puddle, kneesfirst. Pain flared whitehot up my legs, and I felt the skin tear open against the rough ground.

My wolf whimpered somewhere deep inside me, a faint, pitiful sound. Get up, I told her. Get up.

I didn't stop. I dragged myself upright and kept running, rain blinding me, lungs burning, until I burst through the carved timber doors of the Nightfall Den at the nineteenminute mark.

Outside the private gathering room, I raised my hand to knock — and froze.

Laughter spilled through the heavy door, the scents of whiskey and dominant wolves seeping through the cracks.

"Alpha Blackthorn, you seriously made your mate deliver that in this storm? It's at least forty minutes from the pack estate!"

"Seraphina's in a lot of pain." His voice was flat, indifferent — the voice of a man discussing something beneath his notice. "She'll find a way to get here."

"Well, sure — everyone in the territory knows your Luna's devoted to you. Three years, and even though your heart's always belonged somewhere else, she's stayed by your side without a single complaint."

Someone else pressed further, emboldened by drink: "But honestly, Alpha — a mate that loyal, that beautiful — three years and she hasn't moved you at all? Not even stirred your wolf a little?"

The room went quiet. I could hear my own heartbeat pounding in my ears — a sound any wolf inside could have caught if they'd been paying attention.

I held my breath.

A few seconds crawled by. Then he spoke, and his voice carried the weight of absolute certainty.

"No matter the circumstances — if it's between Seraphina and her, I choose Seraphina. Every time."

Words that brutal should have hurt. Three years ago, they might have cracked something inside me. But I felt nothing close to pain. If anything, relief loosened the tightness in my chest, like a fist unclenching around my ribs.

Good, my wolf murmured, and for once I agreed with her. Let him choose. We leave soon.

I waited until the conversation drifted to other things — territory disputes, alliance pacts, the usual posturing of powerful wolves — then raised my fist and knocked.

When I pushed the door open, every face in the room turned to stare. The scents hit me first — a wall of dominant Alpha pheromones thick enough to make a lesser Omega buckle. I locked my knees and held steady.

"Moon Goddess — right on time!"

"Luna, you're drenched — what happened?"

Fenris rose to his feet. He towered over the table, darkhaired and sharpjawed, his eyes the color of a winter storm. His brows drew tight as his gaze swept over me — the soaked clothes, the water pooling at my feet, the way I trembled despite every effort not to. I caught the briefest flicker of something in those grey eyes. His nostrils flared, catching my scent — rain and cold and something underneath that made his jaw tighten.

"What the hell happened to you?"

I held out the package I'd shielded beneath my cloak the entire way, keeping it dry against my chest while the rest of me drowned. "You said twenty minutes. I was afraid you'd be worried, so I left the car and ran."

I didn't mention the fall. I didn't mention that my knees were trembling with pain beneath my soaked dress, blood slowly seeping into the wet fabric where no one could see.

Something shifted behind his eyes — a crack in the frost, there and gone so fast I might have imagined it. His wolf, perhaps, stirring at something his conscious mind refused to acknowledge. Without a word, he stripped off his heavy outer coat — still warm from his body, saturated with his scent of cedar smoke and iron — and draped it over my shoulders.

"Put it on."

Then he nodded toward the package in my hands. "Take those to Seraphina. She's in the washroom down the corridor."

I nodded obediently, pulling his coat tighter around me despite myself, and headed down the hall. His scent wrapped around me like a cage. My wolf pressed toward it instinctively, and I shoved her back down.

Don't, I warned her. He's not ours. He was never ours.

When I knocked on the washroom door, Seraphina's voice drifted out — soft, fragile, honeyed, the kind of voice that made every wolf in earshot want to protect her. She had perfected it over years. "Who is it?"

"Delivery."

Silence. I could smell her through the door — that thin, sweet, slightly unstable scent of a turned wolf whose beast never fully settled. A few seconds later, the door cracked open just wide enough for me to slide the package through. Her fingers brushed mine as she took it, and I felt the faintest sting — like touching something coated in diluted wolfsbane.

I pulled my hand back and left without another word.

Back at the Blackthorn estate, I stood under scalding water in the bathing chamber for a long time, letting the heat soak into my frozen bones. The scrape on my knee stung viciously under the stream, the torn skin raw and angry. I watched the faintly pink water swirl down the stone drain and thought about how wolves were supposed to heal fast.

My wolf couldn't even manage that much.

Lying in the bed afterward — the bed in the Luna's quarters that Fenris had never once shared with me — I thought about how close I was to freedom. Truly, permanently free. One more month. Thirty days. And then the border crossing, the moonstones, the territorial deeds, and a life where no Alpha's command could reach me.

A strange lightness settled over me. Something I couldn't quite name. My wolf uncurled just slightly, like a creature daring to lift its head toward a distant warmth.

Almost, she whispered. Almost free.

I was just drifting off, the rain still drumming against the windows and the waning moon hidden behind clouds, when the bedroom door was kicked open.

Fenris burst through the door and seized my wrist, his grip ironhard. "Get up!"

Before my mind could catch up, he wrenched me from the bed. My bare feet scrambled against the cold stone floor of the pack estate as he hauled me toward the top of the grand staircase. His Alpha dominance rolled off him in waves so thick my inner wolf — fragile, halfstarved thing that she was — cowered somewhere deep in my chest.

"Fenris? What are you—"

The words died on my tongue. A savage force slammed into my body, and I pitched backward. The base of my skull cracked against the edge of a stone step, and then I was falling — tumbling down the entire flight of stairs, each impact a new explosion of pain against bone and flesh.

Agony tore through every part of me.

I lay crumpled at the bottom, my vision swimming, the cold flagstones pressing against my cheek. Something warm and wet trickled from my hairline, and the sharp copper scent of my own blood flooded my heightened senses.

"Why..." I struggled to push myself upright, my arms shaking. "Why would you do this to me?"

He stood at the top of the stairs, the torchlight behind him casting his face into shadow. But his voice sliced through the dim corridor with perfect clarity — cold as silver against skin.

"Did you push Seraphina off that ledge?"

I lifted my head, dazed and blinking. "What?"

"Don't play ignorant with me!" He descended one step at a time, each footfall deliberate, his wolf's dominance pressing down on me like a physical weight. I could feel it in my bones — the compulsion to bare my throat, to submit. "Months of playing the dutiful Luna — this is what you were building toward, wasn't it? Do you have any idea what you've done? You shoved Seraphina from a window. She's covered in fractures. She nearly died."

"I didn't—" I shook my head weakly, but the motion tugged at the wound on my scalp. The corridor tilted sideways, and I tasted bile.

He crouched down and gripped my chin, his fingers digging into the soft flesh beneath my jaw. His eyes flickered — that dangerous amber glow of an Alpha whose wolf was pressing close to the surface. I could feel his canines had lengthened slightly, the faintest hint of fangs behind his lips.

"Solara, has the way I've treated you these past three years given you some kind of delusion? Let me make it clear one final time. This mating is a pack alliance. Nothing more."

He leaned close to my ear, each word driven in like a silver nail:

"The love you want from me? You will never have it."

The pain was so blinding my vision went black. I nearly laughed.

Because I had never wanted his love in the first place.

I opened my mouth to speak, but Fenris had already straightened to his full height, his expression carved from granite, and yanked me to my feet. My wolf whimpered deep inside me — a thin, pitiful sound only I could hear. She had long since stopped trying to fight him. Three years of wolfsbanelaced tonics and silverscarred punishments had broken something fundamental in her.

"Enough with the performance." His voice was ice. "Seraphina fell from the fifth floor of the eastern tower. You only rolled down one flight of stairs."

"Get up. We're going to the healer's wing. You're going to apologize to her."

He dragged me toward the door without a shred of mercy — never mind the blood still running down my face, or the way the halfhealed wound on my knee had torn open again beneath my shift, sending a fresh spike of agony through me with every step. A wolf with a fully awakened bond would have healed in minutes. My body healed at barely more than a human pace — another consequence of the suppressed wolf, the incomplete mating bond, the years of wolfsbane running through my veins.

He shoved me into the carriage. I didn't say a single word during the ride through the Blackthorn territory.

I watched the dark pines blur past the window, their branches clawing at a waning crescent moon that hung pale and distant in the sky. The Moon Goddess's light was thin tonight — barely enough to see by. It felt fitting.

The only thought in my head was: Just a little longer.

Just hold on a little longer, and it will all be over.

In the healer's chamber, Seraphina was propped against her pillows, her face white as bone, bandages wound around her wrist. The room smelled of moonblessed salve and something else — that faint, deliberately fragile scent she always wore. Sweet and trembling, like a wounded pup. I had learned long ago that she could manipulate her pheromones at will, pushing out waves of false distress that made every wolf in range want to protect her.

The moment she saw me, she flinched. Her eyes turned red instantly, glistening with tears.

"Fenris..." Her voice trembled, delicate as a startled fawn. "I don't want to see her..."

Fenris was at her side in an instant, taking her hand with a gentleness I had never once been shown. His wolf — that terrifying, dominant beast — seemed to soften entirely in her presence, his rigid shoulders dropping, his thumb stroking across her knuckles. "Don't be frightened. I'm here. No one is going to hurt you."

Then he turned to me, and all that softness vanished. His gaze was flat and frigid, the amber completely gone, replaced by cold dark steel. "What are you standing there for? Apologize."

I must have looked halfdead. Blood matted in my hair. My shift torn at the knee, the fabric darkened with fresh crimson. My body swaying on unsteady legs.

But I was perfectly calm.

I stared straight at Seraphina and asked quietly, "When you fell from that window — was it really me who pushed you?"

Seraphina's lashes quivered. Tears spilled down her pale cheeks in perfect, crystalline streams. "If the Luna doesn't wish to apologize, then forget it. I never intended to cause trouble for you."

She sniffled, her voice thick with practiced grievance. "I know Fenris has been spending all his time with me lately, and I understand if you resent that. But your mating was always just a pack alliance. He doesn't love you." She paused, letting the words sink in like venom. "If my bloodline had matched his — if I hadn't been a turned wolf taken in out of charity — he never would have been yours to begin with..."

The harder she cried, the darker Fenris's expression grew. I could hear the low, rumbling growl building in his chest — not directed at her. At me.

"Solara!" he snarled, cutting through her performance as though it were gospel truth. "I brought you here to apologize, not to provoke her. Are you going to do it or not?"

I closed my eyes.

I knew Seraphina was framing me.

But I was leaving soon.

I couldn't let anything jeopardize the alliance between the Ashvane and Blackthorn packs. If the pact fell apart, I wouldn't receive the cache of moonstones and territorial deeds — and I wouldn't get my freedom.

"I'm sorry," I said softly. "It was my fault."

Somewhere deep inside, my wolf lifted her head — not in protest, but in something quieter. Resignation. She had stopped howling a long time ago.

I turned to leave.

"Stop."

Fenris's voice sliced through the sterile air of the pack healer's chamber like the snap of an Alpha command. "Since you're the one who pushed her, you'll stay and take care of her. Until the healer clears her to leave."

My fingers curled inward, nails biting into my palms. My inner wolf cowered low, pressing herself flat against the floor of my consciousness. After a long, hollow moment, I dipped my head in submission. "Understood."

For the days that followed, I never once left Seraphina's recovery room in the healers' wing.

Fenris practically abandoned the pack den entirely — neglecting territory disputes, council gatherings, patrol reports — all of it cast aside so he could remain at her bedside. He lifted spoonfuls of warm bone broth to her lips with a gentleness I'd never known his hands capable of. He wiped her fingers clean with dampened cloth, murmuring soft reassurances until her breathing evened into sleep, his deep voice rumbling low like a wolf's purr.

He had never done any of those things for me.

But jealousy didn't stir inside me. That part of me had gone quiet long ago. I simply stayed close, tending to Seraphina in silence — changing her compress, refilling her water, adjusting her blankets — my expression smooth and unbothered, as though none of it had anything to do with me.

The healer's assistants whispered among themselves when they thought I was out of earshot. My wolf's hearing, weak as it was, still caught every word.

"Moon Goddess, I've never seen a Luna this generous."

"You don't understand — this is what devotion looks like at its peak," another assistant murmured, her voice thick with pity. "She loves her Alpha so deeply that she's willing to care for even the shewolf he adores, just hoping he'll spare her a single glance. It's heartbreaking, truly."

Fenris happened to pass by the doorway at that exact moment.

His steps faltered. Through the narrow gap, his gaze drifted — almost involuntarily — toward the slender figure inside the room.

I was sitting with my head bowed, peeling a moonapple with quiet focus, a small knife turning in careful strokes. My profile was still, docile, the faint silverburn scars along my wrists hidden beneath long sleeves.

Something unfamiliar stirred behind his ribs. His wolf shifted restlessly, lifting its head with an attention Fenris didn't understand.

He walked on without a word.

The day the healer finally cleared Seraphina, Fenris told me plainly, his tone leaving no room for discussion. "I'm taking Seraphina beyond the territory for a few days. Don't reach out through the bond link unless it's urgent."

I nodded. "Understood."

I stood at the entrance of the pack den and watched them walk away — his hand wrapped around hers, their figures growing smaller against the treeline where moonlight broke through the canopy. His wolf moved close to hers, protective, possessive.

And I felt something unexpected loosen inside my chest.

Relief.

Finally, I wouldn't have to face the two of them together. Wouldn't have to breathe in the mingled scent of their closeness, a scent that made my stunted wolf whimper and curl tighter into herself.

Back in the Alpha's quarters — the rooms I technically shared with Fenris but occupied alone more often than not — I began packing. Quietly. Methodically. Folding garments into a leather travel satchel, tucking away the few personal things I owned. Preparing for the departure that was no longer far off.

The waning crescent hung outside the window, thin as a scar. Under its pale light, my wolf stirred faintly, pressing against my awareness like a creature trying to remember how to breathe.

Soon, I told her silently. Soon we leave.

A few days later, I caught wind of the gossip circulating through the pack — whispers carried on the tongues of wolves who had nothing better to do. Rival pack scouts had spotted Fenris and Seraphina together in the tropical neutral territories far to the south. He'd bid on sky lanterns at a coastal auction for her, releasing them into the warm night. He'd spent a fortune on rare gemstones she'd admired at a market stall, draping them around her throat himself.

I absorbed the information for exactly one heartbeat, then let it pass through me like wind through empty branches.

I didn't care.

I had never cared.

A week later, the Blackthorn Pack's monthly formal dinner arrived on schedule — a tradition the Pack Mother enforced with iron will, where the Alpha's inner circle gathered to reaffirm bonds and discuss pack affairs.

Fenris wasn't back. I had no choice but to attend alone.

The great dining hall of the Blackthorn estate was lit by iron chandeliers and smelled of roasted elk and cedar smoke. Pack elders lined the long table, their gazes heavy with judgment. The moment Fenella Blackthorn laid eyes on me from the head of the table, her expression darkened like a storm rolling across open plains. Her dominant Alpha pheromones pressed outward, thick with displeasure.

"Where is Fenris?" she demanded.

I lowered my gaze, baring the side of my neck in the expected show of deference. "He's occupied with matters outside the territory. He won't be back for some time."

Fenella let out a cold, brittle laugh and was about to speak when the pack steward hurried over, a folded report clutched in his hands — intelligence gathered by rival pack spies, the kind of gossip that spread between territories like wildfire.

The contents were impossible to miss. A detailed account, accompanied by descriptions vivid enough to paint pictures: Alpha Fenris Blackthorn and the turned wolf Seraphina Holloway, tangled together on the deck of a boat in the southern waters, his mouth on hers, her fingers buried in his hair. The report had already circulated to at least three neighboring packs.

Crack.

Fenella slammed her fist against the oak table so hard the wood groaned. The elders flinched. Her eyes blazed gold, her wolf surging to the surface as fury overtook her composure. "Umbra. The study. Now."

The moment the heavy door shut behind us, sealing us in the dim, woodpaneled room lined with ancestral pack relics, her voice turned razorsharp.

"Kneel."

I knelt on the cold stone floor in silence. My wolf pressed flat inside me, trembling.

"Useless creature!" Fenella was shaking with rage, her canines elongating past her lips, her Alpha aura crashing over me in suffocating waves. "You can't even keep your own Alpha bonded to you! The entire Capital Territory is laughing at the Blackthorn name!" She paced before me, claws clicking against the stone where they'd extended from her fingertips. "I'm giving you two choices. Either reach out through the bond link right now and bring him back — or you take the pack's discipline."

My lashes trembled.

I already knew. Even if I called through the faint thread of our incomplete mating bond, Fenris wouldn't come back. He'd severed his awareness of that thread long ago. It was a bond in name only — no claiming mark, no true connection. Just a formality signed in blood at a ceremony he'd never wanted.

And I couldn't interrupt his time with the shewolf he loved. If he lost his temper, if his wolf turned savage at the intrusion, the fragile alliance pact between the Ashvane and Blackthorn Packs could unravel entirely. My father's territory — weak as it was — would be absorbed within a moon cycle.

"I'll take the discipline," I said quietly.

Fenella's face contorted, her features caught between human fury and the snarl of her wolf. "Say that again."

"I'll take the discipline." I lifted my head, meeting her blazing gold eyes with a calm that seemed to enrage her further. "Go ahead."

Her complexion went ashen with disbelief. She turned to the wall where the instrument hung — a whip with silvertipped ends, an archaic tool of pack punishment that most modern packs had long abandoned. The Blackthorn Pack was not most packs.

She tore it from its mount and brought it down across my back.

The silver kissed my skin and burned — not like ordinary pain, but like liquid fire poured directly into the wound, searing through flesh and into something deeper. My wolf screamed inside me, thrashing, trying to claw her way to the surface to heal what the silver wouldn't let heal.

"Will you call him?!"

Crack.

Another lash. The silver tips bit through the fabric of my dress and into the muscle beneath. I could smell my own blood — copper and something faintly sweet, the scent of old Ashvane lineage that I'd been told meant nothing.

Crack.

I bit down on my lip so hard I tasted that same copper on my tongue. My back was a sheet of whitehot agony, every lash searing deeper than the last, the silver preventing my body from beginning even the faintest attempt at wolfaccelerated healing. The wounds would scar. I knew they would scar. They always did.

But I shook my head. Again. And again.

My wolf howled inside me — a broken, keening sound — and then went silent.

Until the darkness swallowed me whole.

When I woke, I was lying facedown on a healer's cot, my back wrapped in layers of moonblessed bandages that smelled of chamomile and wolf's bane antidote. The pain was a dull, constant roar beneath the numbing salve.

Fenris sat at my bedside.

His brow was drawn tight, his jaw clenched. He smelled of salt air and distant places — he'd only just returned. His wolf was restless behind his eyes, pacing, though he didn't seem to understand why.

"My mother made things difficult for you," he said, his voice low and hard. The words weren't quite an apology. They weren't quite anything. "Why didn't you reach out through the bond? Why didn't you call me back?"

I managed a weak smile, the expression pulling at my cracked lips. "I didn't want to interrupt your trip with Seraphina."

He went still.

He stared at my colorless face — the hollowed cheeks, the dark circles beneath my eyes, the way I lay so carefully motionless because even breathing made the silverburns scream — and the healer assistant's words surfaced unbidden in his mind.

She loves her Alpha so deeply that she's willing to care for even the shewolf he adores, just hoping he'll spare her a single glance.

Was that how deeply she loved him?

Enough to endure silvertipped lashes rather than disturb him?

His wolf rose inside his chest — not with its usual restless irritation, but with something heavier. Something that pressed against his ribs like a howl that couldn't find its way out. The beast paced in tight, agitated circles, whining low, and for the first time, Fenris felt the strange, sharp pull of it — an ache he couldn't name, directed at the broken shewolf lying before him.

He didn't understand it.

He chose not to examine it.

He stood, and he left the room without another word.

And on the cot, beneath the bandages and the pain and the silence, my wolf lay curled in the smallest shape she could manage, and did not stir.

Over the next few days, Fenris did something no one in the Blackthorn Pack would have believed — he stayed at the pack infirmary to watch over me.

I told him there was no need. He stayed anyway.

His wolf seemed restless during those days. I could hear it sometimes — a low, barely audible rumble in his chest when the healers changed my bandages, a flicker of something unreadable behind his dark eyes when he thought I wasn't looking. But I told myself it meant nothing. It never did.

On the day the healer finally cleared me to leave, a howlmessage came through the pack link — something urgent at the Great Hall. A Pack Council Gathering that demanded the Alpha's presence.

"Get yourself back to the den." He tossed the words over his shoulder without turning around, his broad frame already disappearing through the infirmary's stone archway.

I nodded to his retreating back and made my way slowly out of the healing wing.

The late afternoon sun hung low, and a pale crescent moon was already visible against the bruised sky — a waning quarter, thin as a sickle. I could feel its faint pull against my suppressed wolf, a gentle tug that promised nothing.

I'd barely made it down the stone steps leading from the infirmary when I collided with someone.

"Are you blind?!" The shewolf rounded on me instantly, her canines flashing as her lips curled back in a snarl. Her scent was sharp — cedar and expensive oils, the kind only highranking wolves wore. "Do you have any idea how much this cloak costs? Look at you — dressed like a packless rogue. Could you even afford to replace it?!"

I was about to lower my head and apologize when a cold, cutting voice sliced through the air from behind me.

"Get lost."

Fenris had stepped out of his vehicle — I hadn't even caught his scent returning, hadn't heard the crunch of gravel beneath his boots. He flung a leather pouch heavy with moonstones directly at the woman's face. "Is that enough?"

She opened her mouth to snap back, but the moment her eyes landed on him — the sheer dominance radiating from every line of his body, the Alpha pheromones rolling off him like a winter storm — her wolf made her decision for her. She bared her throat in submission and scurried away without another word.

His gaze swept over me, cold as iron. "Umbra. The Ashvanes and the Blackthorns didn't provide for you? You're walking around the territory dressed like this?"

I said nothing.

The Ashvanes had never given me anything. The Blackthorn Pack had a Luna's allocation, yes — resources, furs, access to the pack's stores — but I wasn't truly Luna. I'd never touched any of it.

My silence seemed to ignite something in him, an irritation he couldn't name. His jaw tightened, and I caught the briefest flash of amber bleeding into his dark irises — his wolf pushing forward. He grabbed my arm with a grip that was firm but not bruising and pulled me toward the waiting vehicle.

"We're getting you proper attire."

At the merchant quarter in the heart of the Capital Territory, he selected several pieces for me — finely woven cloaks lined with moonsilver thread, leather boots crafted by the best artisans in the region, garments worthy of a Luna from one of the great bloodlines. Each piece was worth a small fortune in moonstones.

I cooperated quietly the entire time, like a puppet with no will of its own. I let the attendants drape fabric over my shoulders and pin hems at my waist, and I felt nothing at all.

But just as we stepped out of the merchant hall and into the cool evening air —

"Fenris?"

A trembling voice.

I looked up. Seraphina was standing a short distance away, still wearing the plain tunic of a parttime server at one of the territory's common dens. The waning moon caught the sheen of unshed tears in her eyes.

Her gaze was rimmed red, disbelief written across her delicate features as she stared at the two of us — at the fine bags in his hands, at the new cloak draped over my shoulders. "Didn't you say you had a Pack Council Gathering at the Great Hall?"

"Seraphina…" His entire expression shifted. The cold authority that had been etched into his face moments ago cracked open, replaced by something raw and desperate. His wolf surged visibly — I could see the tendons in his neck tighten, feel the spike in his pheromones as they turned from icy dominance to something aching and warm.

"You don't have to love me —" Tears spilled down her pale cheeks, and her scent flooded the space between us — that fragile, wounded sweetness that always made every wolf nearby want to protect her. "But how could you lie to me? I shouldn't have come back to this territory. I'm the one intruding on the two of you…"

She turned and ran.

"Seraphina!" He went after her without a heartbeat's hesitation, dropping the bags where he stood.

I remained where I was, watching his retreating figure as he chased her down the cobblestone path. My heart was perfectly still. My wolf — that faint, stunted presence deep inside my chest — didn't even stir. She had learned long ago not to hope.

And then, the very next second —

CRACK.

A heavy stone ornament mounted high on the merchant hall's facade split from its moorings and plummeted straight down toward Seraphina's head.

She didn't even make a sound before she crumpled into a pool of blood on the cobblestones.

The color drained from Fenris's face. Every trace of composure vanished. He rushed forward, scooped her unconscious body into his arms — her blood soaking into his dark tunic, staining the fabric crimson — and sprinted toward the pack infirmary without looking back.

I stood rooted to the spot, my fingers curling slowly at my sides. The bags of fine clothing lay scattered on the ground around me like discarded things.

In the end, I followed.

Under the harsh glow of the healer's lanterns lining the infirmary corridor, the warding runes etched above the emergency chamber pulsed with a steady amber light — the sign that the healers were still working inside.

Fenris stood outside the sealed doors. Seraphina's blood still stained his jacket, dark against the black fabric. That face — always so controlled, so devastatingly composed — now held a rare flicker of agitation. His wolf was close to the surface. I could see it in the way his hands kept clenching and unclenching at his sides, in the faint glow of amber that bled in and out of his irises, in the way his canines had lengthened just slightly past his lower lip.

I sat quietly on a stone bench nearby. I didn't speak.

The chamber doors swung open and a healer rushed out, her hands still gloved in blood. "We have a problem. The patient is hemorrhaging severely and needs an emergency blood transfusion, but her blood carries a rare marker — Moonnull type. Our stores are critically low. We don't have enough."

Fenris's brow furrowed, a growl building low in his throat. He was about to speak when I was already on my feet.

"I'm Moonnull type. I can donate."

He turned sharply, a flash of shock cutting through the amber glow of his wolf's eyes.

I met his gaze, calm. "Saving her is what matters."

Something passed across his face — something I couldn't read and didn't try to. His wolf stilled behind his eyes, watching me with an intensity that made the hair on the back of my neck rise.

I followed the healer to the blooddraw station. They used a clean needle — not silver, at least — and four hundred cc's of my blood drained slowly through the thin tube. My face grew paler by the minute, the room tilting faintly at its edges, but my expression never wavered.

Fenris stood to the side, arms crossed, watching the needle buried in the crook of my thin arm. His gaze lingered on the faint silverburn scars that traced along my inner wrist — old marks, halfhidden beneath my sleeve — and that strange, unnameable feeling inside him seemed to grow heavier. His wolf paced behind his ribs, restless, unsettled by something it couldn't articulate.

How much did she love him?

When it was over, I pressed a wad of herbsoaked cloth to the puncture wound and walked out on unsteady legs. He was still standing exactly where I'd left him, motionless outside the emergency chamber, a sentinel carved from stone and shadow.

I hesitated, then went to him and said softly, "Don't worry. She'll be fine."

He looked up at me, his voice rough, scraped raw. "Why are you still here?"

I shook my head gently. "Seraphina has the wrong idea about us. When she wakes up, I need to explain things to her — make sure she understands there's nothing between you and me."

He stared at my colorless face — at the dark hollows beneath my eyes, at the way I swayed almost imperceptibly on my feet. Then, abruptly, his voice dropped low: "Do you really love me that much?"

I froze.

Something deep inside me — that faint, battered wolf — flinched. For one terrible moment, I felt her stir, felt her press against my ribs like a wounded animal trying to crawl toward warmth. Mate, she whispered, so quietly I almost didn't hear her. He's asking.

I was about to answer when the chamber doors opened again. The lead healer stepped out, pulling the bloodstained gloves from her hands. "The healing was a success. Once the sedative herbs wear off, the patient will wake."

The rigid line of his shoulders finally eased. The amber faded from his eyes. His wolf retreated, and he was just Fenris again — cold, distant, unreachable.

I quietly stepped back and said nothing more.

The crescent moon hung outside the infirmary window, thin and pale, offering no light at all.

A few hours later, Seraphina stirred awake.

The instant her eyes fluttered open and found me standing at her bedside, the rims of her pale eyes turned crimson. "Fenris, did you bring her here again because you want me to give you my blessing?"

I stepped forward quickly, keeping my voice low and my gaze submissive, tilting my head just enough to bare the side of my throat — a gesture of deference that had become second nature over three years. "Miss Holloway, you've misunderstood. Alpha Fenris truly did have a Pack Council Gathering that day. Taking me to the clothier was only because it fell along the route — it wasn't a courtship outing. He didn't deceive you."

Fenris gave a curt nod, his jaw tight. "She and I are only mated for the alliance between our packs. There is nothing between us."

Deep inside my chest, my wolf — still so faint, still barely more than a flicker of warmth behind my ribs — curled tighter into herself and said nothing. She had learned long ago not to react to those words.

Seraphina bit her lip, and tears slid down her cheeks, carrying the faintest tang of distress pheromones into the air. They were delicate, trembling, the kind of scent that made every wolf in the room want to shield her. She had perfected that fragile aura like a weapon. "Then prove it. Prove you don't have even the smallest feeling for her."

Fenris's brow creased, a low rumble building in his throat. "What do you want me to do?"

She was quiet for a moment, her gaze drifting toward the frostedged window where the waning crescent moon hung like a pale scar in the winter sky. Then she pointed beyond the glass, toward the frozen lake at the far edge of the Blackthorn estate grounds.

"Throw her into the silverlaced ice water."

The lake. Every wolf in the Blackthorn Pack knew about it. During the harshest months, the pack elders had the water infused with dissolved silver — a deterrent against rogue wolves crossing the frozen territory border. Even a brief submersion would burn a wolf's skin, suppress the shift, and send the body into shock.

Fenris's expression shifted, something tightening behind his dark eyes. "Seraphina..."

"You're hesitating?" Her voice broke, trembling like a wounded pup's whimper. "You do have feelings for her!"

He went still. His jaw worked silently, and I could see the muscles in his neck cord as though his wolf was pacing beneath his skin, agitated, pushing against his control. Several long seconds crawled past.

Finally, he let out a slow breath, turned on his heel, and gestured to the pack enforcers standing by the door. "Put her in the lake."

My pupils contracted.

I knew he would do anything for Seraphina. I had witnessed it a hundred times — the way his entire world narrowed to the orbit of her fragile, weaponized scent. But I never imagined he could be this ruthless.

I couldn't fight back, though. I had to endure. The alliance between the Ashvane and Blackthorn Packs depended on it. My father's territory — small and starving and barely holding its borders — depended on it.

The enforcers seized my arms, their grips ironhard, and marched me out of the chamber. Fenris stood where he was, unmoving, his gaze dark and unreadable as a moonless sky. I searched his face for something — anything — but found only stone.

My wolf stirred faintly inside me, a whisper of warmth that tried to reach out, tried to brush against the bond that should have connected us. But there was no bond. He had never marked me. There was no claiming bite on my neck, no tether between our wolves. I was his mate in name only — a ghost occupying a Luna's place.

The water of the silverlaced frozen lake was beyond cold. It was annihilation.

The instant the enforcers shoved me beneath the surface, my entire body seized. Every nerve screamed. The silver in the water burned against my skin like liquid fire even as the cold crushed the air from my lungs. Ice water flooded my nose, and my limbs went numb within seconds — but the burning didn't stop. It sank deeper, into muscle, into bone, into the place where my wolf lived.

She h