LOGINKieranI'd had two days to work out how to say it, and I still took her into the study like a man walking to something he'd rather not reach.She came without asking a single question, which was worse. Ten minutes ago she'd had her hand in my shirt in front of the whole yard, and now she walked beside me down my own corridor with her coat still on, and every step of it I could feel her waiting for whatever this was going to be.The study was cold. Nobody had been in it since I'd gone down to the gate."Sit if you want," I said."I've been sitting in a car for three hours."So she stayed on her feet by the desk, and I went to the door and put my head out and told the wolf in the corridor to find Silas.He came fast. He'd been somewhere close since the gate, the way he always was when he thought I might need something I hadn't asked for yet, and he stopped when he saw the two of us in that room with the lamp not even lit."The sealed packet," I said. "From the cabinet."He looked at me.
MeredithThe bond got warmer with every mile, and by the last of them I could feel him the way I used to feel him from across a room.He hadn't slept. That came through first and it wasn't even close. Under it there was the tightness he'd been carrying since he watched my car go, and under that the restless thing that wouldn't settle anywhere, and then, as the wall came up black out of the trees, relief started coming through in pieces faster than he could get a hand over any of it.He'd kept it open. Ten hours, three territories and a royal receiving house, and he hadn't shut it once."Gate's coming up, Luna," the driver said.It was already moving. The iron came apart down the middle before we'd finished the bend, so somebody had been standing at the controls waiting for the sound of an engine, and beyond it the yard was full.They'd come out the same way they had when I left. Fighters near the wall with their arms crossed. The kitchen staff crowded onto the storehouse steps. Two of
MeredithAlarick didn't go pale and he didn't sit down. He got angry."Say exactly what you mean by that," he said. "Be precise, because I'll be repeating it to my own council tonight. Reddick was paid four days ago. The forgery was made months before that, on Clover's money, in a rented office I'd never heard of. I bought the truth off a frightened man. I didn't order the lie.""That distinction matters," Castien said. "I want to be clear that I'm not suggesting otherwise, and I'll write it exactly that way.""Then what are you suggesting?""That paying him proves nothing on its own, in either direction." Castien didn't take his eyes off him. "The crown will work out what happened by putting it all beside each other. Reddick's testimony. What day he arrived at your gate. The account the money came out of. Both letters, once we have them. Your messages." A pause. "And the fact that you sat on a witness and a piece of evidence while a royal ultimatum was running against her.""I sat o
MeredithHe didn't answer.I'd watched him fight me for an hour over the wedding and my wolf and my marriage, and he'd never once needed a run-up. Now he stood with his hand on the back of the chair and looked at the door instead of at me, and whatever was behind it had nothing to do with the two of us.The inner door opened before he found anything to say.Castien came back in without the case. He'd been gone long enough to hand it to his escort and see it onto the road. He stopped two steps inside because he'd walked into something and he knew it.Alarick's eyes went to him, then came back to me.I didn't repeat the question. I sat down again and folded my hands and let him have the room."He came to my gate on foot," Alarick said at last. "No vehicle, no escort, nothing on him but what he was carrying. He'd worked out that the crown would have him in a cell inside a day if anyone learned his name, so he brought me the truth and asked for protection in exchange for it.""What's his
Meredith“No. You’re going to hear this one.”He came away from the window with his hand still wrapped around the shutter latch. He held it for another second before letting go.“Two hundred acres above the south coast road,” he said. “I bought it in March. I never told you because you spent a year talking about that water like you’d already lived there. You had the rooms planned. You had names for them.”His voice rose with every sentence.“Am I supposed to believe none of that was real? That I imagined an entire year of it?”“It was real.”He stopped.“I meant every word,” I said. “The house, the water, all of it. I’m not going to sit here and pretend I invented a future with you to be polite. I wanted it.”“Then—”“Do you remember the night I didn’t come to bed?”He hesitated. “Which night?”“That answers the question.”“Meredith.”“The bathroom floor,” I said. “March.”His face changed slightly.“The tiles were so cold my legs went numb, but I stayed there because every time I rea
MeredithHe waited for me to answer like he had laid something valuable between us and expected me to understand what it had cost him.While he spoke, his body had turned toward mine. His hand moved across the table before he caught himself and pressed it flat against the wood. He thought the confession was the hardest thing he owned. He thought giving it to me would make me soften.But he still had not heard himself.He thought admitting he had underestimated me was the same as being sorry. What he had actually admitted was that he heard my warning, weighed it against five years of forgiveness, and decided my love would hold.The longer I sat with it, the uglier it became.“Do you hear yourself?” I asked.His brow tightened. “I hear myself fine.”“Then say it again.”“I knew you would be hurt.” He opened one hand between us. “I knew you would be furious. But we had five years, Meredith. You do not throw five years away because of one terrible day. I believed we would get through it.
Meredith Kieran Croft. The name wouldn’t stop repeating in my head. Stories came with it, the kind whispered across territories when people thought no one important was listening. The Rogue Alpha. The leader of Silverthorn who’d been accused of betraying the coalition. The man other packs avoi
MeredithSix days had passed since I agreed to the arrangement, and I still didn't know the Alpha's name.I'd spent those days imagining every possible kind of man my father could have hidden from me. Old and desperate for an heir. Cruel and looking for someone he could control. Politically dangero
MeredithThe Benic estate looked exactly the way I remembered it. Grand iron gates, sprawling gardens that someone else maintained, and the main house rising three stories high with windows that caught the late afternoon sun. I'd grown up here, spent eighteen years learning how to be the perfect da
MeredithI walked through the front door of the mansion still wearing the wedding dress Alarick had left me in, no veil, no bouquet, and no groom trailing behind me. The staff froze when they saw me, their eyes widening as they took in the ruined train dragging across the marble floor and the tear







