Chapter 1.

Chapter 1

Amara’s POV

"I'm sorry. We couldn't save him."

The doctor's voice was quiet. Too quiet for words that ripped my whole world apart.

I stared at her. My body was still shaking from twelve hours of labor. My gown was soaked with sweat. My arms were already reaching out, waiting for the weight of my son.

"No," I said. "No, I felt him kicking this morning. Check again."

"Luna Amara..."

"Check again!"

She didn't move. A nurse behind her lowered her head.

That was when I saw the small bundle on the table. Wrapped in a blue blanket. Not moving. Not crying.

Silent.

"Give him to me," I whispered.

"Luna, I don't think that's..."

"Give me my son."

They placed him in my arms. He was so light. So small. His little face was peaceful, like he was only sleeping. He had Michael's nose. My lips.

Six years. Six years of tests and treatments and negative results and crying alone in bathroom stalls. Six years of the pack whispering that their Luna was barren. And when the Moon Goddess finally blessed me, this was how it ended.

Inside me, my wolf, Naya, threw back her head and howled. The sound tore through my mind, raw and broken. Then she curled into a corner and whimpered like something dying. A mother wolf mourning her pup.

"Michael," I choked out. "Someone call Michael. Call the Alpha."

The young nurse by the door shifted on her feet. "We've been trying, Luna. His phone keeps going to voicemail. Beta Kane said the Alpha left for the northern border. The rogue attack."

I grabbed my phone off the side table with trembling hands. Nine missed calls to him during labor. Nine. I dialed a tenth.

Ringing. Ringing.

Voicemail.

"Michael, please." My voice cracked. "Please pick up. It's the baby. Our baby, he..." I couldn't say the word. "Just come. Please come."

I called again. And again. I called until the nurse gently took the phone from my hands, and then I pressed my face into my dead son's blanket and screamed until my throat gave out.

Sometime after midnight, a warrior came to stand guard outside my hospital room. I heard him talking to the nurse in the hallway, his voice low.

"Strange, though," he murmured. "The rogue attack ended hours ago. Border's been clear since sunset. Why isn't the Alpha back?"

I lay there in the dark, holding my son, and reached for the mate bond. The invisible thread that had tied me to Michael for six years. When I broke my ankle two winters ago, he'd felt my pain from three towns away and driven home like a madman.

Our child was dead. My grief was an ocean.

And the bond was quiet.

Not blocked. Not strained by distance. Just... cold. Like a phone that rings and rings in an empty house.

“Something is wrong” Naya whispered. “Something has been wrong for a long time.”

I was too broken to listen.

Chloe came to the hospital at dawn.

My little sister burst through the door with her mascara already running, and when she saw the empty bassinet, she covered her mouth and sobbed.

"Oh, sis. Oh no. No, no, no."

She climbed onto the bed and wrapped her arms around me, and I fell apart against her shoulder the way I'd wanted to fall apart against Michael's.

"I'm so sorry, sis," she whispered into my hair. "I'm so, so sorry."

"He was perfect, Chloe. He was perfect and he never even opened his eyes."

"I know." She rocked me gently. "I know. But you still have me, okay? We'll get through this together. You and me. Like always."

She held my hand the whole morning. She brushed my hair. She helped me into the black dress for the burial because my hands were shaking too badly to work the zipper.

"Where's Michael?" I asked her as she fastened the clasp at my neck.

Her fingers paused. Just for half a second.

"I'm sure he's on his way," she said. "Don't think about him right now. Think about saying goodbye to your boy."

I should have noticed her fingers pause.

I noticed nothing.

They buried my son that evening, before the second sunset.

Pack law didn't wait. An Alpha heir had to be returned to the Moon Goddess quickly, so barely a day after giving birth, I stood at the pack cemetery in black, my body still bleeding, my breasts aching with milk for a baby who would never drink it.

The whole pack came. Hundreds of wolves in black, standing in silent rows between the old oak trees. That was tradition. When an Alpha bloodline lost an heir, the entire pack mourned.

I barely saw any of them.

I only saw the coffin.

It was white. And it was so small. God, it was so small. A grown man could carry it under one arm.

"Amara." Diana appeared at my side and laced her fingers through mine. "Breathe. I'm right here."

Diana Okafor. My best friend since we were seven years old, back when we were two skinny pups stealing meat pies from her mother's kitchen. She was a gynecologist now at the city hospital, brilliant and sharp-tongued, but today she wasn't here as a doctor. She was here to hold me up.

"You should be lying down," she said quietly, scanning my face. "You gave birth yesterday, Amara. You're gray."

"I'm burying my son today, Diana. I can lie down tomorrow."

She didn't argue. She just gripped my hand tighter.

"Where's Michael?" I asked.

"He was here. I saw him near the gate when the ceremony started."

My head snapped up. "He's here?"

"He was." She hesitated. "Then he slipped off somewhere. Quietly. I thought he'd come back by now."

He came to his son's burial and disappeared before the prayers.

Pack business, probably. There was always pack business. Pack business when I had my first ultrasound. Pack business when I painted the nursery alone. Pack business while I screamed his name in a delivery room.

The Pack Priest raised his hands over the tiny coffin.

"Moon Goddess, mother of us all," he began, "tonight we return an innocent soul to your light. He knew no sin. He knew no hatred. Take this pup into your arms and let him run free in your eternal fields."

The words floated past me like smoke. My eyes were locked on that white box as two warriors began lowering it into the earth.

My knees buckled. Diana caught me around the waist.

"I've got you," she whispered. "I've got you."

"That's my baby," I sobbed. "He's going into the ground and his father isn't even..."

I stopped.

I looked around. Really looked. Rows of bowed heads. The Elders. The warriors. The omegas holding candles.

No Michael.

My husband was not at our son's burial.

And Chloe. I turned, searching for her dark head in the crowd. She'd been standing behind me when the ceremony started, dabbing her eyes with a tissue.

Gone too.

I pulled out my phone and dialed. Around me, wolves pretended not to watch their Luna falling apart.

Ringing. Voicemail.

"Michael, where are you?" I hissed. "They're burying him. They're burying our son right now. Whatever you're doing, nothing is more important than this. Nothing."

I hung up. Called again. Voicemail.

"Maybe his phone died," Diana offered weakly.

"His son died," I said. "His phone should be in his hand."

The priest finished the prayer. One by one, pack members walked past the grave and dropped white roses into it. Each rose landed on the little coffin with a soft sound that broke something new in me every time.

Then the wind changed.

It came from the east, from the direction of the Alpha mansion on the hill. Every wolf is born with a nose that never lies, and mine caught a scent I knew better than my own heartbeat.

Cedar and dark spice.

Michael.

Naya lifted her head inside my mind, ears flat.

He was home. Not at the border. Not handling pack business. Home. Half a mile from his son's grave, and he couldn't walk down the hill to say goodbye.

I was moving before I made the decision.

"Amara?" Diana grabbed my arm. "Where are you going?"

"He's at the mansion."

"What? How do you know?"

"The wind." My voice didn't sound like mine. "I can smell him, Diana. He's there. He's been there."

"Then I'm coming with you."

"No." I pulled free. "Stay. Make sure they finish properly. Make sure someone stays with my son."

"Amara, wait..."

I didn't wait.

I walked out of the cemetery in my funeral dress, heels sinking into the grass, my body screaming with every step. The climb up the hill nearly finished me. Twice I had to stop and grip a tree while my vision swam and fresh blood seeped into the pad the hospital sent me home with.

But I kept going. Because the closer I got, the more the wind told me.

Michael's scent was strong now. Fresh. And tangled inside it was something else. Something soft and sweet.

Vanilla. Peaches.

I knew that scent too.

I'd known it for twenty-one years. From birthday parties and school pickups. From the day she showed up at my door with two suitcases and swollen eyes because our parents couldn't afford her anymore.

Chloe.

My steps slowed. My heart refused to let my brain finish the thought.

She lives here, I told myself. Of course her scent is around the house. She probably left the burial because she was too heartbroken to watch. That's all. That's all this is.

But her scent wasn't just in the house.

It was on him. Wrapped around Michael's scent like ivy around a tree. Layered. Mixed. Warm.

Far too intimate for a sister-in-law.

The front doors of the mansion were unlocked. I stepped inside.

Silence.

The staff was gone. Everyone was at the burial, where they were supposed to be. The chandeliers were dark. The dying sun cut long orange lines across the marble floor.

"Michael?" I called.

Nothing.

I crossed the foyer. Past the family photos on the wall. Our wedding. Our anniversaries. The framed sonogram I'd hung three months ago with shaking, happy hands.

Past Chloe's graduation photo. That gown I paid for. Three years of tuition I covered in secret, working it out of my own allowance, because she was my baby sister and I'd promised our parents I would take care of her. The little white car in the driveway that I bought her for her twentieth birthday. The guest suite I decorated myself.

I treated her like the daughter I couldn't have.

My heels clicked on the marble. The sound echoed through a house that suddenly felt like a stranger's.

The scent thickened at the staircase.

I climbed. One step. Another. My hand gripped the railing so hard my knuckles turned white.

At the top, the hallway stretched toward our bedroom. The door at the end wasn't fully closed. A blade of light spilled through the gap.

Then I heard it.

Muffled sounds. Movement. A low murmur.

A woman's soft laugh.

Naya went dead still inside me. The whole world narrowed to that door and the four meters of hallway between us.

*Walk away,* a small voice begged. *Walk away and you never have to know.*

I crossed the hallway.

I pushed open the door.

The room smelled like cedar and vanilla and betrayal.

Michael was on our bed. Our bed, with the sheets I chose, beneath the portrait from our wedding day. And tangled against his bare chest, her dark hair spilling across my pillow, was Chloe.

My sister. My 18 year old sister, who had hugged me that morning and zipped up my funeral dress and promised we would get through this together.

For a second, nobody moved.

Then Michael turned his head toward the door. Slowly. Calmly. There was no panic in his face. No guilt. No shame.

He looked at me the way a man looks at a waiter who interrupted his dinner.

Annoyed.

And Chloe. Chloe didn't scream. She didn't grab the sheets or stumble over an excuse. She propped herself up on one elbow, looked me straight in the eyes, on the day I buried my son...

And she smiled.