Chapter 2

I had loved Lucian long before the Moon Goddess named him as mine.

When I was eighteen, he returned from the northern border at the head of his guard. Blood had soaked through the bandage around his ribs, but he refused help and walked through the pack gates under his own strength.

I stood in the crowd and could not look away.

That night, I wrote his name in the margins of my journal. I sketched his face from memory until I knew every hard line of it.

So when the mating ceremony revealed that Lucian Thorne was my fated mate, I thought the years I had spent waiting for him finally meant something.

I thought they would mean something to him too.

Four months into my first pregnancy, I heard Lucian and Seraphina talking behind the council hall.

“When the baby is born, he goes to you,” Lucian said. “He’ll be recognized as your son from the beginning. I won’t give the elders any opening to question the succession.”

He did not say my name once.

That was the first time I thought about dying.

But rogues were still attacking the northern border. Rival elders were circling my father’s council seat, waiting for any sign that our family had lost Lucian’s protection. If I died then, they would have destroyed him.

So I stayed alive.

Every morning, I went to Seraphina’s residence and waited outside the gates for some sign of my son. Some days I heard him laugh. Some days he cried. Some days there was only silence, and I stood there anyway.

Three years passed.

My son was three years old. My daughter was three days old. Both had been claimed by Seraphina.

Lucian’s succession was secure. The border was quiet. My father’s position was safe.

There was nothing left for me to protect.

The great hall was packed for my daughter’s naming ceremony. Allied Alphas and Lunas filled the front rows while the Bloodmoon elders gathered around the ceremonial stone. The pack crest had been carved into its surface generations ago.

By tradition, every child in the Alpha line had to be presented to the pack before moonrise. A drop of the Alpha’s blood would confirm the child’s lineage, and the elders would enter the name into the succession record.

Lucian arrived carrying our son.

The little boy had one arm wrapped around his neck.

“Dad,” he whispered.

Seraphina held out her hands, and he went to her without hesitation.

“Mom.”

The word entered me like a blade.

One of the elders pressed Lucian’s blood to the boy’s forehead, renewing his place in the Alpha line. Seraphina kissed his hair.

“That’s my brave boy.”

I sat near the back of the hall and stared at my empty hands.

When it was time to present my daughter, Seraphina turned toward me.

“Her birth mother hasn’t held her yet,” she announced. “She should have that honor today.”

Honor.

Every face in the hall turned toward me as Seraphina placed the baby in my arms.

My daughter’s eyes were closed. Her breathing was soft and quick. Her tiny mouth rested open beneath the curve of her nose.

For the first time, I saw her face.

For the first time, I held my own child.

She began to cry within seconds.

Seraphina immediately took her back and rocked her against her chest. The crying stopped almost at once.

Someone behind me murmured, “She already knows her mother.”

Another voice answered, “Blood isn’t always what makes a family.”

I remained standing with my arms still bent around a child who was no longer there.

The elder completed the ritual. Lucian’s blood marked my daughter’s forehead. Her name was recorded beneath Seraphina’s, and her place in the Alpha line became official.

It was over.

Around me, people laughed, toasted the future of the pack, and praised Lucian and Seraphina’s beautiful family.

I heard none of it.

When the ceremony ended, I walked toward the doors. At the threshold, I looked back once.

Lucian stood beside Seraphina, reading the succession record the elder had handed him. My son clung to his leg. Seraphina held my daughter and smiled up at him.

Lucian reached down and rested a hand on the boy’s head.

No one looking at them would have guessed another woman had bled to put those children in Seraphina’s arms.

They looked like a real family.

And I looked like exactly what they had made me.

An outsider.