Never Let You Go

On the night of the Moon Hunt, I was chasing a silver-tailed fox through the forest when the horse beneath me suddenly lost control and threw me down the slope. Right when I was about to fall off the cliff, Xavier Long—the Alpha heir—shifted into his wolf form and pulled me back to safety. However, in the process, his foreleg was slashed by silver thorns, the injury cutting deep into the bone. Because of that wound, when my stepsister, Winnie Sullivan, was later attacked by rogue wolves in the Moon Rite Forest, he couldn’t reach her in time. She died beneath the wolves’ claws. Not long after, the elders of the Frostmoon Pack arranged a mating bond between Xavier and me. He accepted the arrangement calmly. At the time, I thought that even if we weren’t fated to be mates, what we had was no less meaningful. However, I was wrong. When I became pregnant with our first child, Xavier poisoned me with wolfsbane. As I lay dying, he looked at me with indifference and said, “If you hadn’t been wearing Winnie’s pale moon-white cloak that day, I would never have mistaken you for her in the forest, and she wouldn’t have died. If I had another chance, I’d rather watch you die beneath those werewolves than save you again.” Only then did I realize that in Xavier’s heart, he had always considered my stepsister his true mate. He had even once gone to the Alpha to ask for permission to mark her. Then, when I opened my eyes again, I had returned to the day of the Moon Hunt.