Chapter 1

Sylvia's POV

The night I died, my husband was inside my stepmother.

I had been his Luna for three years. I helped him become the Alpha King. I never imagined that the whole time, he was just waiting for the right moment to put me in the ground.

"Which one of us does it better, darling?" she gasped, smiling over her shoulder. "Me, or that little doll you call a wife?"

Through the half-cracked bedroom door, I could hear the wet, low sound of two people who weren't trying to be quiet. I pushed the door the rest of the way open.

Leona was on her hands and knees on Damian's sheets — the red ones I had picked out for our anniversary. Her dark hair fell loose down her bare back. He was behind her with a fist of that hair wrapped around his knuckles.

Damian laughed. It was a sound I had never heard him make before.

"You. Goddess, you. She just lies there. She thinks holding still is a virtue."

My stomach went cold. My face went hot.

For the past month, Damian had been acting like a stranger to me.

He said he was busy with work, leaving early and coming back late every day, sometimes not even coming home at all. When I called him, he would brush me off with a few perfunctory words and hang up. I asked his Beta to pass on a message, but that usually polite man had also become hesitant and evasive, his eyes darting away.

This afternoon, Damian told me he would be working privately at that old villa up north.

A woman’s intuition is always sharp. I didn’t notify him — I just drove there.

The moment I pushed the door open, the world cracked apart like a mirror breaking in two.

Even though I had suspected something in my heart, when this scene unfolded before my eyes in such raw, undeniable reality, the impact still hit me like a wrecking ball, and the woman he was with turned out to be my young stepmother.

My hands were trembling. I tried desperately to steady myself, raised my phone, and tapped the record button with shaky fingers.

Damian's head whipped up. He saw me. For one second his eyes flickered — gold, then ringed in a dull, dirty green I had never seen on a wolf — and then he was off the bed and across the room.

"Sylvia." The cold dropped back over his face like a curtain. "You shouldn't have come."

Leona slid off the bed, naked and unembarrassed, and crossed the room to wrap her arms around him from behind. She rested her chin on his shoulder and smiled at me like a girl at a party.

"Tell her, darling," she said. "Tell her the truth."

"What truth?" My voice cracked. I hated that it cracked.

Damian wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. "I only married you for Moonriver — the biggest pack, the votes, and a way to beat my brother. Never for you."

He let that part land before he finished.

"I have what I needed. The housewife part is done. You can stop being useful now."

The room tilted. My wolf snarled, low and far away, like she was at the bottom of a well.

"Three years." I could hear my own voice but it didn't sound like mine. "You disgust me. Both of you. Three years. I gave you my pack. I gave you the merger. You don't sit in that chair without me."

"I'm aware." He picked up his shirt off the chair like he had decided we were done. "That's why I no longer require you."

I squeezed the phone in my hand. I have everything recorded. "I'll go to the council tonight. I'll put your face and her face on every screen in this country—"

Leona laughed.

She walked, still naked, to the dresser. She lifted a thin manila folder and held it up like a champagne flute.

"Honey," she said sweetly, "you won't have the time."

She tossed it on the floor. The papers slid out toward my shoes. I saw my father's seal. I saw my own name typed under the word conspiracy.

"He's already in a cell. They picked him up an hour ago." Her smile widened. "And you don't live to see tomorrow."

It hit me all at once. Damian leaving the gate open. The bedroom door cracked just enough for me to hear.

They had wanted me to find them.

"You set this up." My voice came back loud. "All of it. " I looked at Leona's smile and tasted bile. "I made my father give you a job. I called you my mother in front of the council. And this is how you pay him back?"

"Of course we did." Leona laughed, light and bright. "And honestly? I'm still in my thirties, I'm so relieved to be done pretending with that old man. You have no idea how exhausting it was."

I went for her.

My wolf surged forward and so did my body. I lunged for Leona's throat. Damian caught me before my fingers reached her skin. His arm wrapped around my chest and threw me back two steps.

Leona scurried behind his shoulder. From the safety of his back, she fumbled in her clutch and pulled out a small glass vial, the color of dark green moss.

"Be a love," she said, pressing it into his free hand. "She's already saying things. She'll keep saying them."

Damian closed his fist over the vial.

His other hand closed around my throat. My feet left the floor.

He pried my jaw open with his thumb. I tasted copper, then something bitter and oil-thick on my tongue. He held my mouth shut until I swallowed.

The pain was instant. It started in my gut and crawled out into every joint. My wolf howled. She threw herself at the walls of me and clawed for one more bite of either of them. Then she went silent.

"I'll see you in hell," I rasped. "Both of you. Every step of the way down."

The last thing I saw was Leona, reaching past my shoulder to pick up my phone.

Luna, I whispered, in the part of me that still had a voice. Goddess. Give me one more chance. Just one. I will make them pay for every second of this.

The dark closed over my head.

Voices.

Far away at first, the way voices sound underwater. Then closer. Then a woman laughing somewhere on my left, a long, champagne giggle.

I opened my eyes.

A ceiling. White marble. A chandelier the size of a small car, its crystals scattering the light into pieces I couldn't count.

I knew that chandelier.

I was sitting at a round banquet table, hands folded in my lap over a pale blue silk dress I had not put on. A waiter slid a flute of champagne in front of me. Across the room, a string quartet was playing something soft and bright.

This was death. This had to be death. The poison had been a kindness, then. It had given me a quiet place to wait.

Then a hand cupped my elbow.

"To my beautiful Sylvia," Damian said.

He was standing. He lifted his glass to a roomful of guests, his eyes shining at me the way I used to believe in.

"Thank you all for coming to celebrate our engagement," he said. "Thirty days from tonight, we will be married, our packs will be one."

He turned to me, glass raised, that same smile I had once climbed the world for.

I felt the bitter, oil-thick heat of the poison rise on my tongue.

I knocked the glass out of his hand.

"No!" I screamed.