Chapter 1

Something was wrong the moment he walked through that door. I felt it before I saw it — the way his footsteps hit the floor too hard, the way his jaw was locked tight, the way he wouldn't look at me straight on. Three years of marriage teaches you a man's silences. This one had teeth in it.

I'd been standing there for the better part of an hour, rehearsing. I had a whole speech ready — soft opening, a joke maybe, something to ease into it before I told him the moon goddess had finally answered us after three years of trying. Two weeks pregnant. I'd practiced saying it out loud in the mirror until it stopped catching in my throat.

"Ethan." I said his name carefully, testing the air of the room. "You're back early."

He didn't answer. He crossed to the table and set something down on it — a folder, thick, official — and my stomach dropped before I even read the words on the cover.

"What is this?"

"Divorce papers." He said it flat, like he was reading me a supply order. "I need you to sign them."

The room tilted. "You need me to *what*."

"Sign them, Elena." He still wasn't looking at me. "It's simple."

"Nothing about this is simple." My voice came out sharper than I meant it to, and good — let it be sharp. Three years I'd run his pack when he wasn't there, hold the omegas together during the border raids, and defend him to elders who thought he was too young to lead. I'd earned the right to raise my voice in this room. "You walk in here after three years and just — hand me papers? No conversation? No *why*?"

"There's nothing to discuss."

"There's everything to discuss!" I stepped toward him, and for the first time he flinched, just slightly, like my anger had weight he hadn't accounted for. "Our bond isn't nothing, Ethan. It isn't a business arrangement you can dissolve with a signature."

"Elena—"

"Tell me why." My hands were shaking now, and I pressed them flat against my stomach without meaning to, an instinct older than thought, protecting the secret I hadn't told him yet, the one that was about to make this so much worse. "You owe me that much. Tell me why."

He opened his mouth, and that was when the door opened behind him.

I knew her walk before I even turned my head. Camille. My closest friend since we were pups — the girl who'd braided flowers into my hair on my wedding day, who knew where every scar on my body came from. She stepped into the room in a gown too beautiful for an ordinary evening, and she crossed straight to Ethan's side like she'd done it a hundred times before, her hand settling on his shoulder like it belonged there.

"Camille?" Her name came out of me as a question I already knew the answer to.

Neither of them spoke. That silence told me more than words could have.

I looked between them — his shoulders relaxing under her touch, the ease in the space between their bodies that three years of my marriage had never quite managed — and something in my chest cracked clean down the middle.

"How long," I said quietly.

"Elena, it's not—" Camille started.

"How long." I wasn't shouting anymore. I didn't have the strength left for shouting. "Don't lie to me. Not you. Not after everything."

She didn't answer. She didn't have to.

My eyes dropped to her throat before I could stop them, and there it was — the mark, dark and unmistakable, the kind a wolf only gives once. Alpha's mark. Luna's mark. He'd already claimed her. The papers on the table weren't a request. They were paperwork catching up to something that had already happened.

"I didn't mean for it to happen like this," Camille said, her voice cracking. "I'm sorry, Elena, I never meant to—"

"Stop." The word came out of me hard enough that she actually did. I looked at Ethan, waiting — for an apology, an explanation, anything — and got nothing but silence and a man who wouldn't meet my eyes.

I picked up the pen. It felt like it weighed more than it should have.

"I want you to know," I said, signing my name with a hand that had somehow stopped shaking, "that I gave you everything. Every single thing I had."

I set the pen down and looked at him one final time.

"You'll regret this," I said. "I promise you that."

Then I walked out, past both of them, past the pack members gathered in the hallway who'd clearly been listening through the walls, out into a storm that was already breaking loose over the compound — and I didn't look back once, even though some small, aching part of me wanted to.

They didn't know what I was carrying out of that room with me.

But they would.