ANMELDENThank you for reading!
Skye Jaxon has been gone for five days and I'm having some feelings about it that I don't think I'm allowed to have. If someone had told me this time last year that there would come a time I’d miss him again, I’d have thought they’d lost their mind. But I do. I miss him.And not just as Benji's father—I miss him in a way that has nothing to do with Benji and everything to do with the bond and what I finally admitted to myself and what I still haven't figured out exactly what to do with.I am Nicolai's mate. I am wearing his mark. I chose him and I love him and I am sitting at the breakfast table missing Jaxon Vale with an intensity that is shocking and equally guilty-inducing.I'm not going to pretend it isn't happening. I told myself I'd be honest. Being honest includes letting myself feel it. Even if that means that Nicolai sees me craving the presence of another man. And he does notice. Of course he does. Even if he couldn’t feel it through our bond, he’s always noticed everythin
Jaxon “Please tell me what you want.” Skye pleads again.And even as I know I have to answer, I also know there are so many ways this could go wrong. With the bond doing its work, insistent that I still can't fully separate from what's actually mine. With the fact that she's wearing Nicolai's mark and I'm about to tell her something that was supposed to stay private until I was sure.But she heard it. And she's asking. And I made a commitment to not making her wait for things she deserves to hear."I want you," I lay it out there.The words come out clear. Quieter than I expected, but clear."Not because of the bond. Not as something that happened to me and I'm trying to make the best of.." I look at her. "I want you. You, as you are, with everything that comes with you—Benji and Nicolai and the mating mark and the complications and all of it." I hold her gaze. "I know I don't have a right to say this. I know what I lost and when I lost it and whose fault that was. But you asked me t
Jaxon Rena knocks on my door, announcing I have a visitor waiting for me downstairs. As I don’t know anyone here, I can;t imagine who it might be. But I’m even more surprised to find Noah standing at the bottom of the stairs. He’s the last person I’d expect to show up here without calling first. The fact that he did tells me everything I need to know before he says a word. Noah calls ahead. Noah is a man who believes in advance notice, who thinks showing up unannounced is a form of aggression that can usually be avoided with basic courtesy.When Noah doesn't call ahead, something has happened.I meet him in the main hallway—Mikhail having let him through—and read his face."Council inquiry," I guess."Elder Castillo filed it two days ago. Formal inquiry into leadership stability and the Alpha's extended absence." He says it straight. No softening. "I didn't want to tell you over the phone.""How bad is it?""Not insurmountable. If you come back."I nod silently for him to follow me
NicolaiThat night, alone in my office while Skye sleeps—I sat with her until she drifted off, just watching her sleep calming something in me that desperately needs to be calmed right now—I do the thing I do with problems that don't have solutions.I sit and drink my best whiskey until the solution becomes clear.I wanted to give Skye a certain kind of life. The life I built here. The estate, the pack, running it together as equal partners, Benji, the mating bond. A life where she was safe and valued and finally, conclusively chosen.I still want that life. The question is whether that life can contain what it apparently contains now. Another Alpha. I think about Benji. I keep thinking about Benji—this is becoming a pattern. Using my son as the model, which is either wisdom or avoidance and probably some of both.Benji has two fathers. Not in the conventional sense. In the sense that two men who love him have figured out, through considerable friction and adjustment, how to coexist
NicolaiThe report I’m reading is twelve pages long. I've read it four times. I couldn't tell you what's in it.This is new. I retain everything—it's not a boast, just a fact, something I developed early because the Woolf family's business requires holding more information than most people can organize. I read things once. Sometimes twice to confirm. I do not read things four times and come away with nothing.I set the report down and stare at my desk, trying to wrestle my mind into obedience. Something is very wrong with my usual capacity.The kitchen yesterday morning. That’s the problem. The thing that occupies my mind so completely I can’t focus on anything elseI went back to my office afterward and sat for twenty minutes not doing anything—which is also not like me—and made myself be honest about what happened.My wife and the father of her child doing something they’ve been doing in front of me for months. Nothing different about it and yet, everything’s different. The particul
SkyeI can’t avoid it any longer, no matter how much I wish I could. So I go in search of my husband and find him in his office. Nicolai looks up when I come in. Reads my face in the way he reads everything important—before I speak, completely—and I know I have his full attention."I need you to stop treating me like I'm going to break," I blurt out before I lose my nerve.He's quiet, knowing I have more to say and patiently waiting for me to get it all out."I'm not going to break," I continue. "I'm also not going anywhere. But if you keep being carefully polite with me—if you keep choosing responses instead of just responding—I'm going to lose my mind." I look at him. "I need you to be real with me. Even when real is complicated, or even painful. You told me that once. It goes both ways."He looks at me for a long moment. Something shifts in his expression."That's fair," he says."I know the kitchen this morning was—""Difficult," he admits. "Yes." He meets my eyes. "I'm working on
Jaxon Fourteen fucking weeks!She's been carrying my child for fourteen weeks and didn't tell me.The betrayal I’m feeling right now is overwhelming. It sits in my chest like a physical weight, crushing my lungs, making it hard to breathe.But underneath it, my wolf is howling with triumph and poss
JaxonI can't sleep.Every time I close my eyes, I see them. The way Skye smiled at Nicolai across the dinner table. The easy conversation that flowed between them like they'd never stopped talking. The way his eyes softened when he looked at her—not with the polite respect you show a fellow Alpha's
Skye"Oh," Cassandra says, her voice soft and surprised. "I'm so sorry. I didn't realize we had company. I thought I heard voices and—" She stops at the bottom of the stairs, taking in the formal table, the candles, Diana in her evening dress. "Is this a dinner party?"The calculation in her timing
SkyeThe rumors spread faster than I anticipated.Despite Jaxon's best efforts to contain the narrative—carefully worded statements to the elders, strategic conversations with influential pack members—the truth has a way of seeping through cracks. By the end of my first week back, everyone knows th







