Chapter 1: Four Years

ELLA’S POV

“Fuck! I’ll drill your hole until you beg me… I’m going to tear you apart.”

The sound of my husband’s voice, low and unfamiliar in its urgency, reached me before I’d even opened the bedroom door.

“Right there. Harder. Don’t stop, baby.” Another voice reached me. A woman’s voice.

Not my voice. Never my voice.

I stood frozen in the hallway with a breakfast tray balanced in my hands, cinnamon rolls going cold, listening to four years of marriage collapse in real time through a door I hadn’t even pushed open yet.

I’d woken before dawn, the way I always did on our anniversary, and slipped out of bed without waking him. The kitchen had been dark when I padded downstairs, the tile cold under my bare feet, the house holding that particular hush that only existed in the hour before the pack staff arrived.

I liked that hour. It was mine.

Four years married to Alpha Sherwood Hawkson, and I still made his favorite breakfast myself instead of leaving it to the kitchen staff. Cinnamon rolls, the way his mother used to make them before she passed. Strong coffee, no sugar, exactly the way he’d always taken it since the day we married.

I’d hummed to myself while I worked, letting myself imagine, just for a morning, that this year might be different. That maybe this was the year he’d finally reach for me the way a husband was supposed to reach for his wife.

He always had an excuse ready — exhaustion, pack business, a headache that never seemed to trouble him with anyone else, not that I’d let myself think too hard about what that meant. It had been so long since he’d touched me that I sometimes wondered if he remembered how, or if some part of him had simply decided I wasn’t worth the effort anymore.

Now I knew exactly what he’d been saving himself for.

My hand hovered over the door handle, and for one long, humiliating second, I considered turning around and walking away without ever confirming what I already knew. But some stubborn, self-destructive part of me needed to see it with my own eyes, needed proof I couldn’t later talk myself out of believing.

I pushed the door open.

He wasn’t alone.

Claudia’s laugh cut off the second she saw me standing in the doorway, tray balanced in my hands, breakfast going cold between us. Sherwood didn’t even bother covering himself. He just looked at me with something worse than guilt — irritation, like I’d interrupted something far more important than my own marriage.

I didn’t scream. I didn’t drop the tray. I set it down on the dresser, very carefully, and walked back out of the room I’d shared with him for four years, and only once I reached the hallway did I let myself cry.

I cried until there was nothing left, and then I stopped, because crying had never once fixed anything in my life, and I was done waiting for it to start.

By the time I dried my face, something colder had settled into its place. I would end this. Not quietly, not with a private conversation over untouched coffee — but publicly, at the Annual Alliance Ceremony, in front of every Alpha who’d ever called him a lucky man for marrying me.

A garment bag arrived that afternoon, sent personally by my husband. He wasn’t even ashamed. A gown, deep emerald, the kind of thing he never bought me without an ulterior motive. I ran my fingers over the fabric and wondered, bitterly, what performance he expected me to give in it.

I’ll expose you tonight, Sherwood, I promised myself, hanging the dress carefully in the closet. In front of everyone who’s ever respected you.

…

The ceremony hall glittered with every Alpha of consequence, their Lunas dressed in silks and jewels, the air thick with polite ambition. I stood near the edge of the room in my husband’s chosen gown, rehearsing the words I planned to say, when Sherwood’s voice rang out across the celebration before I’d found my moment.

“I have an announcement.” He raised his glass, and the room quieted instantly, the way it always did for him. “I think it’s time everyone here understood the truth about my marriage.”

My stomach dropped. This wasn’t supposed to happen. I wasn’t supposed to lose control of the room before I’d even opened my mouth.

“I married Ella because her father’s alliance was useful to my pack.” He said it lightly, like he was discussing the weather instead of detonating my entire life in front of two hundred witnesses. “That’s all it ever was. Business.”

Gasps rippled through the crowd, but he wasn’t finished. He never was.

“She’s overweight. A fatso!” His eyes swept over me with open contempt. “Barren, as far as I can tell, after four years of trying. She doesn’t even have a wolf of her own — did you all know that? My Luna, and she can’t shift.” He shook his head, feigning regret so convincingly that half the room actually believed it. “I deserve a real Luna. A woman who can give me an heir, who can stand beside me as an equal.”

“You were never even good in bed,” he added, almost as an afterthought, like it was the cruelest insult he could think to add. “Boring. Predictable. I stopped looking forward to touching you a long time ago.”

He reached behind him and pulled a stunning woman forward by the hand — Claudia, dressed in white, like she was the bride and not the woman who’d been in my bed that very morning.

The crowd applauded.

“This pack actually deserves better, finally getting rid of the fat and barren woman,” they all agreed.

“A fat, wolfless, and barren Luna? Such a joke,” a woman close to me said with no remorse.

I looked around that room, at Alphas who had once bowed their heads to me out of respect, and every single one of them stayed silent. Not one voice rose in my defense. Not one.

I had lost everything in the span of two minutes, standing in a dress my husband had bought specifically to humiliate me in.

“Guards get this filthy fatso out of my pack! Now.”

I couldn’t even find my voice. Everything happened so quickly that I couldn’t defend myself. And just like that, I driven out of the pack I served and loved so much filth.

…

I returned to my father’s pack house that night with nothing but the clothes on my back and a hole where my dignity used to be. The road had felt longer than I remembered, every step a fresh reminder of everything I’d just lost in a single glittering room full of people who used to bow their heads when I walked past.

My stepmother was waiting at the gate, arms crossed, her face arranged into an expression of pure, practiced disgust, like she’d been standing there rehearsing it since the moment word reached her.

“I heard what happened.” She didn’t bother pretending to soften it. “Sherwood finally came to his senses, it seems. Took him long enough.”

“I need somewhere to stay.” My voice came out hoarse, barely holding together. “Just until I figure out what comes next.”

“There’s no place here for you.” She glanced behind her, toward the warm lights of the house I’d grown up in, then back at me with something close to satisfaction. “You’ve embarrassed this family enough for one lifetime, Ella. My daughters have reputations to protect.”

“Please.” I hated how small the word sounded, hated that I was still capable of begging after everything I’d already survived that night. “I have nowhere else to go.”

Her smile was the last thing I saw before the gate began to close, iron grinding against iron, sealing me out of the only home I had left.

“Go live in the pig farm,” she said, “where you rightfully belong.”

I stood there long after the gate shut, staring at the space where my childhood used to be, until the cold finally convinced my feet to move.