Chapter 2

When I got back to the estate, the photograph from our mating ceremony was still hanging above the fireplace.

In it, Julian was kissing my forehead, his arm wrapped firmly around my waist.

That was the year he told me he finally had a home.

I was eight when I became lost in the snowy woods along the Blackpine Pack’s border.

Between hunger and fever, I could barely remember where I had come from. All I remembered was someone shoving me into a truck, followed by shouting and violence.

Julian was eleven. He was traveling with pack members delivering supplies when he found me, too cold to speak, and carried me back to the pack.

The woman who ran the children’s home saw that I had no identification tag and refused to take in a child whose background was unknown.

Julian stood in the doorway and set his own food ration on her desk.

“Take it out of mine. I’ll look after her.”

He fed me warm soup a little at a time that day and asked what I remembered.

All I could tell him was my name.

He held my hand. “Then just remember me, Serafina. I won’t let you get lost again.”

For years afterward, we lived in a little cottage behind the children’s home.

He fed horses and unloaded cargo for a merchant caravan while I learned to read and keep accounts from an elderly bookkeeper. Every winter, cold air crept through the window frames. He always put our only thick blanket on my bed.

Ayla awakened on my eighteenth birthday.

Julian came home to celebrate with me. The moment he opened the door, we both went still.

His cedar scent suddenly sharpened. My wolf cried out with joy. “Mate.”

His eyes filled with tears as he swept me into his arms.

“I knew the Moon Goddess wouldn’t give you to anyone else.”

Four years later, we held our mating ceremony at the temple of the Moon Goddess. We marked each other and signed a vow of lifelong protection.

Back then, he had only two battered cargo trucks.

Once, while rushing to deliver a shipment, he fought off rogues at the border. He came home with a wound so deep I could see the bone in his shoulder, but the first thing he did was pull a honey cake from inside his jacket.

“It didn’t get crushed. Try it.”

I cried as I tried to stop the bleeding. He was sweating with pain and still trying to smile.

During our hardest year, we paid the road tolls and had so little left that we couldn’t afford a bottle of soulmoon wine for the Full Moon Festival.

I split a flatbread in half. He took his share, then quietly pushed some of it back toward me.

Later, he opened new trade routes while I calculated prices and organized supplies. I spent more than a dozen nights poring over maps to work out our longest route into the north.

We moved from the old apartment into an estate on the hill. With dozens of transport crews working for him, Julian became the wealthiest wolf in Blackpine.

He wasn’t the Alpha, but to his guards, he was the boss. They always bowed their heads respectfully when they saw me, too.

My wardrobe filled with expensive dresses. Yet he never forgot how easily I got cold, and every winter he checked the bedroom fireplace himself.

I thought we had finally reached the life we had worked so hard for.

Then, a year earlier, he traveled to a neighboring pack on business and brought Mia home.

At first, she was just a new shipping clerk with his merchant caravan.

Then I started finding lipstick on his collar, and he began shutting me out of our mind-link late at night.

The first time pain from the bond woke me, he told me he had been attacked at the border. His distress had carried through the link, he said.

I believed him. I waited by the phone until dawn.

Only when I saw them in each other’s arms did I understand what had really been happening on those sleepless nights.

I didn’t make a scene at the warehouse. I simply asked him to transfer her elsewhere.

He told me I had no compassion for a woman with no one to turn to.

When I laid out the records of their late-night meetings, he accused me of tracking his movements. He said I was no longer the Serafina he knew.

Every argument ended with the same words.

“You know I’m never going to leave you.”

But I had never wanted to be someone he merely allowed to stay.

Six months earlier, after a particularly bitter argument, Ayla began slipping in and out of dormancy.

The healer said prolonged betrayal could weaken a mate’s wolf.

By the time Julian arrived at the healing cottage, I had been unconscious for two days.

When I woke, he was beside the bed, unshaven, holding my hand against his cheek.

“It’s over with her. Sera, please don’t scare me like that again.”

He stayed home to take care of me and learned to brew the remedies the healer prescribed for my wolf. At night, the slightest movement would wake him, and he would reach over to check my forehead.

For a while, I truly wanted to believe him again.

Seven weeks earlier, on the anniversary of our mating ceremony, he took me back to the old apartment and cooked dinner himself.

He said he wanted a daughter who looked like me.

I thought he had finally come back to me.

Three days earlier, I went to a healer I trusted because I had been feeling sick in the mornings. That was when I found out I was pregnant.

She covered the test results with her hand and asked what I wanted to do.

I told her not to tell anyone yet.

Since my wolf had been weakened, I had been using a scent-masking salve she made to conceal the erratic changes in my scent. She confirmed that the formula was safe during pregnancy and told me to keep using it sparingly. But she warned me that as the baby grew, its scent would become harder to hide.

I took the report back to the estate. I meant to wait for Julian and tell him myself.

Elder Vittorio arrived before he did.

He brought a family crest that matched the old pendant I had always kept with me, along with records of an attack on the Mooncrest Pack.

My parents had never abandoned me.

Someone had abducted me during the attack, only to be caught in another clash while transporting me. I had escaped into the snowy woods and vanished.

Elias, the Alpha of Mooncrest, and his Luna had been searching for me for twenty years.

The night my blood sample was sent for confirmation, I spoke to my mother on the phone for the first time.

She didn’t ask why I hadn’t come back sooner. She just kept saying my name, crying so hard she could barely speak.

I stood by the window with the phone in my hand, waiting for Julian to come home so I could share both pieces of good news.

Then I saw them in the garden.

He was holding Mia. “She hasn’t been well,” he said softly. “I can’t leave her now.”

“What about me?” Mia asked.

He wiped away her tears.

“You’ll keep your position with the merchant caravan. I’ll take care of you. Just don’t let her find out again.”

I lowered the phone. Then I lowered the hand I had been resting on my belly.

He knew exactly how much he was hurting me.

He just thought that as long as I didn’t see it, I would stay.

That night, I put the pregnancy report in the hidden drawer of my dressing table. I said nothing about it.

The next day, I submitted my petition to the elder.

Under royal law, anyone whose wolf had been harmed by a mate’s repeated infidelity could apply to have the bond dissolved, with medical records as evidence. There was no need for a rejection ceremony in front of their mate.

The elder would verify the original certificate. The Alpha King would give final approval, and a priestess would sever the bond.

Even if my father hadn’t been the Alpha of Mooncrest, I would still have had the right to leave.

I organized my medical records, page by page. For the first time, I wasn’t waiting for Julian to decide for me.