LOGINMona POVI didn’t see the confrontation happen.I only felt the moment Alessandro’s control finally slipped its leash.It was late—past midnight—when the front door opened and closed with a controlled violence that made the frame rattle. I was still in the guest room, half-upright against the headboard, the rejection sickness turning every hour into a slow grind of fever and hollow ache. Mom had gone to bed hours earlier after another tense, unfinished conversation with Alessandro. The house had been quiet.Then it wasn’t.I heard him come up the stairs hard and fast. The guest room door opened without a knock. Alessandro stood in the doorway, chest heaving, eyes pure molten gold, the scent of night air and blood and raw Alpha rage rolling off him in waves. There was a smear of red across the knuckles of his right hand. His shirt was torn at the shoulder.My heart lurched. “What did you do?”“What I should have done the first time he put his mouth on you.” His voice was low, rough, st
**Mona POVThe healer left just after sunset.She had checked my temperature, pressed two fingers to my wrist, and frowned at whatever she felt in my pulse. Her diagnosis was careful and incomplete—“severe stress response, possible energy imbalance, rest and monitoring”—but her eyes had lingered on Alessandro a second too long before she packed her bag. Mom walked her out. The low murmur of their voices drifted up the stairs, too quiet to make out.I was still in the guest room when my phone vibrated on the nightstand.Unknown number.I almost ignored it. Then the preview of the message froze the breath in my lungs.**Unknown:** Heard the bond’s broken. Or at least badly damaged. That true, little wolf?Dargrel.A second message followed before I could lock the screen.**Unknown:** Don’t bother lying. Word travels. Your Alpha’s been looking rough, and you’re hiding in the house like something died. Which it kind of did, right?My hands shook. The rejection sickness flared in response
Mona POVMom came home early on the third day.I was still in the guest room, curled on my side under the blankets, when I heard her voice downstairs. The rejection sickness had settled into a grinding, low-grade misery—fever that came and went, constant ache in my chest and limbs, a hollow exhaustion that made even sitting up feel like work. Alessandro had barely left the house. He moved through the rooms with the same controlled quiet he used during pack crises, but the strain showed in the tight set of his shoulders and the way he sometimes stopped mid-step, as if the missing bond had left him off-balance too.I heard them talking in the kitchen. Mom’s tone started light, then shifted.Footsteps came up the stairs. She knocked once on the guest room door and opened it without waiting.“Mona?” She stopped in the doorway. Her eyes moved over me—pale face, damp hair, the way I was still in bed in the middle of the afternoon—and her expression tightened. “You look awful. Why didn’t any
Mona POVI tried to leave again the next morning.The rejection sickness had eased just enough that I could stand without the room spinning, and the hollow ache in my chest had settled into a constant, manageable throb. I told myself that was progress. I told myself Alessandro would be better off if he didn’t have to watch me suffer through the consequences of my own choice. I packed the same small bag, moved as quietly as I could, and made it all the way to the front door before his voice stopped me.“Put the bag down.”He stood at the top of the stairs, barefoot, wearing only low-slung sweatpants, arms crossed. His expression was calm in the way that always meant trouble. The gold in his eyes was duller than usual, still marked by the same pain I carried, but the authority in his posture had not faded.“I can’t keep doing this to you,” I said. My voice sounded thin. “You barely slept. You’re still hurting because of what I did. Let me go somewhere else until it’s over.”“No.”He cam
Mona POVBy the second day the rejection sickness had settled into my bones like a fever that refused to break.My skin felt too tight. Every joint ached. A low, constant nausea sat in the base of my throat, and the place in my chest where the bond used to live burned with a cold, empty fire. My wolf remained silent—curled in on herself, refusing to speak or surface. The claim mark on my thigh had faded to a dull, ordinary bruise. Looking at it made my eyes sting.Alessandro refused to let me leave the room for long.He brought food I could barely eat. He forced water into my hands. When the shaking got bad he pulled me against his chest even though the contact now carried a strange, wrong edge—close but no longer complete. The absence of the mate pull made every ordinary touch feel like a reminder of what I had destroyed.On the afternoon of the second day I tried to put distance between us anyway.While he was downstairs taking a call with the Beta, I dressed in loose clothes, packe
Mona POVThe pain did not stop when the bond snapped.It only changed shape.I lay on the bedroom floor with Alessandro’s arms locked around me, both of us shaking, both of us struggling to breathe through the raw, open wound where the mate pull used to live. Every heartbeat felt wrong. My wolf was silent in a way that terrified me more than her earlier screaming. The claim mark on my thigh had gone dull and cold, like something vital had been drained out of it.Alessandro’s chest heaved against my back. His voice, when it finally came, was wrecked and furious.“You had no right.”I couldn’t answer. The rejection sickness was already settling into my bones—nausea, weakness, a deep bone-deep ache that made even lying still hurt. Tears kept leaking from the corners of my eyes no matter how hard I tried to stop them.He shifted us carefully until I was on my back and he was braced over me, still trembling. His eyes were bloodshot and gold-rimmed with pain. When he spoke again the anger w







