LOGINMona POVWe left the cabin before dawn.Alessandro’s ribs had stiffened overnight. Every movement cost him, but he refused to stay in a place the pack already knew how to find. We traveled higher along the ridge, sticking to stone where we could and doubling back through a narrow defile to break our trail. By midmorning the bond carried a constant low thread of his pain beside the sharper awareness of open territory and no safe ground.That was when I caught the wrong scent on the wind.Not Ironfang.Rogue.Alessandro stopped at the same moment I did. His head turned. Through the bond his focus went cold and precise.“Dargrel,” he said quietly. “And others. At least four.”My stomach dropped. “How did he find us so fast?”“He doesn’t need the pack’s maps. He only needed to know we would run north and that I was hurt.” Alessandro scanned the treeline. “He’s been waiting for the boundary to spit us out.”A soft, mocking whistle drifted up from the slope below—close enough to carry, far
Mona POVNight dropped fast in the redwoods.We didn’t dare light a lamp. The cabin’s single room held a narrow bunk, a cold woodstove, and a cache of emergency supplies that hadn’t been touched in years. Alessandro barred the door with a length of old timber, checked the one window, then finally let himself lean against the wall. In the dark I could still see the darker stain spreading along his side where the ribs had taken the worst of the fight.“Sit,” I said.He did—more of a controlled drop onto the edge of the bunk than a choice. I found a tin of water and a relatively clean cloth in the cache and knelt in front of him. When I pressed the cloth to the cut above his eye he didn’t flinch. When I carefully lifted the torn edge of his shirt and saw the deep bruising already blackening across his ribs, the bond between us pulsed with shared pain.“They’re cracked,” he said quietly. “Not through. I can still move.”“You shouldn’t have to.”His hand found my wrist, sticky with drying
Mona POVThey came for me at first light.Two warriors opened the annex door without ceremony. No Gray. No formal words. The sentence had already been spoken; this was only the enforcement. I stood on unsteady legs as they cuffed my wrists with the binding cords used for wolves under removal orders—not iron, but treated rope that bit against any attempt to shift.“Time to go,” one of them said.We stepped outside into the gray early cold.That was when the bond exploded.Alessandro came across the pack house grounds like the title they had stripped had never mattered. I felt him before I saw him—pure decision, no hesitation—and then he was there, slamming into the first warrior with enough force to send them both into the dirt. The second warrior barely got a warning out before Alessandro’s fist caught him in the throat and dropped him choking to his knees.“She is not leaving without me.”His voice was barely human.Alarms rose across the grounds. Footsteps pounded from the main buil
Mona POVThey did not make me wait long.Less than a day after they stripped Alessandro of his title, the council reconvened in a narrower, harder session. This time there was no full pack audience—only the elders, the Beta, a record keeper, and the minimum number of ranking witnesses required for a formal sentence. I was brought in under escort and left standing in the open space before the long table. Alessandro was not there. Through the bond I felt him under territorial restriction on the far side of the pack house grounds, locked out of this room by order, his fury a constant low burn against my ribs.Gray looked older than he had the day before. He did not waste time.“Mona of Ironfang,” he said. “You have admitted to a mate bond with the former Alpha while he was still bound to the Luna. You participated in the concealment of that bond. You stood in this hall and claimed him openly after the evidence was presented. The council has considered your age, your prior standing, and t
**Mona POVThey brought me back into the hall when the recess ended.The atmosphere had changed. The earlier chaos had hardened into something colder and more deliberate. Wolves stood in tighter clusters. The elders had reseated themselves in a formal line. The Beta looked like a man who had aged a year in an hour. Alessandro stood alone in the open space before them, shoulders square, the bond between us pulled so tight I could feel the strain in my teeth.Mom was not in her previous seat. She stood to the side with two ranking females, face unreadable, eyes fixed on nothing.Gray rose.“The council has deliberated,” he said. The hall quieted at once. “The evidence is admitted. The admissions are recorded. The Luna has formally requested dissolution of the mate bond. The pack has been given the truth the Alpha previously withheld.”He turned fully to Alessandro.“Under pack law, an Alpha who forms a competing mate bond while still bound, who conceals that bond from his pack and his
Mona POVThey separated us before the recess ended.Two senior warriors escorted me out of the main hall through a side corridor while the pack’s voices still roared behind the closed doors. Alessandro tried to follow. The Beta and two others blocked him—not with force, but with the formal weight of the council’s order. Through the bond I felt the moment he chose not to break through them. The cost of that choice hit me like a second pulse.They put me in a small antechamber used for waiting witnesses. Bare walls. One window too high to reach. A single door that locked from the outside. I sat on the wooden bench and pressed both hands against my chest, focusing on the bond so I wouldn’t come apart. Alessandro’s presence was a hard, bright line of fury and calculation in the back of my mind. He was still in the hall. Still fighting in words what he could not yet fight with teeth.I didn’t expect Mom to be the one who opened the door.She stepped inside alone and closed it behind her. F







