LOGINAfter five years of betrayal, Meredith Benic is abandoned at the altar by Alpha Alarick Holt for her stepsister, Clover. Humiliated and heartbroken, Meredith finally walks away. But years of Alarick’s unstable bond have weakened her wolf, leaving her with only one choice: accept the arranged marriage she once ran from. Her new husband is Kieran Croft, the feared Rogue Alpha of Silverthorn. Their marriage is meant to be political. Meredith needs his mark to save her wolf, and Kieran needs her family name to regain his place among the packs. But as Meredith struggles to earn Silverthorn’s loyalty, Kieran’s cold protection begins to feel like something far more dangerous. When Alarick realizes Meredith now belongs to the one Alpha he fears most, jealousy turns into obsession. With Clover feeding his rage and the coalition turning against Silverthorn, Meredith must choose between saving herself or standing beside the Rogue Alpha everyone calls a traitor. She was once the bride Alarick abandoned. Now she will become the Luna he regrets losing.
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Alarick's phone rang before the priest could finish binding us. Buzz. Buzz. I knew that ringtone, and so did everyone else in the hall as it meant one person and one person alone. Clover. My hand tightened around the bouquet, white roses crushing beneath my grip until the ribbon bit into my palm. Alarick's fingers were still laced with mine, but I felt the moment his grip loosened. He glanced down at his pocket. The priest kept speaking, the Bloodmoon Pack kept watching, and I kept standing there like I hadn't already lived different versions of this moment for five years. Clover calls, Alarick runs, and I forgive him. The pattern was so familiar it made my chest ache. "Alarick," I whispered. He didn't look at me, but his jaw tightened as he pulled his hand free. The cool air rushed between our palms. He answered the call right there in front of the priest and his entire pack. "What's wrong?" His voice dropped low, but the hall had gone quiet enough that everyone heard him anyway. Clover's sobs crackled through the speaker, loud enough to carry and theatrical enough to make my stomach twist. "Alarick, please." Her voice broke. "I can't do this anymore. I just, I can't." Someone else grabbed the phone, their voice panicked and sharp. "Alpha, you need to come now. She's threatening to hurt herself. We can't stop her." My breath caught. Alarick turned toward the door, and I stepped in front of him. "Don't." My voice came out steadier than I expected as I grabbed his wrist and held on. "If you walk out of this hall, don't expect to come back and find me waiting." His eyes finally met mine, brown and frustrated, like I was the one being unreasonable. "Meredith, she's going to die." "She's not going to die." My fingers dug into his sleeve. "She does this every time, and you fall for it every single time." "You don't understand." "I understand perfectly." My voice didn't shake as I held his gaze. "You're choosing her again." Alarick's expression softened, but it wasn't guilt. It was pity. "We'll fix this when I get back. The wedding can wait another week. You know I'll make it up to you." Another week. Like the three months I'd already waited meant nothing. Like the six times we'd rescheduled this ceremony were just minor inconveniences. "No." I let go of his wrist. "It can't." Clover's voice wailed through the phone again, high and desperate, and Alarick flinched. He looked at me one last time before pulling away and walking toward the exit. I watched him go. The empty space where his hand had been felt colder than it should have. For one breath, no one moved. Then the whispers began, crawling through the pews like insects, and I heard every word. "She'll take him back. She always does." "Poor thing. Clover's won again." "I told you this wedding wouldn't happen." Heat flooded my face as my hands shook around the bouquet. I couldn't tell if it was anger or humiliation or both. One of Alarick's Betas approached me, looking uncomfortable as he shifted his weight from foot to foot. "Luna," he said quietly. "Should we preserve the setup? For when the Alpha reschedules?" Something inside me snapped. I stopped shaking, and my vision cleared. The whispers didn't matter anymore. Fuck this, I was done. I looked at the Beta, then at the crowd, then at the priest who was still frozen mid-prayer. They all expected me to wait, to forgive, to stand here like an obedient fool until Alarick decided I was worth coming back to. I tore off my veil. The lace caught in my hair but I yanked it free with more force than necessary. It fluttered to the floor in a heap of ruined tulle. "There won't be a reschedule," I said. The Beta blinked. "Luna." "I'm not your Luna." My voice carried through the hall. "And I will not marry Alpha Alarick Holt." Silence. I turned toward the aisle as my bouquet slipped from my fingers and hit the floor with a soft thud. White petals scattered across the red carpet. I stepped over it. No one tried to stop me. No one spoke. I walked out of the wedding hall with my head high and my hands steady. This time, when Alpha Alarick Holt returned, he would not find me waiting and I absolutely mean it.KieranI came back slow, and it wasn't gentle.The pain reached me first, a deep drag under my ribs that pulled with every breath. The bitter smell of silver still hung off the bandages. My wolf was awake under my skin, restless and angry and weaker than it had any right to be, scratching at the inside of me for a fight it couldn't find. The lamps were turned low, and for a moment I didn't know if I was in my own bed or still out on the ridge with the smoke in my eyes.Then I turned my head.Meredith was asleep in the chair beside me.Not gracefully. Not arranged the way a soft bedside wife arranges herself for the picture of it. Her neck was bent at an angle that was going to hurt her when she woke, her hair had come loose from whatever she'd done with it hours ago, and one hand was tucked up near the edge of the mattress, fingers half-curled, like she'd fallen asleep reaching for me and hadn't quite made it. There was still a faint smear of dried blood near her sleeve.My blood.Tha
AlarickThe report came in broken, half a sentence at a time, and I sat in the back of the car with the wine going warm and forgotten in my hand.Silverthorn's north ridge. Fire. Gunfire on the ridge road. The pack had sealed its outer routes inside the hour and nobody on the outside knew the shape of it yet.I should have thought about what it meant. Bloodmoon and Silverthorn and the coalition, the borders, what an attack on the Rogue Alpha's ground did to the balance of every territory around it. That was the Alpha's thought, and it should have come first.It didn't come at all."Was she seen?" I said.A pause on the line. "No, Alpha.""Was she hurt?""We don't—" Another pause. "No one's saying. Not because she's clear. Because no one knows yet."That was the part that got its fingers into me. Not she's hurt. Not she's safe. Just nobody knew, and I was three territories away with a glass of wine in my hand.I called her.It rang. Once, twice, the sound of it going out into a room I
MeredithI was already moving, and there was a roar in my ears, and all I could see was his face.I don't remember deciding to cross the floor. One second I was at the table with Kieran's blood drying on my hand, and the next I was halfway across the hall with my whole body aimed at the man in the doorway. His words were still in me, lodged somewhere they wouldn't come loose. Should've stayed dead at the pass. Kieran was bleeding behind me and this man was laughing about it, and my wolf had gone somewhere past thinking, somewhere I couldn't reach to call her back from.Sera caught me, but not easily.My nails cut the air close enough to his face that he jerked his head back before he laughed at me. A guard got hold of my wrist and twisted it facing it down while Sera locked an arm hard around my waist and took my feet right off the floor, and still I strained against both of them, reaching, and for one long breath the whole receiving hall got to stand there and watch their Luna try
MeredithI was crossing the hall before I could even think.They had him up between two wolves, his weight hung off their shoulders, the blood gone dark and stiff on his clothes and smoke worked into his hair. His head hung so low that even now, this close, some last desperate part of me tried to make him into someone else. Then the firelight caught the scar by his left eye, and everything in me dropped through the floor.I was almost at him before I'd decided to move.A healer's aide stepped into my path with his hands up. "Luna, we need space here, you can't—""Move."It came out of me low and flat and cold, nothing like my own voice, and the boy went white and stepped aside without another word.People turned. I felt them turn but honestly? I didn't care who saw it.Elara reached us, and she saw him properly then.Whatever had been in her face went out of it all at once. The warmth, the dry amusement, all of it just emptied, and what was left underneath was so still and so cold th
KieranI read it twice and felt the afternoon go out of me.The mud, the race, all of it drained off and left the cold thing underneath. Bloodmoon had gone through the coalition. They'd put it on the record. And I stood there reading the same polite sentence over while something tightened in my che
MeredithWe came off the walkway with his warning still sitting between us, and it didn't ease on the way back. I stayed half a step off him the whole way, close enough to feel that his anger had gone quiet instead of gone.The main packhouse felt wrong before I worked out why.A worker by the far
Meredith"The houses are smaller down here," I said.He didn't slow. "They're older. We built outward from this part, not toward it."It was the most he'd given me since the yard, and I took it, because the silence had started to get hard to walk in. We were well past the administrative grounds by
KieranThe question was wrong the second it left my mouth.I don't know why you still let him reach you.I'd meant that Alarick should not still have a road to her. That a man who'd thrown her away should not be able to reach into her week with a single message and make her hand go tight around a ph
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