LOGINThe Alpha KingThe official across the table had been talking for a while, and he stopped the moment I reached for my water.He didn't stop because I told him to. He stopped because I'd moved, and everyone at that table had spent years learning to watch my hands. Nine of the oldest bloodlines in the coalition sat around it, wolves who ruled their own territories like small gods at home, and here they waited on me to lift a cup before any of them dared finish a sentence. I set the water down. He picked the sentence back up where he'd dropped it.We were into the dull part of the day, a stretch of border two territories both wanted and neither would pay to hold, a grain shortage out east, a patrol report with three dead names on it that meant three letters I'd be writing myself. Then Marius laid another folder down in front of me, and Kieran Croft's name was on the front of it.I didn't sigh. I never let them see that. But my jaw set, because that name kept turning up on this table late
CloverI'd told myself to stop reading an hour ago, but my thumb kept dragging the feed down anyway.For a while it had gone the way it was supposed to. The picture landed and the circles tore into her, the cast-off bride throwing herself at the Rogue Alpha, moved on before the flowers wilted, all of it. I'd sat here and let it warm me. Then Meredith opened her mouth, and it turned.Every refresh made it worse.CoastRunNell: she stood up to him with one line. queen behaviour honestly.GreyFangMira: funny how he only wanted her back the second she stopped waiting.OldHowlTruth: "try to keep up" I'm going to think about that for a week.They'd taken her replies and made banners out of them. Then why is he still chasing it. I walked away from one. Try to keep up. People were pinning the garden photograph to the top of their own posts now, not as shame, as proof. Look how she's holding him. That's not a woman who was forced into anything.The picture I'd sent out to bury her had become th
MeredithI had already decided I wasn't replying.The insult sat under Hayley's comment, and I read it twice and told myself it didn't matter. The account had four followers and a stolen picture for a face. Answering it would only feed it, and I'd already said everything I needed to say in the post itself. So I locked the phone and made myself listen to Silas.He was on about the angle again, that the picture had come from above, from a window or the gallery. I lasted a few seconds.The phone buzzed in my hand.I looked down before I'd decided to. Same insult, still there. Alarick dodged a bullet. My thumb drifted toward the reply box, hovered, and I dragged it back and locked the screen again.Silas said something about the older passages. Sera said whoever took it knew the house well enough to pick the right spot. Kieran asked whether an outsider could have gotten up there without being seen. I caught the shape of it and lost the middle, because the phone went off against my palm o
KieranThe headache had started before the sun and kept building since, and the silver under my ribs pulled every time I breathed too deep. Reports sat across the low table, two phones, a cup of tea gone cold at the edge, and I hadn't touched any of it. My thumb pressed hard into my forehead, and my eyes had narrowed down to a slit hours ago.None of that was what I kept looking at.Since everyone is so curious: yes, I kissed my husband. I'd do it again. Next time, find a better angle.I read it again. I knew every word by now, but I read it again anyway, and my gaze caught on the same two places it kept catching. My husband. I'd do it again. A tired laugh got out of me, and I rubbed my forehead because it was reckless and shameless and exactly what I should have expected from her.She'd walked away from Alarick in front of his whole pack instead of begging him back. She'd kept pulling at the medicine problem after my own people told her to leave it. She'd come to me on her own feet
MeredithI woke before the house did.The light was still grey at the window and my mind wouldn't sit still, kept dragging me back to the garden, to his room, to the closed door and the thing that had almost happened on the other side of it. Lying there only made it louder. So I got up, pulled on the first dress my hand found, and went out to walk it off, because cold morning air was supposed to be good for a head that wouldn't quiet.Something was off before I'd cleared the second corridor.Two maids were whispering by the linen store. They stopped when they saw me, one dropping her eyes to the floor too fast, the other biting down on a smile that didn't quite go. I slowed. They found somewhere else to be.A guard at the lower stairs gave me a good morning like always, then looked away the second he'd said it and cleared his throat, and there was something in the throat-clearing I didn't like.Further down, two wolves were helping a wounded one along the wall, the young one with his
AlarickThe screen sat in front of me, and my eyes only stayed on it for a second, but a second was enough.Meredith against a tree. Kieran close, too close, his hand somewhere I didn't let myself follow, her face turned up under his in a way that left no room to argue about what it was. I saw that much and then I couldn't look anymore, because looking meant reading her, and I wasn't ready to do that.So I looked at Clover instead and shoved the phone back into her hand because holding it felt too much like holding the truth itself. "She wouldn't," I said.It came out flat, like I'd caught her lying. Because that was what i wanted. Clover cut things, angled them, made them say what she needed. She'd done it to me for years and I'd let her, so this was easier to believe than the other thing."It's real, Alarick." She didn't push it. She didn't tell me Meredith had wanted it, didn't build a case. She just held my eyes over the trembling edge of the phone. "You can stand there and say
Meredith Kieran Croft. The name wouldn’t stop repeating in my head. Stories came with it, the kind whispered across territories when people thought no one important was listening. The Rogue Alpha. The leader of Silverthorn who’d been accused of betraying the coalition. The man other packs avoi
MeredithSix days had passed since I agreed to the arrangement, and I still didn't know the Alpha's name.I'd spent those days imagining every possible kind of man my father could have hidden from me. Old and desperate for an heir. Cruel and looking for someone he could control. Politically dangero
MeredithThe Benic estate looked exactly the way I remembered it. Grand iron gates, sprawling gardens that someone else maintained, and the main house rising three stories high with windows that caught the late afternoon sun. I'd grown up here, spent eighteen years learning how to be the perfect da
MeredithI walked through the front door of the mansion still wearing the wedding dress Alarick had left me in, no veil, no bouquet, and no groom trailing behind me. The staff froze when they saw me, their eyes widening as they took in the ruined train dragging across the marble floor and the tear







