LOGINSlowly and deliberately, the sliver claw learned how to breathe again. Not all wounds vanished with time. Some still lingered like faint scars beneath the skin, there were no longer painful but we're still impossible to forget. Yet under Ella’s guidance and Cole’s steady hand, the pack found a rhythm that felt different from before. This time it's more quiet and had gotten wiser. Ella thrived in her role as the Luna.She never ruled with blind tradition or with fear, nor did she seek to soften the pack into something that it wasn't. Instead, she listened, at dawn she walked the borders, she related with the elders at dusk, and sat with grieving wolves long after the fires burned low. She healed when she could, and when she couldn’t, she stayed anyway—present, grounded and unafraid of pain.And the pack had notice all of this. They noticed how disputes settled faster when Ella mediated. How younger wolves especially those who felt lost or out of place gravitated towards her cal
COLE POV The night smells like pine, bonfire smoke, and something sweeter—anticipation, maybe. Or hope. I stand at the edge of the sacred clearing, dressed not as the alpha who had once to get married only out of obligation, but as a man who has chosen his mate with open eyes and an heart that wasn't burdened. The moon is full.The elders insisted, murmuring about balance and renewal, about endings that deserve proper beginnings. This isn't a wedding that's done to patch up old wounds, but a wedding that's meant to honor survival.The pack gathers in a wide circle, their voices filled with excitement, an excitement that vibrates through the ground and into my bones. Lanterns glow between the trees, gold light mingling with moon-silver, casting shadows that dance like living things. Drums beat softly—slow, reverent—echoing a rhythm as old as the pack itself.I inhale, steadying myself.I have stood before them before, but then my heart was clenched with resentment and confusi
COLE POV The night smells like pine, bonfire smoke, and something sweeter—anticipation, maybe. Or hope. I stand at the edge of the sacred clearing, dressed not as the alpha who had once to get married only out of obligation, but as a man who has chosen his mate with open eyes and an heart that wasn't burdened. The moon is full.The elders insisted, murmuring about balance and renewal, about endings that deserve proper beginnings. This isn't a wedding that's done to patch up old wounds, but a wedding that's meant to honor survival.The pack gathers in a wide circle, their voices filled with excitement, an excitement that vibrates through the ground and into my bones. Lanterns glow between the trees, gold light mingling with moon-silver, casting shadows that dance like living things. Drums beat softly—slow, reverent—echoing a rhythm as old as the pack itself.I inhale, steadying myself.I have stood before them before, but then my heart was clenched with resentment and confusi
COLE POV Three days after the moon bond ceremony, the letter arrived. Sometime before dawn, it's been slipped beneath the doors of the pack hall, it's cream-colored parchment folded with deliberate care, sealed with red wax stamped in a symbol I could instantly recognize, the symbol of Sasha. For a heartbeat, my chest tightens, not with fear or anger but with disbelief. It was as if a ghost had reached out from a grave that's already beeb filled and forgotten. I stare at the envelope from across my desk.Eight years ago, a letter like this would have the potential to unravel me. It would have sparked doubt, stirred old habits, made me second-guess my own spine. Sasha knew how to write words that wormed their way under skin, how to dress poison up to look like devotion.But I'm no longer that man.I don’t open it immediately.Instead, I lean back in the chair Victor once sat in, the weight of the alpha’s mantle heavy but familiar on my shoulders. Sunlight filters through th
COLE POVAfter Ella says she loves me, I just couldn't move a muscle. The words hang in the clearing like something holy—fragile, luminous, terrifying in their power. Most of my life, I've faced rogues, rebellion, and judgment beneath this moon, but nothing has ever struck me as deeply as her confession.She's finally been able to forgive me.Not blindly. Not foolishly. But deliberately.My chest feels too tight, it feels like my heart has forgotten how to beat in the proper way. I've imagined how this moment will go but in a hundred different ways, I had imagined her silence, her turning away even her silence but i had never this, never imagined the quiet strength in her voice. I stare at her like if I should blink she might vanish.“Ella,” I breathe, her name breaking from my chest like a vow.Her eyes shine with tears, but she refuse to flinch, and she stands steady, she is no longer the girl that once trusted so easily, not the woman who ran while in pieces. This is
Ella POVThere isn't so much difference in the clearing, it still seems familiar. The stones still circle the old oak like silent witnesses. The air still smells of pine and damp earth, sharp and clean. Moonlight pours through the canopy in pale ribbons, silvering the grass and catching on the carved runes embedded in the ground—marks of oaths sworn and lives forever altered.It's been a while that I've been here, the last time I was here was before the betrayal. Before my love had turned into pain.Before trust had become something that I need to learn all over again to be able to breathe. My feet stop at the edge of the clearing, and for a moment, I'm remember being eighteen again, I remember my naive, hopeful self, I remember when I still hold on to wildflowers and believing that the pack was my family.I swallow.Tonight, I'm back not as the girl who I once was but as the woman who I had survived into. Cole is already present.He stands near the oak, moonlight outlin
Cole POVAfter she left the room, I have no idea how long I’ve stayed on the floor.Minutes. Hours. Time no longer make any sense when you can feel your chest being ripped apart with a hot blade. All that left of the space where our bond use to sit, which use to feel warm, pulsing, alive is now a t
Even as Cole left his parent’s cabin he could barely feel the cold. The cold hit him, so sharp but he barely made a flinch. The words his father spoke to him still resounded in his head.*You let her go.You weren’t present.She nearly died alone.*For eyes, he hasn’t cried not even at funerals o
Before sunrise, the news had gotten to Victor.The knock he heard at his office door was a frantic one in-fact it was too frantic, especially for a pack that wasn’t lacking in discipline. He looked up from the scattered reports on his desk, annoyance already curling on his tongue, but the expressio
Sasha POVI’ve always had the belief that to influence people is actually very busy, especially at a time where they are either grieving, confused or just desperate for someone to lay blames on.And at this moment, the pack is all three of those emotions. I stroll through the pack house hall, whil







