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.

I exhaled through my teeth and picked up the communicator again. The pack mind-link thread had blown up while I was dealing with the fallout, and I hadn't even glanced at it. When I opened it, every message was from Ciara. She had been updating the pack's inner circle on her injury, image after image, message after message. My jaw tightened as I scrolled through the crystal-images she had sent. They were carefully framed. Every single one featured her and me. I lingered on the worst of them: Ciara lying on the cot in the compound's Healing Hall, her face arranged in an expression of fragile suffering, while I stood over her looking every inch the concerned protector.

I ran a hand through my hair and dropped the communicator face-down on the desk.

Everything seemed to be spiraling out of my control, but none of it was my doing. Ciara needed me. My father had sworn a dying Moon Oath to her dying mother. I could not simply abandon that debt because of the ceremony. Neva should have understood how sacred the obligations of this pack were. She knew the life. She had always known the life.

Still, the guilt gnawed at me like a rat behind the walls. I had canceled our mating ceremony. Our Moon-Bound Union. For Ciara. And now Neva was furious, and the silence on the other end of that call had been the kind of silence that preceded war. Somewhere beneath my ribs, my wolf paced the length of its cage and would not lie down.

Maybe I could have handled it better. I should have called her first, spoken to her directly, asked for her understanding before making the decision. Or at the very least, I should have explained my reasons face to face instead of sending a message as if the union meant nothing. As if she meant nothing.

But what was done was done, and I had to deal with the fallout.

A knock on the study door pulled me from the spiral.

"Come in."

Ivar stepped through the heavy oak door with his usual measured calm, the kind of composure that had made him invaluable to me since we were pups running through the corridors of this very compound. He closed the door behind him without a sound, lowered himself into the chair across from my desk, and studied me with those sharp, patient eyes. The faint trace of gunmetal and dry pine resin settled into the room with him. If there was anyone in this world I could count on to help me make sense of this wreckage, it was him. My Beta. My brother in everything but blood.

"Dorian." His voice was low, almost gentle. "I heard what happened."

I leaned forward and pressed my knuckles against my temples.

"Yeah. Neva's furious."

Ivar raised an eyebrow, settling deeper into his chair, one ankle crossing over his knee with the ease of a wolf who had never lost a moment's sleep in his life.

"Furious at you for fulfilling your obligation?"

His words made me drag a hand down my face.

"I canceled the ceremony, Ivar. The Moon-Bound Union. She has every right to be upset."

He shook his head slowly, as though Neva's reaction was something he genuinely could not fathom.

"She might be upset, but you did what you had to do. Ciara was hurt. You're the Alpha. Your first responsibility is to the pack. That means ensuring every wolf under this roof is safe, especially when they're injured. Especially when they carry the weight of your father's oath."

"I know that." My voice came out rougher than I intended. "But Neva doesn't see it that way. She thinks I'm choosing Ciara over her."

Ivar's expression softened. He uncrossed his legs and leaned forward, his elbows resting on his knees.

"Dorian. You didn't choose Ciara over Neva. You chose the pack over everything. That is what being Alpha means. Neva knows that deep down, even if anger is blinding her right now."

I clenched my fists on the desk, the signet ring biting into my finger. Frustration coiled inside my chest like smoke with nowhere to go, and my wolf pressed against the underside of my skin, restless.

"I know she does. But it feels like I'm losing her, Ivar. I've been so consumed with the pack lately, with Ciara, with every crisis that walks through that door, that I haven't had a moment to breathe, let alone be with her."

"You're not neglecting her." Ivar's tone was firm, certain. "You carry responsibilities that most wolves will never understand. Neva is upset, sure. But she'll come around. You have always been there for her, and she knows that."

I didn't respond. I turned my head toward the window, where the lights of the eastern territory bled through the reinforced glass like distant fires. A part of me knew Ivar was right. Neva had always stood by me. Through the territory wars, through the funerals, through every blood-soaked night that came with this throne. But lately, something between us had shifted. I could feel the distance growing, a silence that had nothing to do with loyalty and everything to do with loneliness.