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.
The she-pup who smiled so prettily and spoke so softly and always, always found a reason to be near Dorian. The pack-warriors doted on her. The den-keepers cooked her favorite meals without being asked. Even the Beta spoke of her with a gentleness he reserved for no one else. She had wrapped the entire Nightveil Pack around her delicate finger.
But Lavinia, like me, had never trusted her. Not once. Not from the very first day Ciara had been brought through the territory gates as a frightened twelve-year-old, clutching her dead mother's moonstone pendant and weeping, her thin scent of honeysuckle already laced with something faintly spoiled.
"That injury is a fake." Lavinia's voice was flat, certain, the voice of a she-wolf stating a fact as plain as the turn of the moon. "Convenient timing, wouldn't you say?"
My heart hammered against my ribs, and somewhere beneath it my wolf lifted her head, ears pricking at the words like they were the first true thing she'd heard in days. It was not just me. I was not paranoid. I was not the jealous, bitter she-wolf the whispers down the den corridors made me out to be.
"You think she did this on purpose?"
Lavinia scoffed. The sound was quiet, almost elegant, but it carried the weight of absolute contempt.
"Oh, child. Of course she did. She has been playing this game for years, pulling Dorian closer every chance she gets. Every scraped knee. Every tearful confession. Every little crisis that requires the Alpha's personal attention. You think she is helpless?" Lavinia leaned forward, and her dark eyes burned, a flicker of old amber rising in them. "I see right through her. I have buried two mates and outlived three challenges, and I have seen she-wolves like Ciara Thornwood my entire life. They are the most dangerous kind. The kind who smile while they slip the knife between your ribs."
I clenched my fists in my lap. My nails bit into my palms, and for one breath I felt them threaten to lengthen.
"Then how come Dorian doesn't see it?"
"Because that boy has been blinded since the day she arrived. His father's dying Moon Oath, the debt of honor to Rosalind Thornwood, it clouds everything. He confuses obligation with affection, and Ciara knows exactly how to keep the confusion alive." Lavinia's mouth thinned. "But you know the truth. So you must be strong enough to face it."
I nodded. The motion felt mechanical, hollow. My stomach churned. I did not want to be strong. I wanted Dorian to walk through that door, take my face in his hands, and tell me he was sorry. I wanted him to make it right. I wanted him to choose me. Beneath my skin, my wolf paced and would not settle.
"I'm sure you'll think of something. I know you are strong and wise, Neva." Lavinia rose from the chair with a grace that defied her years. She crossed the room and pulled me into an embrace. Her arms were thin but firm, and she carried the scent of aged oak and dried lavender, of beeswax and cold hearthstone. "Do not let this Pack break you. You are worth more than they know."
She released me, smoothed the front of her dress, and left without another word. The door clicked shut behind her.
Silence filled the room like floodwater.
My communicator vibrated against the duvet, and I flinched. I crossed to the bed and picked it up. A message from Ivar Blackthorn, the Beta. My childhood packmate. The wolf who had grown up beside Dorian and me, who had stood at Dorian's right hand since the day the old Alpha was laid beneath the earth.
"Neva, I heard the news. Don't be too disappointed. Dorian had to do this. It's his obligation as Alpha of the Pack. He needs to ensure the safety of everyone under his protection."
"Yeah, right!" The words tore out of me, loud and raw in the empty room. My wolf snarled low at the back of my throat. I tossed the communicator back onto the bed without typing a reply. Ivar and his endless excuses. Ivar, who always found a way to make Dorian's choices sound reasonable, who always smoothed the edges until the blade didn't look like a blade anymore.
Two minutes later, the pack messages buzzed again. I picked up the communicator against my better judgment. Ciara had posted more crystal-captures. Dorian sitting at her bedside, spooning broth into her mouth as though she were an invalid. Dorian pressing the back of his hand to her forehead to check her temperature. Dorian adjusting the wrapping on her ankle with the careful, focused attention of a wolf tending to something precious and breakable.
As if she were his mate. As if she were the she-wolf he was meant to take in the Mating Ceremony today.
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.
