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.

Ivar must have scented the turmoil behind my silence, the gunmetal-and-juniper of him sharpening as he caught the unease bleeding off my skin, because he pressed on.

"You're doing the right thing, Dorian. Ciara is part of this Pack. Your father's Moon Oath binds you to shelter her. That is sacred. That is a debt of honor, sworn under the Goddess herself. Neva will understand once the anger has passed and she can think clearly."

I turned back to him, doubt still heavy in my chest, my wolf restless beneath it.

"You really believe that?"

"I'm certain of it." A note of quiet confidence threaded through his voice. "Don't let this consume you. It's nothing. Neva is hurt right now, but she will realize you were fulfilling your duty. Nothing more."

I nodded slowly. I had been so tangled in guilt and frustration that doubt had started to poison everything, distorting my judgment about what this would mean for us. I was doing the right thing. I could not run two trails at once. What I did for Ciara was what any Alpha would have done. What my father would have expected of the one who took his place.

"I just don't want to lose Neva." The words came out barely above a whisper, and I hated how vulnerable they sounded in the stillness of that den.

"You won't." Ivar's voice carried the weight of absolute conviction. "Neva loves you. That's precisely why this is hitting her so hard. But she'll come around. The two of you have been bound together too long for a single incident to sever it."

I let out a long breath, and some of the iron tension in my chest began to loosen. Ivar was right. He was always right about these things.

"Thanks, Ivar. I needed to hear that."

He smiled, and there was a glint in his eyes that caught the lamplight, gold flickering low and gone.

"Anytime. That's what I'm here for."

I pushed myself up from the chair, feeling lighter than I had since the moment Neva's voice had gone cold across the mind-link. The talk with Ivar had helped, but I still had a great deal of damage to repair. The fracture between Neva and me was real, and no amount of reassurance from my Beta could mend it. Only I could do that. But at least now, the guilt was no longer drowning me.

"I'll talk to her later tonight. Give her time to cool down first."

"Smart. Neva has a soft spot for you, Dorian. Always has. Use that to your advantage."

We walked to the study door together, and for the first time in hours, I felt prepared to face whatever came next.

Ivar clapped a hand on my shoulder, his grip firm and familiar.

"You've got this. Just remember you're not alone in this."

"Thanks, Ivar."

He left, and the weight on my shoulders had lifted enough that I could breathe again. But now came the harder part. I had to find a way to make things right with Neva.

I crossed the eastern territory to the den Neva and I shared. It was our private ground, set apart from the pack estate, the one place where we were not the Alpha and his Intended but simply two people who had chosen each other. Or so I had believed.

When I opened the door, the den was dark. The kind of dark that had nothing to do with the hour and everything to do with absence.

"Neva?"

My voice echoed off the stone floors and died against the walls. No answer. And then my wolf went very still, because the air was wrong. I moved through the rooms, checking the kitchen, the sitting room, the bedchamber. Everything was in its place. Everything except the things that mattered. The frost-and-white-birch of her, the cold river-stone and that thread of moonflower that had lived in these walls for years, had thinned to almost nothing.

Instinct seized me, cold and sudden, and I walked to the closet. I pulled the doors open.

Empty. Every hanger bare. Every shelf cleared. Her boots, her coats, the small leather case where she kept her grandmother's moon-rosary. All of it, gone.

Neva had left me.

My legs gave out, and I sank to the floor of the closet, surrounded by nothing but the faint ghost of her scent and the hollow click of empty hangers swaying in the draft. Somewhere beneath my ribs my wolf threw back its head and made a sound I had never heard it make, a low keening that scraped at the inside of me with no name to give it. The silence pressed in from every side, absolute and merciless, and for the first time since I had become Alpha of the Nightveil Pack, I felt completely and utterly powerless.