LOGINMy Beta Aiden had two sisters.
Kelly and Merry.
I have known Kelly for the longest time. She was also my girlfriend, Mate, and my future Luna. Everything had been going well between us.
Until one day, I saw Kell tying her sister Merry to a tree. At first, I thought that they were playing, so I didn’t mind them. Until I saw Merry still tied up on the same tree, but Kelly was no longer there.
Still, I didn’t do anything because I thought it was part of some plan that the two of them were working on, and I know that Kelly wouldn’t do anything that would hurt another person.
But when lunchtime arrived and the sun was high in the sky. Seeing that Merry was still there, looking like she would faint any moment without Kelly in sight, I rushed to help her.
“Are you okay?” I asked even though I could see that she was not.
“No,” her voice was weak and harsh.
“Why are you tied up in this tree?” I continued to ask.
“Kelly tied me,” she replied, even though she was having a hard time speaking because of how dry her throat had become.
“Are you two playing some kind of games?” I asked, hoping that it was some kind of prank or something. Because I know that Kelly wouldn’t tie her sister and leave her there.
“No,” Merry replied as he slid down the tree after I had untied her. “Kelly hates me. She said that I don’t belong here and that I should just die and disappear.”
I looked at her, and for a moment, I felt something close to pity. She seemed vulnerable, rattled, but I knew Kelly. And the Kelly I knew would never do such a thing.
One of my guards approached us with a water bottle I had asked for earlier. I took it and placed it on her hands.
“Don’t play dangerous games,” I warned softly. Then turned and walked away, leaving her under the tree, staring at the water bottle like it was the best thing she had ever had.
Her words lingered in my mind like a parasite, gnawing at everything that I knew. But I didn’t let it win. I have known Kelly since we were young, and the Kelly I knew would never be so cruel.
But then, there were more.
I started to doubt what I know about the woman I love whenever I see her doing things that could hurt Merry. That’s when I realized that this was Kelly’s true colors.
As I continue to save Merry, I am slowly becoming closer to her.
One night. I woke up after getting drunk and found myself lying in bed with Merry, both of us naked. Not long after, I found out that she was pregnant. And being the only man that she was with, I know that it was my responsibility not only to her but as her Alpha to do what is right. That’s why I proposed to her.
What I didn’t expect was for Kelly to be so driven by jealousy over Merry’s pregnancy to actually push Merry down the stairs. We lost our baby, and to make it worse, what happened to Merry made her unable to have a child ever again.
I wanted to give Kelly a chance. After all that we’ve been through, she deserves it. But when she didn’t show any remorse after I asked her to beg Merry for forgiveness, and even went so far as to say that everything was part of Merry’s plan.
My disgust toward Kelly had reached its limit.
After I banished Kelly from the pack, my mind was a mess. My mood was out of control. And I was having a hard time functioning well.
Oftentimes, I found myself walking towards our secret spot, hoping to see a glimpse of her. I wanted to remember her smiling face or hear the sound of her voice as she sang while doing her chores.
But I could no longer do that because she’s no longer here.
I thought I had cured myself from missing her when I stopped visiting our secret spot, only to become so much worse.
In meetings, she would wander in my head and stay there until I no longer knew what we were discussing, which led to having the meeting adjourn because I could no longer think straight.
As much as I don’t want to admit it, I know that the reason this was all happening was because I missed her.
And just when everything in my life was turning into shit, the door to my office was kicked open — it was my Beta, Aiden.
“You know that what you did is a sign of disrespect to your—.”
I wasn’t able to finish what I was about to say because my face met his fist.
“What the fuck, Aiden!” I shouted. As I rubbed my jaw.
“Why did you banish Kelly from this pack?!” He demanded, shouting.
I sigh heavily. I know that this conversation would come. I just didn’t expect he would punch me for it.
“She deserves it,” I replied as I sat in the chair behind my desk. But Aiden moved towards me again and pulled me up by the collar so tightly that I was having a hard time breathing. His eyes were bloodshot with fury as he screamed.
“How could you forget your promise, Leo?!” His hand loosened against my collar as he continued. “After you banished Kelly, she was attacked by the rogues. My men knew that, so they followed her to protect her until I arrived. But when they found where she was initially, there was blood everywhere.”
“There are no rogues in the forest,” I said as I pulled his hands away from my neck. I know that Kelly did something wrong, and I know that the forest would lead her to an allied pack.”We have made sure that there are no rogues in that forest.”
She can’t be dead.
Aiden got it all wrong. He had to be.
Aiden looked at me, he raised his hand ready to strike again, and I was prepared to fight back this time. I already had a lot of things to think of, and I wouldn’t let this nonsense distract me. I waited for another punch from him, but it didn’t come.
Instead, he opened his hand, and a pendant fell. Aiden was holding a necklace with a pendant I knew so well. It was the necklace that Kelly had worn. There was no moment that she didn’t have it on because she said it was so important to her, just like how important the person who gave it to her was.
I know the quarter-moon pendant so well because I was the person who gave it to her.
I felt like a punch to the gut, leaving me hollow. I just need her to understand the weight of her actions. I just want her to repent. And when she realizes all the wrong things she has done, I would take her back. I never meant for her to die.
I placed my face in my palms, unable to look at my Beta and bestfriend.
What the hell have I done?
"Hello, brother."The voice came out of the smoke before the shape did, and I knew it the way you know thunder before you see the lightning that caused it, a sound that arrives ahead of the thing that made it and tells you everything you need to know about what is coming.He stepped through the haze with his sword already raised, the same sword, I realized, that had been a half breath from my granddaughter's father's heart only a moment before, in a version of this evening that no longer existed anywhere except inside the woman who had unmade it."Where is she?" Valentino said. He was smiling. He had always smiled like that, even as a boy, even before the mountains took him and gave something else back wearing his face. "Where is my Kayla. I felt her wake. I felt it from a hundred miles away, brother, like a bell I had been waiting two hundred years to hear ring again.""She is not yours," I said. "She was never yours.""She chose me first.""No, she never did."He came at me, and I m
KaylaI saw him before Viktor said the name.I had been awake for less than an hour, and already my body remembered things my mind had not caught up to yet. The smell of him came first, across all that distance, across the smoke and the blood and the dying light. Cold iron and burnt sugar. That was always his smell, even when we were young, even before he chose what he chose."Valentino," I said.Viktor did not answer me. He did not need to. His hand had gone still in mine, the good kind of stillness gone wrong, the stillness of a man watching a debt arrive that he had spent two hundred years pretending he would never have to pay."He is not Fae anymore," Viktor said. His voice was emotionless, and yet I could see the pain of betrayal in his eyes. "He gave that up a long time ago. What he is now, I do not have a clean word for."I knew the word. I had known it since before Kelly was born, since the year Valentino disappeared into the lower mountains and came back different, came back
Kelly"You really believe you could defeat me that easily?"I won't waste many words on what happened next. It deserves far less of my breath than the fear it stole from me.Behind them, the darkness filled with bodies. Dozens of them, then more, spreading across the ridge until the hillside itself seemed to breathe.I thought our enemies were just Merry, Anderson, and the Vampire Lord. But the man I am facing now defeats the three of them all at the same time.The man on the ridge walked towards us with such arrogance that it seemed like he owned the place. I don’t know exactly who he is, but I have a feeling that I have seen him somewhere. I couldn't shake the feeling that I knew him.His face tugged at something buried deep in my memory, something I couldn't quite reach. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't remember where I had seen him before.But one thing was certain.He was behind what had happened to Merry.I knew he wasn't a wolf. He wasn't a vampire. And somehow, I couldn
I had never truly understood the fire.I had only seen it in fragments. The candle in the kitchen. In the warmth that spread across the floor beneath Lylia's feet on cold winter mornings. Those were only glimpses.I had never known what the fire really was.Until now.Now, I know.After finding out about my mother and the endless secrets she kept, I found out that it is not a wolf thing. That there was something more inside me that I hadn’t discovered. That is what I learned: in the second after Merry’s wolf-suppressor took my wolf away from me, when by all the laws of the world I had been raised inside, I should have gone to my knees beside my brother and watched my half-sister walk past me with a smile.My wolf was gone, but I was not alone.The fire still lived within me.Waiting.And very much alive.It flowed inside of me, but this time I wasn’t afraid of it. This time, I welcome it as it came up the inside of my arms like a thing that had been waiting for a chance to flow. It c
My mother had been awake for nineteen minutes when the first vampire crossed the shepherds' wall at the southern line.I wish I could tell you those nineteen minutes lasted forever. But they didn't. I counted every single one in the silence as we stood together at the edge of the garden. It gave my trembling mind something to cling to, because when everything inside you is breaking apart, sometimes all you have left is the simple act of counting the moments before they're gone.Viktor revealed what was happening beyond the walls of the Fae Lands. Every vision showed our people risking everything for the future they believed in, each one willing to sacrifice their life for a freedom that had been denied for far too long.Then the image shifted.My brother. Aiden.I had spoken to him to tell him that our mom was awake. And all he replied to me was his last request, still echoing in my mind.Stay there. We'll come when this is done.As though that could ever be enough. Anyone who truly k
LeoThat is the part I keep coming back to, after, when I am alone with my own breath and the soreness in my left shoulder where the chain bit through to skin. He knew the fight had turned before I did. I am not sure, but I could see it on his face. The smug look he's wearing now tells me he knows more than he's letting on. He had been running on me since the second clash, delaying me and keeping me in the same spot I had been since the clash began. The steady, patient, infuriating defense of a man who only needed to keep me in one place. What stood opposite me then was just a tired old wolf who had run out of road and knew it.I would like to tell you I felt sorry for him. I did not.Since I couldn’t be there for the ritual that Kelly and my daughter were doing, Ella helped me out by casting a spell. I spell that would make me feel exactly what was happening even when I’m not there. Mateo offered to let me stay with my wife and daughter, but I refused to leave them to fend off the v
I don’t know how long I had been locked up in this cold, dark cell. All I know is that they gave me only one meal a day, composed of stale food I could barely swallow. But for the sake of my little angel in my belly, I forced myself to eat. I heard the doors of the entrance being unlocked. Was it t
Every part of me aches. My head throbs, my body feels heavy, and my heart feels like it’s about to die on me. Like it was ready to fall apart, all over again. To make it worse, when I opened my eyes, I found myself in my room, with Merry beside me. “Thank the goddess you’re okay,” she said, “I’m
Out of all the things that had happened to me in the past few months, this would be the best news that I had received. I couldn’t contain my happiness as I rushed to find Leo and tell him the good news.I was pregnant!So many things happened between Leo and me. The worst was when he suddenly broke
KellyThe sun was shining, and the children happily played in the field under the big oak tree. “Hi, Luna,” some of our kitchen helpers called, smiling playfully at me as I passed them by. “You all know that I am not yet the Luna,” I replied, returning their smiles. “We all know that you would s







