Chapter 1

ELIRA POV

"Last night was a mistake."

I heard it before I opened my eyes. Four words, flat as a closed door.

I turned my head on the pillow. Kian stood at the end of the bed already dressed, shirt buttoned to the collar, hair combed like he hadn't just spent the night tearing the sheets apart with me.

My stomach dropped.

"Kian—"

"Don't." He didn't look at me. He looked at the window. "It was the moon. It does that. It's not real."

Not real. My whole body still ached from him and he was standing there telling me it wasn't real.

I sat up, pulling the sheet against my chest. My skin still carried his scent, and under it, something else. Something new. A pull in my ribs that hadn't been there yesterday, like a hook set deep and tightening.

Mate.

I felt it. He had to feel it too.

"You feel it," I said. "Don't tell me you don't."

His jaw moved. A muscle jumped once under his ear.

"I feel a lot of things I'm not going to act on."

Hope is a stupid, stubborn animal. Mine wouldn't die even then. I'd wanted this man since I was fourteen years old and invisible in every room he walked into. Now the goddess herself had put us in the same bed, and some small, foolish part of me thought — maybe. Maybe now he sees me.

"So what happens now?" I asked. "We're mates, Kian. That doesn't just—"

The door slammed open.

Priya stood in the frame first, hand pressed to her mouth, eyes already wet. Behind her, my mother.

Not my mother. Never my mother. I just hadn't learned that yet.

"Priya, wait—" I started.

Marisol crossed the room in three strides and slapped me before I could finish the sentence. My head snapped sideways. My ears rang.

"You disgusting little—" She grabbed my hair, wrenched my face up to hers. "In her bed. In her fiancé's bed. Did you plan this? Did you plan this from the start, you ungrateful little bastard?"

"It was an accident," I said. My voice cracked down the middle. "The full moon, we didn't choose—"

"Save it." Marisol's grip tightened. "Everyone will know what you are by morning. A slut who couldn't keep her hands off her own sister's mate."

"Enough."

Kian's voice. Flat. Final.

Marisol's hand froze in my hair.

"Last night was an accident," he said, still not looking at me, only at her. "It changes nothing. My engagement to Priya stands."

Something in my chest folded in half and stayed that way.

Priya made a small, wounded sound and turned into Kian's shoulder. He put a hand on her back. On her back, not mine. Like I was furniture that had been moved without permission and now needed putting back.

My father filled the doorway next.

I felt it before I even turned my head. The room went colder.

"Pack your things," Robert said. His voice didn't shake. It never shook, not for me. "You're an omega now. I want you out of this house within the hour."

The words hit harder than the slap.

"Dad—"

"Don't call me that." He said it the way a man corrects a stranger who has his name wrong. "You've embarrassed this family for the last time."

"It wasn't a scheme." I was crying now and I hated myself for it, hated that my voice was begging. "I didn't plan this, I would never — Kian, tell them. Tell them what happened."

I looked at him. I made myself look at him, because some idiot piece of me still believed that if I just looked hard enough, he would remember every second of last night and choose me in front of all of them.

Kian looked back.

And said nothing at all.

I watched the last of my hope die in his eyes before it died in mine. He wasn't going to help me. He was never going to help me. Whatever had happened under that full moon, whatever the goddess had decided about the two of us, Kian Voss had already made his choice, and it wasn't me.

Robert stepped further into the room, and for the first time in my whole life I saw something in my father's face that wasn't distance.

It was relief.

Relief that he finally had a reason.

"One hour," he said again, and turned to leave — and that was when I understood, with a cold, sick certainty settling into my bones, that whatever came through that door nex

t was going to be so much worse than a slap.