Chapter 2

The doctor’s voice pulled me from the pain.

“False labor,” she said, putting down the monitor. Her tone was relieved. “It’s way too early for labor. You’re only entering your third trimester. You might just be under too much stress.”

Stress.

The word almost made me laugh.

After the nurse left, I lay alone in the bed, staring at a tiny crack in the ceiling. My thoughts drifted back. Three years ago.

I was twenty-one.

I first saw Cain at a resource summit between packs.

He was in a corner, wearing an ill-fitting suit, nervously clutching a glass.

A young wolf lost in a den of lions.

That awkwardness. That desperate need to be seen. It softened my heart.

I didn’t tell him who I was.

I used my family’s scent-masking herbs. It perfectly hid my Alpha aura.

I became just another ordinary she-wolf.

I didn't want a marriage forged by bloodlines.

I wanted a pure love, free of power and fear.

“I’ll always be with you, no matter who we are.” The night we mated, Cain pressed me beneath him, his ragged breaths hot against my ear. He held me with something close to reverence, swearing his oath to me.

I believed him then.

I even believed him when, by accident, I let a flicker of my power show. The old wolves in his small pack shunned me, and he stood up. He took my hand in front of everyone. “She is my Mate. No one will treat her this way.”

I thought it was real.

My father had warned me.

“Cain’s hunger for status is a sickness,” he’d said in his study, his voice unusually grave. “That sickness will devour his loyalty one day.”

I didn’t listen.

I told him Cain would change. I told him I would help him grow stronger.

I used my family’s syndicate, the Silver Moon Alliance—the largest werewolf trade network in the North. I funded him anonymously. Paved his way. All the doors that had been slammed in the face of a no-name Alpha suddenly swung open.

For three years, Cain thought he was a genius.

He never knew that every territorial contract he signed, every mining deal he closed, had the Crestfall name standing behind it.

He thought he was climbing a mountain. He never knew he was just walking on the path I built for him.

Six months ago, everything started to change.

Cain brought home a battered Beta she-wolf. Her name was Jasmine, he said. She’d escaped an abusive Alpha in her old pack and had nowhere to go.

I saw her cowering in the doorway, her eyes flashing with terror. A terror that reminded me of my own anxiety when I first hid my identity.

My heart softened again.

I secretly arranged a place for her to live. I found the best healers for her injuries. When Cain was about to banish her for overstepping her patrol boundaries, I stood in his way. “Give her another chance. She’s been through enough.”

Cain looked at me and smiled. “You’re always so kind.”

Thinking back now, what was hidden in that smile?

Gratitude? Or mockery?

I closed my eyes. The broken pieces started to fit together.

Every time Jasmine “happened” to be in Cain’s office for a meeting. Every time she “unintentionally” stayed late into the night. Every time she spoke of Cain’s hard work in front of me, her voice full of just the right amount of concern.

Cain’s attitude toward me in the last six months had slowly shifted. From passionate to dismissive.

He kept testing my boundaries. And when he mentioned Jasmine, his eyes held a softness I once knew. A softness that was no longer for me.

And I thought I was helping a poor victim.

I thought I was nurturing a clumsy but loyal lover.

Now, it was all sickeningly clear.

From the moment Jasmine walked into our home, it was a trap. A trap designed just for me.