Chapter 3

Willow’s POV

Over the years, I had carefully concealed my strength, quietly building my power in the shadows until its foundation was unshakable.

So when Rowan's throne was crumbling, I used the power of the ancestors to prop up his reign.

And Rowan, the Alpha in name only, was nothing more than a steward, permitted to rule by my bloodline.

And he had called me a fool.

I laughed again, laughing until tears streamed down my face.

I made copies of every payment to the witch, every falsified medical file, and hid them in the false bottom of an old wooden chest Aunt Maeve had given me years ago. It was sealed with the silver sigil of the Moon Goddess, a magical lock not even Rowan's Alpha Command could break.

Then I collapsed onto the cold stone floor of his study and cried until I had no tears left.

When the tears stopped, I sat there, empty, with no idea how to go on.

Until a sentence Rowan had said a few months ago floated up from the depths of my memory.

"Stay away from Lucian of the Northern Territories. That Alpha is a madman. Colder than a rogue and more dangerous than a lunar eclipse. If he ever gets a chance, he will wipe Black Moon off the map."

Lucian Wolfe. The supreme Alpha of the northern continent and Rowan's greatest rival.

But across the entire continent, he was the only one with both the power and the reason to destroy Rowan.

My hands still shaking, I searched through Rowan's encrypted contacts. Twenty minutes later, deep within his device's most secure files, I found the number for Lucian Wolfe's private line.

I stared at the string of numbers for a long time.

To make this call was to cross a line from which there was no return.

But I closed my eyes and saw my three pups who never got to open theirs. I heard Isolde's voice saying, "I suppose we have my dear sister and her three short-lived pups to thank for this." I saw the drop of wolfsbane Rowan planned to put in my wine.

I pressed the call button. The line rang twice.

A deep, masculine voice answered.

"Who is this? How did you get this number?"

My throat was tight, but I forced the words out. "My name is Willow. I am the Luna of the Black Moon pack, Rowan Cross's mate."

There was a brief pause on the other end, as if he were sizing up his prey.

"Cross's Luna. Interesting."

"You had better have a good reason for me not to hang up."

His cold, murderous intent did not make me flinch. I spoke, each word deliberate. "I need your help."

"Rowan's fated mate, coming to her husband's mortal enemy for aid?"

"Because," I said, my voice steadier than I expected, "I want him to pay in blood. And I imagine you want to tear him to pieces just as much as I do."

"And you are the only Alpha powerful enough to see my revenge through."

After a long silence, so long I thought he had hung up, Lucian Wolfe laughed.

It was a dark, dangerous sound that made the hairs on my arms stand on end.

"Luna Cross," he said slowly, his voice thick with a predator's hunger. "You have my full attention."

"Start from the beginning." Lucian's voice was as cold as a wind howling across the frozen tundra.

"Tell me why Black Moon's Luna wants to tear her Alpha to shreds."

I told him everything. The sudden tearing pain in our mate bond, following the trail to find Rowan with Isolde, how he used the blood of my unborn pups for forbidden magic, the three sacrificed children, and his plot to publicly reject me at the full moon ceremony.

When I finished, I realized I was crying again.

Lucian was silent on the other end of the line for a long time.

"Do you have proof?" he finally asked.

"I do." This time, my voice was steady. "Falsified medical reports, records of secret gold payments to the witch. I have all the evidence."

"You said you hold half the absolute rule over the pack's Founding Pact?" Lucian pressed.

"Rowan has no idea. No one in the pack knows."

"I also have proof he embezzled from the pack treasury and colluded with rogue factions. But I cannot use it on my own."

"He is the Alpha. The elders listen to him, the healers listen to him, the patrol guards listen to him. And my parents..."

"Your parents will not side with you," Lucian finished for me.

His statement was a silver blade to my heart, because the truth is often brutal.

My own birth mother could not have cared less whether I lived or died.

The truth came out at my first shift ceremony when I was twelve. Years ago, during a rogue attack, two newborns had been switched in the infirmary.

Isolde had been raised as the Head Elder's precious daughter, while I was left on the outskirts of the pack.

That was the day I learned I was the Head Elder's real daughter.

Before they took me back to the pack's central territory, I had lived with the former pack healer, Aunt Maeve, on the remote borderlands.

We were poor, but we had a fire at night, a goat for milk, and the old moon lullabies Aunt Maeve would hum while she mended our torn clothes.

My parents brought me back to their lavish estate, but my mother refused to give up Isolde. She had raised the Omega as her own, pouring all her love into her.

So she insisted on keeping both of us at the manor.

But it was always clear who she viewed as her real daughter.

"Willow, stand up straight. You cower like a field mouse."

"Willow, lose the borderlands accent. You are an embarrassment to this family."

"Willow, why cannot you be more like Isolde?"

I was never good enough. I took lessons on posture from the pack's elders, but I was clumsy. I studied the formal pack dialect, but my accent was stubborn.

Isolde was delicate and endearing, and my mother was constantly reminding me in a hundred different ways that my supposed Elder bloodline was a disgrace to their family name.

By the time of my coming-of-age ceremony, I had learned to be quiet, to stay in the background, and to stop expecting love.

That was when I met Rowan.

He had just inherited the Alpha title from his father, and his eyes burned with an ambition as bright as stars. The way he looked at me made me feel cherished for the first time in my life.

"Willow, you are not like those other pretentious she-wolves," he had told me.

Like a lost pup, I fell headfirst into the web of love he spun for me.