LOGIN
RILEY
My smile widened with each anticipating moment. Today was the day I would tie the knot with my childhood sweetheart—Knox. Despite all odds against us, we fought through and our love only became stronger. I was looking forward to spending the rest of my life with him.
The Blackthorn estate. That's where we held our wedding—and I was amazed to see that his father agreed to our union. I wasn't born with a wolf and have been cast aside for so many years. But it was different with Knox. He had never looked down on me.
Staring at him, those gorgeous silver eyes piercing into mine—I feel happier than ever. He stood gorgeous, in his black tuxedo, his eyes locked on mine like I was the only person in this world.
But I couldn't help but notice his eyes held something different—I couldn't explain it. But it wasn't those exciting eyes I had been relishing all these while. My kind scattered, fear of him getting cold feet.
But he was here. That's all that matters.
The priest's voice disrupted my thoughts. “Do you—Riley Harper— take Knox Blackthorn as your lawfully wedded husband? To love and obey unruly death do you part?”
I immediately nodded,unable to withhold back my excitement.
We were seconds from saying ‘I do’. When his father rose from his chair and cleared his throat, all attention turned to him. For a flick moment, I noticed his eyes staring back at Knox.
Knox's face went pale. I reached out for his palm, caressing him softly. He gave me a small smile, but I could tell that they held something so much more.
“I do,” I responded finally.
The priest repeated the vows to Knox. But he remained quiet, the silence stretching through the room. My heart pounded hard in my chest.
“Knox?” I called softly.
He remained quiet for a moment. Multiple thoughts went through and fro in my head, wondering what could be going on in his. Wondering why he suddenly chose to be quiet. Was he having cold feet?
He looked at me, a cold glare on his face. He marched up to the mics and took one of them. My breath got heavier with each passing minute, wondering where this was leading too.
He cleared his throat. “I'm sorry for this abrupt interruption, but I have an announcement and it's directed to my lovely wife-to-be,” he stated.
I forced a smile, trying not to let the nerve kick in. “What's…going on, Knox?” I asked him.
He didn't look at me. Not once.
“I, Knox Blackthorn, Alpha heir of the Blackthorn Pack, reject you as My mate and Luna.”
The bond snaps like a bone snapping inside my chest, and I screamed loudly in front of the most wealthiest werewolves gathered to share this joyous occasion with.
The pain felt like something was ripping me in half. I screamed loudly again, blood pouring from the fresh mating mark as the rejection tears it open.
The second he said those words my whole body just… broke. Like someone took a hammer to my ribs. I screamed so loud my ears rang and I dropped straight down, knees banging the floor hard. Blood started pouring out my neck like a faucet, hot and sticky, ruining the pretty white dress in seconds. I kept grabbing at the bite mark tryna stop it but my hands just got slippery red.
Knox was still holding the mic looking like a stranger. He wouldn’t even glance at me. Then he said it again, louder, “She’s nothing but a weak human I used for fun.”
And everybody laughed.
Not like a little giggle, like full on losing it. People were bending over, slapping their legs, wiping their eyes. One girl was literally screaming and laughing. I heard one go “oh my god” and then start cackling too.
My mom was fighting the guards tryna run to me but two big guys held her back and she was yelling, “Let me go, that's my daughter!”
But nobody cared.
I was on the floor crying and bleeding and tryna breathe but it hurt so bad. “Knox please,” I kept saying, “please look at me, we can fix this just talk to me.” My voice sounded gross and wet. He finally looked down for half a second and I thought he was gonna help me but then his dad coughed again and Knox just… turned off. Like a light switch.
He dropped the mic and it made this huge banging noise and started walking away.
I tried crawling after him, dragging the heavy dress, leaving a long red streak behind me. “Knox wait wait please dont leave me like this!” I was screaming and sobbing and snot was everywhere.
People were stepping over my dress like it was trash. One lady actually said new and lifted her skirt so it wouldn't touch the blood.
He never turned around. Not once. Just kept walking till he got to the big doors and disappeared.
The doors slammed.
I don't even know how long I stayed there. Everything got blurry. I think I passed out for a minute cuz next thing I know I’m outside on my side and my mom is finally next to me crying and tryna hold me up but I’m too heavy with all the blood. Everybody else was already leaving, chatting and laughing like they just watched a funny movie.
I somehow crawled out the side door. My nails were broken, my knees were messed up, the dress was basically red now. Outside was cold and I threw up right on the steps, roses and champagne and blood all mixed.
His bike was gone. Just tire marks.
He promised he wouldn't do this to me. Today was supposed to be the happiest day of our lives, but it became a nightmare.
I sat in the dirt hugging myself, blood still dripping, and looked at the moon and said the only thing I could think of.
“I’ll never let you find me again.”
Then everything went black.
The request is still on my kitchen table.I want to be precise about what I mean when I say that, because precision is the habit two years have built in me, and I won't abandon it for a closing paragraph.The request is still on my kitchen table in the sense that I haven't answered it yet — not in the sense that it's gathering dust, not in the sense that I'm avoiding it. I'm thinking about it carefully, the way I've learned to think about things that matter. The way I was taught, by a year of building and a year of being tested, is the right way to approach significant choices: honestly, patiently, with the full accounting, without rushing to the yes or the no before the thinking is done.I've told Yolanda. She read the eight sentences and said: I don't know what this is either. Which means we'll figure it out together. That's the right attitude.I've told Daria. She said: this is what the methodology was always going to grow toward, eventually. You built a practice for this kind of w
The request arrived on a Tuesday in the third week after I got back, forwarded by Hunter with a message that was longer than his usual brief flags: I don't know what this is. I've never seen anything exactly like it. I wanted you to see it before I sent it on with any context, because I think the context I'd add might shape how you read it before you've read it yourself.That, from Hunter, was its own kind of information.The message itself was short. Shorter than Valla's letter, shorter than the Compact's initial inquiry, shorter than most significant things that arrived in my professional life. Eight sentences. No institutional designation. No name I recognised. No request for discretion. No flattery, no framing, no attempt to position the ask as something other than what it was.What it was, was this: a request for a specific kind of reading, in a specific context, that was unlike anything in my experience or, as far as I could tell from eight sentences, unlike anything in the exis
He told me the rest of it on a Sunday, two weeks after we got back, in the deliberate unhurried way that he'd always brought to the things that required the most care.Not the morning — the afternoon, the particular Cascade Sunday light, tea already on the table, neither of us anywhere we needed to be."I want to tell you the full version," he said. "Not because you've been waiting, or because I think you need it. Because I want to have told it. I want you to have it, and I want to have given it to you, and I think I'm finally ready.""I'm here," I said.He told it steadily, without stops that I filled, just the account itself — the person who'd managed him, the specific shape of the manipulation, the three weeks he'd described as the incident, the gradual, deliberate dismantling of the version of himself that had trusted easily and moved through the world with the assumption that people were mostly what they appeared to be.He was seventeen. He had trusted someone who deserved the tr
The apartment was exactly as I'd left it.This shouldn't have been remarkable — I'd been gone nine weeks, not nine years, and the apartment was well-maintained and the plant had been watered by the same building resident who'd apparently been watering it since my first season — but it was remarkable, in the specific way that familiar things become remarkable after an absence long enough to give you back the capacity to see them clearly.The north-facing window. The particular quality of the light at this hour. The roofline of Cascade visible in the way I'd spent seasons learning was mine — familiar not because I'd grown up with it but because I'd chosen it, specifically, by staying long enough for it to become the roofline I knew.I stood in the doorway for a moment before going in, the way I sometimes stood in the doorways of significant moments, taking the measure of where I was.Eamon was behind me — we'd traveled back together, and he'd carried my heavier bag up the stairs with th
The last session of the engagement was with Valla alone, two days before I was due to travel home, and I'd built it into the structure from the beginning — not as a debrief, not as a formal conclusion, but as a space for the honest accounting that I'd learned, over two years of building the practice, was as important as any other part of the work.What I owed Valla, at the end of nine weeks of significant engagement, was an honest account of what the work had cost me and what I'd observed about the cost as it accumulated — not for her professional record, not for any institutional purpose, but because she was the commissioning party and she deserved to know what she'd asked of me so she could hold that knowledge appropriately if she ever made a similar request in the future.I told her the full accounting.The level had been higher than a Cascade season, sustainably so across the nine weeks, but higher. The specific cost of the mapping sessions — particularly the fourth, sixth, and se
He stayed for the final week, which hadn't been part of the original plan — he'd arranged his work to allow for it, a flexibility that told me something about how seriously he was taking the question he'd said he wanted to ask when we got home.I didn't manage his presence in the communities the way I might once have managed it. He was simply there, available, and I let whatever happened between him and the people he encountered simply happen, the way I'd been letting things happen between him and the significant people in my life across the past year. My mother. Hunter. Now Valla.I found out afterward what they talked about.He came back from a walk with her on the third day of his final week, in the late afternoon, and sat down across from me at the kitchen table with the quality of someone who has just had a significant conversation and is still absorbing it."She asked me about the blank," he said."And?""She's the first person outside of you who's asked me about it with genuine
RILEYThe whole apartment turned into a zoo in like two seconds flat. Damien was yelling about lawyers and trespassing and calling it assault, while waving his phone around like he was gonna call the cops right there. Guests were whispering and filming and some lady actually started live-streaming.
KNOXI was still standing there like a complete moron, dripping water all over Riley’s hallway floor, heart banging so loud I swear the neighbors could hear it, when the bedroom door at the end of the hall flew open like someone kicked it. Two tiny kids came running out full speed, socks sliding on
KNOXOur eyes met, and the desire that I had convinced myself for the past five years that it wasn't there any more, suddenly surged in. Her mouth hung open, tears on the brim of rolling down her eyes.She tried closing the door, but I was faster and used my powers to rush in before she was able to
RILEY*FIVE YEARS LATER* I stared at the new masterpiece I had just finished working on, unable to take my eyes off it and continued grinning from ear to ear. It had taken me just an hour to lain the wolf claw marks onto the Harley engine, but each minute was worth it.Then a familiar memory hits







