Seraphina's POV:

Ethan’s fingers were like a vise on my arm, the scent of his rage—like burning wood and ozone—assaulting my senses, making me feel dizzy. He leaned in closer, his voice dropping to a low, venomous hiss right next to my ear.

"Have you forgotten? Have you forgotten how disgusting you were that night?"

His words were a key, twisting in a lock I hadn't known was there, forcing open a rusted door in my mind. His voice dragged me backward, pulling me into the swirling, chaotic memories of the Blood Moon Rite ten years ago. The night our pack celebrated the coming of age for all its eighteen-year-olds, the night the Moon Goddess revealed destined mates.

"Celeste," Ethan whispered, his voice a blade of poisoned honey. "Our perfect Celeste. She'd waited her whole life for that night. And the Goddess blessed her. She found her fated mate—Alpha Kieran Valerius. Powerful, noble, a future leader of a great pack. It was the happiest I had ever seen her."

Flickering images danced behind my eyes. Celeste's radiant face, lit by the bonfire. The way Kieran had looked at her, the visible sparks that crackled in the air between them, the undeniable pull of a true mate bond. I remembered the pure, unadulterated joy I had felt for my sister, mixed with a small, secret pang of loneliness for a mate I had not yet found.

"And you?" Ethan's voice dripped with contempt. "You were jealous. You saw a powerful Alpha, and you wanted him for yourself. But you weren't brave enough to challenge her, were you? No. You chose the coward's way. The slut's way."

His grip tightened, each word a hammer blow. "You slipped an herb into his drink. A potion to heighten his lust, to cloud his mind."

That was the official story. The truth everyone in the pack had accepted without question.

*No! It wasn't us!* Lyra howled, a desperate, frantic denial in the cage of my skull.

"I didn't," I gasped, trying to pull away from him, from the poison of his words. "I don't remember..."

"Don't remember?" He laughed, a cold, sharp sound. "How convenient. But Celeste remembers. She remembers everything. She remembers searching for Kieran, her heart full of joy, only to find him missing. She remembers hearing... noises... coming from your room."

He was painting a picture with his words, each stroke a fresh cut on my soul.

"She pushed open the door, Seraphina. And what did she see? She saw you. Naked. In her mate's arms. The scent of your coupling was so thick in the air it was nauseating."

The vile image he described made my stomach churn. Even without the memory, I could feel the second-hand humiliation, the imagined horror of that moment. I could feel Celeste's world shattering.

"You stole him," Ethan said, and I could hear a tremor in his voice now, a raw pain for his twin sister. "You stole her fated mate, Seraphina. You desecrated a sacred bond, a gift from the Goddess herself!"

In our world, there was no greater sin.

Tears streamed down my face as I shook my head, a useless, pathetic gesture. "No... I would never... I loved my sister..."

"Don't you dare say her name!" he roared, shaking me so hard my teeth rattled.

I cried out, a small, sharp gasp of pain. But the agony in my arm was nothing. Nothing compared to the weight of the accusation that was crushing my spirit.

I wanted to scream that I had been drinking, too. That I had woken up confused and horrified. But what was the use? They wouldn't have believed me then, and they wouldn't believe me now.

She was Celeste, the golden child, the future of the pack. I was just the quiet, lesser sister. The jealousy motive, it was just too perfect for them to ignore.

For a decade, I had worn the label: Mate Stealer. Whore. Traitor.

And now, here was my brother, pronouncing my sentence all over again, right outside our dying father's door.

A wave of blackness washed over my vision. It wasn't Ethan's strength that was felling me, but the sheer, suffocating weight of an injustice I could not fight.

My knees buckled.

Ethan looked down at me, his face a mask of pure disgust, as if I were something vile he’d found on the bottom of his shoe.

He let go of my arm. I crumpled to the cold stone floor.

He delivered the final blow, his voice flat and dead. "A creature like you doesn't deserve the name Blackwood."

Seraphina's POV:

I lay on the floor, the world a meaningless blur of motion and sound around me. Ethan's words echoed in the hollow space where my heart used to be. But beneath the roaring of his accusations, something was stirring. A memory. A single, sharp fragment from that night, rising from the depths where I had buried it.

The world dissolved.

**[Flashback]**

The blood moon hung low and heavy in the sky, staining the world in shades of crimson. The air was alive with the sounds of the celebration—the crackle of the bonfire, the thumping of a drum, the laughter of young wolves drunk on beer and possibility.

I saw myself, a younger, more naive version, in a simple white dress. I stood at the edge of the clearing, a shy spectator, watching my sister, Celeste. She was the center of it all, a queen in her element, her laughter like bells.

Then Alpha Kieran Valerius had walked toward her. The moment their eyes met, the world seemed to hold its breath. The sparks were real, a visible shimmer in the air between them. A murmur went through the crowd. The Goddess had blessed them.

My heart had swelled with so much happiness for her. I raised my cup of cider in a silent toast.

It was then that a server, one I didn't recognize, his face a blur in my memory, approached me. He held out a different cup, a darker, richer vintage. "A special toast," he'd said, his voice smooth. "For the Alpha's other daughter."

I'd smiled, touched by the gesture, and drank it down without a second thought.

The drink was spicy, with a strange, bitter aftertaste of herbs I didn't recognize. I assumed it was just part of the ceremonial brew.

But then a strange heat began to spread through my limbs. The world started to soften at the edges, the drumbeat growing louder, more insistent in my blood. A dizzying wave of vertigo washed over me. Lyra began to whine and claw at the inside of my mind, agitated, trapped.

I needed to get away, to find some air. I stumbled away from the firelight, my legs feeling clumsy and disconnected from my body. My vision swam.

I remember the feel of the cool night air on my feverish skin. I remember trying to make it back to my room in the Packhouse.

And then... nothing. A black, gaping void in my memory.

The next thing I knew, I was being ripped back to consciousness by a pain that was not of the body, but of the soul. It was the searing, brutal agony of a mate bond being forged by force, a brand on my very essence.

I gasped, my eyes flying open. I was in my own room, staring up at my own ceiling. But the air was thick with a scent that did not belong there—the overwhelming, intoxicating scent of a thunderstorm and pine. Kieran's scent. It was everywhere, sinking into my skin, claiming me.

A wave of panic seized me. I was naked. And Kieran was lying beside me, equally bare, his eyes closed, seemingly unconscious.

I tried to scream, but my throat was paralyzed.

That's when the door flew open, slamming against the wall.

Celeste stood in the doorway, her face a portrait of pure joy, a smile just beginning to form. And then her eyes found us. The smile froze, shattered, and was replaced by a look of such profound shock and devastation that it was physically painful to witness. Her lips trembled, but no sound came out.

Behind her, my father appeared, then my mother, then the elders, their faces a gallery of horror.

I would never forget my father's eyes. Not fury. Not rage. Just a deep, bottomless disappointment. The look of a man watching his most prized possession being ground into the dirt.

My mother made a small, strangled sound and collapsed.

And Ethan… Ethan launched himself into the room like a rabid animal, his face contorted in a mask of murderous rage, roaring my name. The elders had to physically restrain him.

**[End Flashback]**

I came back to myself with a violent, racking cough, my body convulsing on the cold floor of the medical wing.

I remembered.

The drink. The bitter, herbal taste.

It wasn't just a special brew. It was Wolfsbane.

A poison to our kind in large doses. But in small, carefully prepared amounts, it acted as a powerful aphrodisiac, a mind-altering drug that could confuse the senses and, most importantly, subdue a wolf's inner instincts, leaving the human half vulnerable and suggestible.

I wasn't the predator. I was the prey.

We both were. Kieran and I. We had both been drugged.

The truth, a decade late, hit me like a bolt of lightning, illuminating the dark corners of my mind. I wasn't a monster. I was a victim.

A surge of adrenaline, of pure, unadulterated rage, flooded my system. I had to tell them. I had to make them see.

I pushed myself up, my limbs shaking, my eyes scanning the faces around me. I saw Ethan's sneer. My mother's averted, grief-stricken gaze. The elders' cold, impassive expressions.

And the lightning of revelation was followed by the crushing thunder of reality.

Ten years had passed. My word against theirs. The word of a disgraced outcast against the memory of a perfect, heartbroken princess. I had no proof. No witness.

If I screamed the truth now, they would see it as nothing more than the desperate, pathetic lie of a cornered sinner.

Seraphina's POV:

The revelation of the wolfsbane was a storm in my mind, but it was followed by the cold, quiet dread of another memory. The aftermath. The trial.

I was back on the floor, but this time it was the polished stone of the Elder's council chamber.

**[Flashback]**

The day after the Blood Moon Rite, they dragged us both before the council. I remember Kieran standing beside me, his face pale, his stormy grey eyes filled with a confusion that mirrored my own.

Celeste was there, weeping, her voice breaking as she recounted what she had seen. Her pain was so raw, so genuine, it was impossible to doubt. She was the perfect victim.

I tried to explain. I tried to tell them about the drink, about the blank space in my memory. But the words came out jumbled, incoherent. I couldn't even name the herb then, couldn't articulate the feeling of being poisoned. To the furious elders, it sounded like the pathetic babbling of a liar caught in the act.

Kieran, too, claimed he remembered nothing after his first drink with Celeste. But he was the Alpha of another, powerful pack. They could not judge him, could not punish him. So, they directed all their wrath, all their judgment, at me. It was easier. I was one of their own. I was disposable.

The verdict was swift. For the crime of desecrating a sacred bond and betraying the pack, the sentence was death.

I remember the silence that followed, the feeling of the world ending.

But just before they were to carry out the sentence, a routine medical check changed everything.

Dr. Vance, his face grim, announced to the stunned council that I was pregnant. The pup was Kieran's. An Alpha's pup.

The news was a bomb that detonated in the silent chamber.

By the most ancient of werewolf laws, a law that superseded all others, no she-wolf carrying the bloodline of an Alpha could be harmed. The future of the species, the strength of the packs, depended on it.

My father, who seemed to have aged twenty years in a single night, made his decision. I was to be banished, cast out, my name stricken from the family.

But Kieran's pack, the Valerius pack, would not allow it. An heir to their Alpha could not be born a rogue, a bastard with no name and no protection.

The negotiations were brutal. For two days, the fate of my unborn child—my fate—was debated.

Finally, a shameful compromise was reached.

Kieran would have to mark me. He would have to claim me as his mate, giving me and his child the protection of his name. It was not a true mating. It was a sentence. They called it the Mark of Shame.

A mark that would feed and house the child, but would forever serve as a public reminder of the sin that created it.

I remember the moment he did it. He pushed my hair aside, and his teeth sank into the sensitive flesh of my neck. There was no passion, no love, no hint of the ecstasy a true mating was supposed to bring. Only cold, clinical duty and a wave of revulsion so strong it felt like acid in my veins. The pain was blinding, worse than the breaking of bones during a first shift.

Our bond was created in that moment, not as a bridge between two souls, but as a cold, iron chain.

**[End Flashback]**

My hand drifted to the back of my neck, my fingers tracing the faint, silvery scar that was always hidden by my hair. Even after ten years, it sometimes ached with a phantom pain.

That was the truth of my life with Kieran. We were not mates. We were cellmates, shackled together by the existence of our son.

I had stayed alive for Daniel. Kieran had fulfilled his duty to his bloodline. Our life together was a gilded cage, our marriage a ten-year-long silent truce. I could count on two hands the number of real conversations we'd had.

Daniel was my sun, my moon, my entire universe. But I was not naive. I knew that for Kieran, his fatherly affection was tangled up in his duty to raise a strong heir.

Our family was a lie, built on a foundation of shame.

And now I knew. I knew it was all a lie. We were all victims of a much larger one.

A fire I hadn't felt in a decade began to burn in my gut. A hot, cleansing anger. It wasn't just for me anymore. It was for Kieran, trapped in a loveless bond. It was for Celeste, robbed of her destiny. It was for my innocent son, born into a world of cold duty instead of love.

I would find out who did this. And I would make them pay.

That fire, that purpose, gave me a strength I didn't know I possessed. I reached for the wall, my muscles screaming in protest, and I pulled myself up. I was shaky, unsteady, but I was standing.

I was no longer just here to see a dying man. I was here to interrogate the last person alive who might know the truth.