Chapter 1

Cold water ran over my fingertips.

I stared at myself in the mirror.

My face looked pale under the bathroom light.

Could I really let go of the past?

I didn’t know.

All I knew was that my heart had never known real peace. There was only a deep, unshakable dread—and the scar I had never truly crossed.

I was scared.

Scared that one day, that gentle face would shift right back into the cold, ruthless one from all those years ago.

My gaze dropped to my left arm.

The scar was still there.

Faint now, but impossible to forget.

And the moment I looked at it, that winter came back to me all over again.

The snow had fallen so hard it looked ready to bury the entire Rocky Mountains.

Back then, during a hunting training class at the Inter-Pack Academy, Kane had led a group of young Alphas and driven me deep into the forbidden zone of Black Pine Forest.

A place of hibernating black bears, cracked ice cliffs, and death traps the academy had strictly forbidden anyone from entering.

“Freak. She can’t even shift, and she still thinks she belongs in training with us?”

“Kane, what do you think? Will this little freak get ripped apart by the bears first?”

The teenage Kane had stood in the snow in his black wolf form, moonlight sliding over his fur like cold steel. He was already the strongest among the young Alphas, already the center of everything, already the one everyone followed.

He shifted back into human form and walked toward me in a black combat uniform.

His ice-blue eyes held no warmth at all.

He never touched me.

He didn’t need to.

He released a crushing wave of Alpha pheromones instead.

The Walker bloodline’s dominance slammed into me like an iceberg.

My legs gave out instantly.

I dropped to my knees in the snow in front of everyone, shaking so hard I could barely breathe.

Laughter exploded around me.

I bit my lip until I tasted blood. Melted snow and humiliation mixed bitterly on my tongue.

Then a wolf’s claw slashed across my left arm.

I heard a sharp snarl from Kane.

When I looked up, all I saw was him kicking away the subordinate who had swiped at me.

“Get out of the academy.”

His voice had been colder than glacial ice.

“This is no place for a broken freak like you. If I see you here again, it won’t be just a scar next time.”

From that day on, I became an outcast in the entire academy.

My parents, the Alphas of a small, weak pack in White Pine Valley, had no choice but to pull me out and take me home.

That should have been the end of it.

It wasn’t.

Three years ago, at the Alliance Rite of Adulthood, I saw Kane Walker again.

I had gone there as part of White Pine Valley’s entourage.

By then, he had become Alpha of the Black Rock Pack, head of the Walker Group, the most dazzling man in the Rockies.

And the moment he saw me, he began pursuing me.

Fiercely. Relentlessly. As if nothing in the world mattered more than having me.

He didn’t recognize me.

At least, that was what I told myself.

The humiliation that had kept me awake for years had clearly meant nothing to him. Just some forgettable cruelty from his youth. He didn’t even remember my face.

Back then, White Pine Valley was peaceful, but weak. My parents spent every day worrying about our future.

And I knew one thing with brutal clarity.

Kane Walker was the only man powerful enough to shield my pack from the storms to come.

Sometimes, life leaves you with only one road forward.

Maybe he had forgotten.

Maybe I could force myself to forget too.

Maybe, through this marriage, I could buy White Pine Valley peace—and finally forgive the part of myself that had never stopped trembling in the snow.

So I said yes.

Everything after that moved too fast.

Too smoothly.

Like a dream I had no time to question.

This was now the third year of our marriage.

Kane was in the open-concept kitchen when I walked out barefoot that evening.

The roaster hummed softly. The air was rich with the creamy scent of snow deer tenderloin, threaded through with the cold cedar note of his pheromones.

He wore a simple black lounge set, his jawline clean and sharp.

But the second he turned and saw me, all of that intensity melted away.

“Ella, you’re awake?”

His voice was always like this with me.

Low. Gentle. Warm enough to make me doubt my own memory.

I nodded.

“You must be hungry. It’ll be ready in a minute.”

He smiled.

I leaned against the kitchen doorway and watched him flip the roasting venison with easy precision.

He was good to me.

Impeccably good.

He remembered every one of my preferences.

How I hated the sinew in game meat and would only eat the tenderest snow deer loin.

How I loved sweetness, but only the light kind—the soft edge of maple syrup, never anything cloying.

How I liked a warm glass of deer milk first thing in the morning, and a honeyed drink before bed.

When damp weather came in, the scar on my left arm would ache and itch. He always noticed before I said anything. He would warm the heating stones in advance, then rub slow circles over the scar with his fingertips, letting his pheromones soothe the deep, restless ache in my bones.

Every wolf in the Black Rock Pack envied me.

They said I, a low-ranking Omega who had never awakened her wolf, had been blessed by the Moon God to end up with a top-tier Alpha like Kane Walker.

He had told the world I was his fated Omega.

He spoiled me so thoroughly that people called me the happiest Omega in the Rocky Mountains.

I always smiled when they said that.

And said nothing.

Because they didn’t know.

They didn’t know that this gentle, attentive man—the one who held me so carefully, the one everyone envied me for—was the same person who had once thrown me into hell and turned me into a joke across the Wolf Alliance.

“What are you thinking about?” Kane asked suddenly. “You’re far away.”

His voice snapped me out of the spiral.

He set the plates down on the dining table, walked over, and wrapped his arms around my waist from behind.

His breath brushed the side of my neck, warm beneath the cedar scent, and a faint shiver ran down my spine.

“Nothing,” I said.

I turned my face away, dodging the intimacy of it.

His arms tightened for the briefest second.

Then relaxed just as quickly.

“Go wash your hands,” he said softly, ruffling my hair. “Dinner’s ready.”

So I did.

And now I was standing here in front of the mirror, cold water running over my hands, staring at my own reflection like it might tell me something I didn’t want to know.

Could I really let go of the past?

The woman in the mirror didn’t have an answer for me.

Only uncertainty.

Only fear.

Only the old scar, and the dread that had never really left.

I dried my hands slowly and looked at myself one last time.

Then I turned and walked back out toward the man who had once destroyed me—and now loved me so perfectly it felt dangerous.