Chapter 10

MORANO

The previous morning burned in my brain like a hallucination. I woke up feeling as if my bones had been ground into dust and poured back into my skin. When Jake’s face finally blurred into focus above me, my lungs felt like they were inflating for the first time in centuries.

I was alive, but only by a razor’s edge.

I had thought he was dead. Relief hit me so hard I almost choked on it. I wanted to pull him into a celebratory hug, but the urge to punch him for scaring me was stronger.

“Where the fuck were you, you useless prick!” I snarled.

The shout was a jagged mistake. A white-hot blade of agony sliced through my abdomen, stealing my breath. I clawed at the bedsheets, my hand instinctively flying to the fresh bandages. I could feel the poison.

They had dug the silver out of me, but the metal had already left its mark. Silver was a slow, agonizing rot that didn't give a damn about my Alpha blood. My body wasn't knitting back together…it was fighting a war it was losing.

My mind drifted back to the bloodbath. It made no sense. Where did Jayla get that kind of primal, terrifying power? I had spent my life walking through shadows, but I had never seen a massacre so beautiful or so complete.

“I was at the club,” Jake choked out, his voice trembling with guilt. “The men were on standby… I gave them orders. When your mindlink hit me, I rushed back. But when I got here... our men were already knocked out. I had to drag the healer in at gunpoint to keep you from slipping away.”

I lay there in the heavy silence, replaying the night. I could still feel the static of her energy vibrating in the air, humming against my skin like a physical touch.

“How are you breathing?” Jake whispered, his eyes wide. “I found you in the middle of a graveyard, Alpha. Those men weren't just killed. They were shredded. Like they'd been hit by a god.”

“Who did it, Boss?”

“She did,” I rasped, the irony coating my tongue like bitter metal.

I told him everything…the lightning, the impossible speed, the way she had dismantled professional assassins as if they were made of paper. Jake sat in stunned silence. The woman I had planned to crush for her lies was the only reason my heart was still beating.

It was a dark, delicious irony I wasn't ready to let go of.

“Who sent them?”

“The bodies are ghosts,” Jake said. “No prints, no records, and their faces are unrecognizable. I’ve searched every corner of the dark web. Nothing.”

Jake went silent. I watched him, my inner wolf pacing behind my ribs, claws out. The frustration was a physical weight. “Keep digging. And I want every breath she’s ever taken documented. I want to know exactly what kind of monster I’ve brought into my bed.”

“Yes, Alpha,” Jake murmured, before slipping out of the room.

I walked into her room later that morning, my mind a jagged mess of suspicion. She looked… untouched. Standing there like nothing had happened. When I asked her if she remembered anything about last night, she looked at me with those wide, clear eyes and claimed she remembered nothing.

I didn’t believe her.

So I tested her, spinning a lie about a drunken fall, and she swallowed it whole. She truly didn't know the monster she had become. Relief slipped in before I could stop it, dark and cold, curling through me like smoke.

Good. That made things easier.

But then she noticed how pale I was, even though I hated the way she said it. No one ever noticed the small things about me, yet she saw the blood loss in my face. And waking up this morning better than I was yesterday was all because of her. She had cared for me.

The physician confirmed the weight of her care soon after. He spoke in clinical terms, explaining that the silver had induced acute hemorheological impairment. The increased viscosity had restricted my flow, triggering systemic necrosis. According to him, her massage acted as circulatory stimulation, stabilizing my hemodynamic flow while he was away.

In simple terms: she had saved me twice.

The doctor had been stunned, praising her for stabilizing me while he was away. But why? Care doesn’t come without a price in my world. This was a strategy…the long game of a girl coached to gain my trust before the kill.

I needed to watch her. She had the brains of a kingmaker and the raw power of a god…a lethal, beautiful, and rare combination for a wife. A dangerous one. I would find out who she really was. I would strip away the lies, the borrowed name, and the carefully placed innocence.

I knew there was something beneath her skin that didn’t belong, something that twisted the natural order of things, and I could feel it every time she looked at me.

And when I found it… I wouldn’t expose her.

She would be the ghost in my counting rooms and the blade in my hand. I would weave her into every facet of my world until she didn't know where she ended and I began.

My enemies wouldn’t see her coming; they wouldn’t understand what she was until it was far too late. All I needed was time and the right pressure to bend her into place.

The memory loss worked in my favor. Every time she lost herself, she gave me more room to shape what came after. But the healing… that didn’t fit. A wolf like her should recover effortlessly, yet she didn’t. It lingered as though something inside her resisted its own nature.

That inconsistency wasn’t a weakness…it was a question. One I intended to answer. Soon.

A faint smile pulled at my lips as I turned away, the thought settling into something heavier and more certain. The moon had fumbled a goddess into the lap of a devil. Her father intended a trap, but he accidentally handed me a crown.

Because this wasn’t the life she was meant to have, but it was the one she had now. Love had no place in any of it. It never had. I had spent too long building myself into something untouchable to undo it for a feeling that only ever weakens men.

My heart is a fortress built of iron and scar tissue…there is no room in it for the soft rot of affection. She would have my protection, my name, and my bed…but she would never have me.

Letting her live after deceiving me was already more than she deserved. And yet… There was something about this, about her, that I found enjoyable. She was my wife now.

Not in the way the world romanticizes, but in the only way that mattered…she belonged within my reach, within my control, and within the boundaries I would define for her, whether she realized it or not.

She was no longer a bride…she was the foundation of my new empire. My most interesting investment. And this marriage, this carefully misplaced fate…was quickly becoming the most valuable thing I had ever been given.

Mine.

The word settled deep in my chest as I stepped out, already thinking ahead, already planning the next move. A few more days to heal, then the real game of thrones begins. I’m taking my new weapon-bride back to the Wolf’s Den to breed a dynasty and crush every traitor who dares look at my crown.

They wanted me dead, but I’m coming back with something far worse than a vengeance.

I’ve never felt more alive.