CHAPTER 5

Nora’s POV

The whispers started three days later.

I heard them in the hallway when I walked to the kitchen in the morning. Soft voices that went silent the moment I appeared and started up again the moment I passed. I heard them in the training yard where I used to spar with the pack warriors, warriors who now turned their backs when I approached. I heard them in the dining hall, floating from table to table like smoke, always just loud enough for me to catch.

"She faked a pregnancy to trap him. Can you imagine being that pathetic?"

"I heard she threw her own stuff out on the lawn and then blamed it on Rachel. Psycho behavior."

"Rachel told me she's been calling strange numbers at night. Probably already got some other man lined up. No shame at all."

"Three years pretending to be Luna and she couldn't even get her own husband to look at her. That's not a wife. That's a joke."

Rachel had been busy. Every lie was planted so carefully, so gently, wrapped in that wounded voice and those wide, innocent eyes. She never said anything cruel herself. She didn't need to. She just told her version of every story with that trembling lip and those damp lashes, and the pack filled in the cruelty all on their own.

I ate my lunch alone at the far table with my head down. I trained alone at dawn before anyone else was awake. I avoided the main paths and stayed out of the main house. I made myself as small and invisible as possible.

It wasn't hard. I had been practicing for three years.

Twenty three days left. That was all I had to survive. Twenty three more days of swallowing their poison, and then I would walk out of these gates and never taste it again.

But the pack wasn't going to let me go quietly.

I was crossing the training yard after my evening run, sweat cooling on my skin, when three women stepped into my path and blocked the way forward.

Brittany. Sierra. Megan.

Rachel's new inner circle. The kind of wolves who picked a winning side the moment they smelled blood in the water and bit down without mercy.

Brittany stepped forward first. Tall, blonde, arms crossed, chin lifted so high she could've been looking at something stuck to the bottom of her shoe.

"Well, well. Look who's still hanging around. I thought for sure you'd have crawled out through a sewer drain by now."

I tried to step around her. Sierra moved to block me, smiling like she was having the best night of her life.

"Where you going, Nora? Got another fake pregnancy test to take? Maybe this time you can pee on two sticks and pretend it's twins."

Megan burst out laughing. It was sharp and ugly, the kind of laugh that bounced off the walls and stuck to your skin. "I heard she actually cried in Elder Morrison's office trying to speed up the divorce. Literally begging to be let out. Like a flea bitten mutt scratching at a locked door."

"Not even a mutt," Brittany corrected, tilting her head and looking me up and down. "Mutts have some fight in them. She's more like a cockroach. You stomp on it and stomp on it and the disgusting thing just keeps twitching on the floor."

I stood still. My hands were fists at my sides, my nails cutting half moons into my palms. My wolf was growling somewhere deep in my chest but I held her down. I held everything down.

Don't react. Don't give them a single thing to chew on.

Sierra leaned in close, so close I could smell her perfume and the coffee on her breath. "Three whole years playing Luna and she couldn't even get her own Alpha to touch her. Think about that. Three years in his bed and the man would rather sleep next to a woman in a wheelchair than spend another night looking at your face."

She tilted her head with mock sympathy. "That's not a wife, sweetheart. That's a piece of furniture. Something you shove in a corner because it's not worth throwing out. But Rachel? Rachel bled for him. She gave up her legs for that man. What did you ever give him besides a headache?"

I looked at Sierra. Something cold moved through my chest like ice water filling up a glass. Not hurt. I was past hurt now. This was the quiet, steady kind of anger that doesn't scream. It doesn't shake. It just sits there. Waiting. Remembering.

"Are you finished?" I asked.

Brittany clutched her chest in fake shock. "Oh, she speaks. Careful, girls. The cockroach might actually bite this time."

All three of them cackled. Megan shoved my shoulder as she walked past. Not hard enough to bruise. Just hard enough to say I know you won't do anything about it.

I wiped the spot on my shoulder where she touched me and kept walking. My back was straight. My chin was up. My eyes were dry.

One month. That's all this was. I survived three years of being invisible in my own marriage. I could survive a few more weeks of being hated by women who weren't worth the dirt on my running shoes.

I was almost at the guest house, my hand already reaching for the door handle, when I heard footsteps pounding across the yard behind me. Fast. Urgent.

A young runner came sprinting around the corner of the training hall, breathless and wide eyed, skidding to a stop in front of the patrol captain who was crossing the yard.

"Sir. There's an Alpha at the main gate."

The patrol captain frowned. "What do you mean there's an Alpha? We're not expecting any delegations."

"He came alone. No escort. No envoy. No prior notice. Just walked up to the border like he owned the territory and asked to speak with the pack leadership." The runner's chest was heaving. "He's still standing there. Just... waiting."

My feet stopped moving. My blood went cold.

The patrol captain narrowed his eyes. "Did he give a name?"

"Yes sir. Said his name is Kade Parker. Alpha of the Blackridge Pack."

My heart slammed so hard against my ribs I thought the bones would crack. Every nerve in my body lit up at once. My fingers went numb. My lungs forgot how to work.

Kade.

He was here. Not in a month. Not after a careful plan. Right now. Standing at the gates of the pack I was trapped inside, in the territory of the man I was trying to escape, and I had absolutely no idea why.

The runner looked around the yard, spotting pack members frozen mid step, all of them staring. "Alpha Damien wants everyone at the main hall. Immediately."

People started moving. Voices buzzed. The name Kade Parker rippled through the yard like a stone dropped into still water.

I pressed my hand flat against my stomach and started walking toward the hall. My pulse was a war drum. My thoughts were a hurricane.

Kade didn't know I was here. He didn't know my face. He didn't know my name. He didn't know that the woman he had spent two years talking to on the phone, the woman he called V, the woman he had quietly fallen for across a thousand midnight conversations, was standing fifty feet away from him with mud on her shoes and tear stains she hadn't bothered to wash off.

To him, I was a voice. A shadow. A mystery.

But now he was standing at my front door.

And everything I had spent years keeping hidden was about to get very, very complicated.