"Lyra." He leaned in close, his breath hot against the sensitive skin behind my ear where his claiming bite still throbbed. "I want your remaining years to hurt a hundred—no, a thousand times more than what I'm feeling right now."
The next morning, he departed for the Moonlit Isles with Seren.
Our mating journey. Our promised destination.
Alaric had always refused to be captured in memory-crystals, claiming an Alpha's image held too much power to share carelessly. But for her, he commissioned a pack chronicler to follow them everywhere. Hundreds of paired images—him gazing at her on white sand shores under the full moon, her draped against his chest as the sun bled into the sea—all shared through the pack network for every wolf in the territories to witness.
By then, my disgrace had spread across Capital Territory like wildfire through dry brush.
Desperate heat-slave. Insatiable she-wolf. The whispered condemnations were endless, carried on every breeze that touched pack lands. Meanwhile, Alaric became the noble Alpha who'd been betrayed by his intended mate yet still honored his claiming responsibility. And Seren? She was celebrated as the brave Omega who'd endured public scorn because her devotion to the Alpha was true and pure.
Their supporters flooded my mind-link with death wishes before I severed the connection entirely. Funeral wreaths woven with wolfsbane arrived at my den door. Someone glamoured my face onto pleasure-house advertisements, images so vile I couldn't look at them twice without my stomach heaving.
While I drowned in shame, Alaric took Seren to every sacred site I'd ever dreamed of visiting with him. Every single one.
And still—still—I couldn't let go of the bond.
How could I? In this entire world, after my mother, he was the only one who had ever truly wanted me. The only one whose scent had ever meant safety.
I was eighteen winters old when my father brought Seren and her mother into our den.
One moon cycle later, at my coming-of-age feast, my mother pressed a moon-blessing charm into my palm. Her hands were warm, her wolf-amber eyes soft with love.
Then she climbed to the highest ledge of our territory and stepped off the edge.