LOGINLeah The council dinner wasn't supposed to be anything formal. Kieran had called it a small gathering, a handful of senior wolves he trusted enough to introduce me to before word spread through the territory in whatever distorted version rumor always preferred over the truth. I'd worn the plainest dress I owned, on purpose, and still felt like I'd shown up in something borrowed from a life that wasn't mine. It was a comment from one of the elder wives, tossed off lightly enough that she probably didn't mean it to land the way it did, that undid the evening for me. Something about how refreshing it was that Kieran had chosen someone so unassuming after Velvet, no offense intended, of course, purebloods could be exhausting company. I understood, immediately and completely, that unassuming was the polite version of a word closer to lesser. I smiled through the rest of dinner. I'd had eight years of practice smiling through rooms that didn't want me in them. By the time we were alon
KieranIt started small enough that I almost let it pass without saying anything.She stopped finishing sentences mid-thought, her attention sliding somewhere I couldn't follow. She'd sit across from me at dinner, present in body, gone somewhere else entirely behind her eyes. Three nights running, I woke to find her side of the bed empty and found her instead on the balcony, arms wrapped around herself, staring north in a direction that had nothing to do with the weather.I didn't ask, at first. I told myself she was entitled to whatever she needed to work through alone, that pushing would only prove every fear she'd built about men who wanted to manage her feelings instead of letting her have them.By the fourth night, I stopped telling myself that.I found her on the balcony again, the air cold enough that her breath showed, a blanket around her shoulders she hadn't bothered pulling tight."You're not sleeping," I said, joining her at the rail."I'm fine.""You've said that every n
Leah"Alpha Cain Hargrove is at the gate," he said. "He's requesting an audience. He's not alone."I was on my feet before I fully understood why, some old instinct still wired to answer that name the way I'd answered it for eight years. Kieran was beside me a second later, his hand finding the small of my back, not holding me in place, just letting me know he was there."He brought someone," the guard added, hesitant. "A boy."My chest went tight before he finished the sentence.We walked to the main hall together, Kieran a half step behind me the whole way, close enough to be a presence and careful enough not to be a wall between me and whatever was waiting. When the doors opened, Cain stood just inside them, stiff, out of his element in another Alpha's territory, flanked by two guards who looked more nervous than he did.Brody stood beside him, small hand gripping the hem of his father's coat.He saw me before Cain finished any kind of formal greeting, and every careful thing I'd r
KieranVelvet found me in the study before I'd found the words to go looking for her myself.She didn't sit. She stood in the doorway with her arms crossed loosely, the posture of someone who'd already decided what she came to say and didn't need the furniture's permission to say it."I spoke with her," Velvet said.I set down the pen I hadn't actually been using for the last hour and gave her my full attention, because whatever this was, she'd earned better than half of it."I know," I said. "Dex mentioned it.""Of course he did." A thin, humorless smile. "I asked her one question. Whether she wanted you. She said yes before she'd finished deciding if she should."I didn't say anything. There wasn't a version of this conversation where staying quiet made me look better, but I didn't have a defense ready either."I've spent my whole life being told exactly what I was for," Velvet said. "A treaty with a womb attached. I accepted that a long time ago, the same way I accepted that love w
LeahThey put me in a guest wing of the Vorreth palace that was nicer than anywhere I'd slept in eight years of marriage to Cain, which felt like its own kind of insult. I hadn't asked for comfort. I'd asked to see Brody, and been told, gently, that it wasn't possible yet.I was standing at the window when the door opened without a knock.The woman who walked in matched every detail I'd built in my head from a single sentence a guard had once said to frighten me. Velvet Lattucinna, in pale blue instead of wedding white, composed in a way that made my own wrinkled borrowed clothes feel like an accusation."You're the reason my wedding stopped in the middle of a sentence," she said, closing the door behind her."I didn't ask him to leave the altar.""No," she agreed. "I don't imagine you did. That's almost the worst part."She crossed the room and took the chair by the window without being invited to sit, the same easy authority I'd once had to fake my way through in Ironveil's dining h
LeahThe helicopter ride back gave me twenty minutes of silence to figure out what I'd just done, and I spent every one of them failing.I sat across from Kieran instead of beside him, which felt like the only responsible choice available to me. He didn't push for anything closer. He watched the window, jaw tight, already halfway back into whatever version of himself had to face a council in an hour.Kael sat wrapped in a blanket next to me, quiet, watching both of us with the kind of attention a boy who'd survived on scraps of other people's secrets never really turned off."You kissed him," he said, once the noise of the rotors gave us enough cover that no one else would hear it."Don't.""I'm not judging. I'm just saying it out loud so you can't pretend it didn't happen.""I know it happened, Kael.""Then why do you look like you're planning his funeral instead of yours?"I didn't answer that, because there wasn't a clean way to explain it. I'd spent seven years married to a man w
Eight years ago, one day after Abel died, Celeste came to us.Cain and I had just gotten married. We hadn't even had our first night together yet. Celeste showed up at our door holding a pregnancy test with two pink lines, telling us the pup she was carrying belonged to Abel.And from that day on C
LEAH "I'm so sorry for your loss, Luna." The pack doctor, a middle-aged man with glasses and hair going silver at the temples, looked at me with a pained expression. "We did everything we could. Your future pups... we couldn't save them." "Tell me you're lying. This can't be real." My voice was
His thumb traced along my jaw like he had every right to touch me. The heat coming off his skin was insane — way too hot, like this bastard was straight-up branding me with molten iron. That Lycan energy prickled across my nerves, making my pulse stutter while something between my thighs tightened
LEAH "Who sent you?" I asked low and sharp. "The one responsible for your father's death." That stopped me cold. My father, died eleven years ago in a lycan brutal attack. He was just a man who doing his job, trying to protect a warehouse full of food and medicine supplies, and those fucking mo







