ALPHA SALFORD

The mansion had been buzzing since sunrise.

Servants moved through the halls carrying armfuls of white lilies, their voices hushed and excited, the scent of fresh flowers mixing with the smell of polished wood and candle wax drifting up from the great hall below, where the caterers had already begun arranging tables for the reception that would follow.

Guests filled the courtyard beneath my window, Alphas from fifty neighboring packs already arriving in polished cars, my father greeting each one with the booming, practiced warmth he reserved for important days.

Today was my wedding, and every corner of my father’s pack house had been transformed to prove it — silk ribbons woven through the banisters, candles lit along every windowsill, a hundred small details I’d spent the better part of a year choosing myself.

I sat at my vanity, letting the stylist pin the last of my hair into place, and let myself feel something close to happy for the first time in months. Nervous, yes.

My stomach hadn’t settled since I’d woken up before dawn, too restless to sleep any longer, my mind circling the same anxious loop it always did before something important.

But happy too, in the fragile way brides were supposed to feel on their wedding morning, watching my reflection slowly transform into someone who looked ready for the life waiting on the other side of the ceremony.

I wanted to see him before the ceremony. It wasn’t proper, and I didn’t care — I’d never much cared for propriety when it stood between me and something I wanted. I slipped out of the dressing room in my robe, still an hour from ready, my hair only half-pinned, and made my way toward the guest wing where Sherwood had been staying since the engagement began three months ago.

I heard the laughter before I reached the door.

A woman’s laughter, bright and familiar in a way that made my steps slow without my permission. I pushed the door open before some quieter, wiser part of me could stop me.

Sherwood was in bed with Miranda. My best friend since we were children. The woman I’d asked to stand beside me at the altar in less than two hours.

I didn’t scream. I didn’t even breathe, not really. I stood frozen in the doorway, watching the two people I trusted most in the world laugh together in the sheets like the ceiling above them hadn’t just cracked open and swallowed everything I thought I knew.

I stepped back before either of them saw me, some animal instinct telling me to disappear before I made a single sound, my heart pounding so hard I was certain they’d hear it through the door. Every second I stood frozen in that hallway felt like an eternity, the laughter behind me continuing, oblivious, while my entire understanding of my own life crumbled apart in silence.

Then Miranda’s voice reached me through the gap in the door, low and satisfied.

“After today, she’ll sign everything over. The whole estate, the pack rights, all of it, straight into your name.”

Sherwood’s laugh was worse than anything I’d ever heard from him before. “Once we kill her father, the pack is mine. Ours. Pack law is clear enough — he only sired daughters, and daughters don’t inherit without a mate to stand behind them. I’ll be that mate. Convenient, isn’t it?”

The floor tilted beneath me. My whole world, the wedding, the man I’d loved since I was seventeen, the future I’d spent a year planning down to the last flower arrangement — all of it collapsed into a single, monstrous truth in the space of one sentence.

I thought of every dinner, every stolen kiss, every promise Sherwood had ever whispered against my hair, and understood in one sickening instant that none of it had ever been real.

My hand caught the edge of a side table without meaning to, and a vase toppled, shattering against the marble floor loud enough to wake the dead.

Silence from the bedroom. Then Sherwood’s voice, sharp with alarm. “Who’s there?”

I ran.

I didn’t think, didn’t plan, just moved, my bare feet slapping against cold marble as I fled down the corridor with my heart hammering somewhere near my throat, my robe flying open behind me, my carefully pinned hair coming loose with every stride.

Behind me, I heard the door slam open, heard Sherwood’s furious voice calling my name through the empty hallway.

He caught me before I reached the stairs.

His hand closed around my arm hard enough to bruise, spinning me to face him, and whatever softness had ever existed in his expression was gone, replaced by something cold and calculating that made my stomach turn.

I barely recognized him — three years of gentle smiles and soft-spoken promises, and this was what had been hiding underneath the entire time.

“You weren’t supposed to hear that.” His voice had dropped low, dangerous in a way I’d never heard from him before, not once in three years of courtship.

“Let go of me.” I tried to wrench free, but his grip only tightened, his fingers digging deeper into skin that would bruise dark by morning, if I even lived to see it. “I’m telling my father everything, Sherwood. Right now, before this wedding goes another step further.”

“No.” He shoved me, hard, and I stumbled backward with nothing to catch myself on, my arms flailing uselessly at the empty air where a railing should have been.

My head connected with the marble pillar behind me, and pain exploded through my skull so violently that the hallway tilted sideways, colors bleeding together, sound going thin and distant, Sherwood’s face swimming above me for one final, terrible second before it dissolved into darkness entirely.

Everything went black.

The last thing I heard, drifting toward me from somewhere very far away, was Miranda’s voice, calm and utterly without remorse, as though she were discussing nothing more significant than a broken vase.

“Throw her body into the river.”