CHAPTER 2

Fallon POV

Callahan Pierce’s phone vibrates violently against the dark mahogany nightstand, cutting through the chilling silence of the master suite at Blackridge Manor.

Fallon Whitaker blinks her heavy eyelids open in the dark, her wolf whimpering deep in her chest from the bruising intensity of the midnight hours they just endured.

"Answer it," Fallon rasps out, her voice rough and exhausted as she presses a trembling hand against her lower belly, where a persistent, dull cramp has settled.

Callahan ignores her, his massive frame shifting away from the mattress as he swings his legs over the side of the bed.

He grabs the device, his bare back muscle-ripped and corded with tension under the pale moonlight, and strides toward the frosted glass balcony doors without a single backward glance.

"I'm coming," Callahan murmurs into the screen, his tone dropping into a low, honeyed velvet of absolute devotion—a gentle patience he has never once offered to his legal mate.

Fallon stares at his broad silhouette against the frosted glass, her stomach twisting into knots as she overhears the faint, cooing laugh of Sable Monroe echoing softly from the speaker.

A moment later, the heavy rumble of the black Mercedes engine fires up in the courtyard below, vibrating right through the floorboards before fading into the freezing Ashbourne snow.

He left her in bed again.

When morning finally creeps through the heavy velvet drapes, the sheets beside Fallon are completely cold and empty.

She rolls over, pressing her palm flat against her lower abdomen where the strange, dull ache continues to thrum.

Her phone buzzes across the room, shattering the morning quiet.

"Get to the Pierce Pack House. Now," Blythe Callahan’s icy voice crackles through the speaker before disconnecting with a sharp click.

Fallon exhales a slow, bitter breath, tossing the phone onto the duvet.

For five years of a secret mate bond tied to the most powerful Alpha in Ashbourne, Blythe has treated her like dirt beneath her paws.

Fallon might carry the Whitaker surname, but she was always the pack's outcast daughter, cast aside by her own blood after the brutal slaughter that tore her family apart.

Her mate bond to Callahan was never born of moonlight or fate; it was forged in blood, ash, and absolute desperation.

Five years ago, after Fallon’s mother snapped in self-defense and killed her abusive father during a drunken pack rage, the entire Whitaker bloodline turned rabid, demanding her mother be dragged before the Alpha tribunal and executed.

Even her mother's kin—the wealthy Hudson pack—publicly severed all ties to wash their hands of the bloodstain.

When every door in Ashbourne slammed in Fallon’s face, an elder pack counselor pointed her toward the ruthless head of the Pierce bloodline.

Callahan Pierce never lost a trial, and his word at the tribunal was law.

He managed to commute her mother's sentence down to five years of hard isolation instead of a death sentence, but the price was absolute submission.

In exchange for her mother's life, Fallon signed away her freedom, becoming Callahan's secret mate behind closed doors while he paraded his high-society life in plain sight.

Callahan had claimed his adopted son, Finley Pierce, was an orphan whose parents died in a border skirmish, a child Callahan took in out of absolute loyalty to a fallen warrior.

Five years have dragged by like an endless winter, and in just one more month, Fallon's mother is finally scheduled to walk free from the pack dungeons.

The bargain was simple, cold, and transactional, exactly the way Callahan wanted it—yet somewhere along the way, Fallon let her foolish heart crave something real.

Shaking the suffocating thoughts from her head, she forces her aching limbs out of bed and stumbles into the en-suite bathroom.

As the hot spray hits her skin, a wave of sudden nausea rolls violently through her stomach, making her grip the marble tiles for support.

Panic spikes hot and sharp through her veins.

They were always careful, but a month ago, Callahan had returned from the border patrols smelling of alpha heat and liquor, taking her with a raw, feral hunger that left no room for caution.

She took a morning-after wolfbane draught the next sunrise, but she knows those remedies are never one hundred percent foolproof.

Determined to stop her mind from spiraling before she faces Blythe’s venomous wrath at the pack house, Fallon dresses in a thick wool coat, steps out into the biting Ashbourne frost, and forces her car toward the local apothecary to buy a pack test.