Chapter 6

Tricia / Seraphina’s POV

I stared at him, waiting for him to laugh or to say it was a joke but Caspian didn’t instead he sat beside me waiting for my reply. 

“Are you insane?” The words ripped out of me, sharp and loud in the quiet hospital room.

“Marriage? You want to marry me?,”

“Yes,” he said simply.

 I let out a laugh, “After what Maxwell just did to me? You think I want to jump from one toxic bond into another?”

The monitors beside me beeped faster. My chest was heaving, and every breath pulled at the bandages around my ribs. The pain was nothing compared to the rage crawling up my throat.

“No.” I said instantly.

“Maxwell destroyed you I know but I —“,

My jaw tightened Immediately. 

“Don’t say his name like you understand.” I said to him before he could finish what he was about to say. 

“I understand more than you think,” Caspian replied calmly.

“You think replacing one Alpha with another fixes anything?” I snapped. “I was his Luna, His mate and he still humiliated me like I was nothing.”

My voice cracked slightly, but I forced it steady.

“I will not repeat that mistake.”

“I am done with bonds,” I said, my voice shaking. “I am done with mates. I am done trusting any man who looks at me and says he cares and I meant every word. “ I had spent three years trying to be enough for a man who saw me as a burden. I had starved, I had run until I collapsed trying to lose weight for him just to fit in. I smiled while his mother called me a fat fool just so I could be the good wife. I stood there while he chose another woman and called her his Luna in front of the whole pack, Never again”.

Caspian leaned forward slightly, resting his elbows on his knees.

“You’re wrong about me,” he said calmly.

“Am I?” I snapped. My fingers dug into the thin hospital blanket. “Because every man says that until they are tired of you or until you’re too much work.”

He tilted his head, “Maxwell was weak,” he said.

I flinched at the mention of his name as my stomach twisted.

Caspian continued, his voice steady. “He never understood what he had, so he threw it away for something shiny and easy.”

“Stop saying his name,” I whispered.

Caspian ignored me. “He doesn’t deserve to even speak your name, Seraphina. Let alone call you his Luna.”

The way he said my real name made my skin prickle. For three years, no one had called me Seraphina. I had been Tricia The fat Luna, the joke of the pack house and the omega with no pack.

I swallowed hard. My throat felt like it was closing. “You don’t know me,” I said quietly. “You don’t know what I’ve become. I’m not that girl anymore.”

“I do,” he said. “I’ve never stopped knowing you, Seraphina.”

He stood then, slow and deliberate, like he was giving me space to run if I wanted to. He was too tall with the kind of presence that filled a room and made it hard to breathe.

I hated that my body noticed.

“I have never had a stable relationship,” he said, his voice lower. “Do you know why?”

I frowned slightly.

“What does that have to do with me?”

Caspian’s gaze didn’t leave mine.

“Because I kept looking for you in every woman I met,” he said. “And I didn’t even realize it until tonight.”

My breath caught and my heartbeat stuttered. I shook my head immediately.

“Don’t do that,” I said. “Don’t try to manipulate me with words like that.”

“It’s not manipulation,” he said.

I smiled.

“That’s exactly what someone manipulating would say.”

“I didn’t understand it at first,” he said. “Why nothing ever felt right, Why every bond felt… incomplete.”

He paused.

“Then I realized something.”

My arms tightened around myself.

“What?”

“I wasn’t looking for new mates,” he said quietly. “I was looking for the woman I had already seen once and known all my life.”

My breath slowed slightly.

“That’s impossible,” I whispered.

I hated how my heart jumped at his words. I hated that a part of me, the broken, starved part, wanted to believe him, wanted to believe someone saw me for who I am. Not Tricia the disappointment, but Seraphina the Alpha heir.

I shook my head quickly, panic rising. “Stop. I can’t do this. I can’t listen to this.”

That was when I felt it.

A low stir in my chest, faint at first, like a whisper I hadn’t heard in years. Like a door creaking open in a house I thought was abandoned.

It was My wolf.

She had been silent for so long that I thought Maxwell’s rejection killed her. I thought I had lost her the night he stopped touching me. But now she pushed against my ribs, restless and alert

Mate, she whispered the word very clear. Accept him. He is ours.

Panic shot through me like ice water.

“No,” I said firmly, stepping back. “No, I’m not doing this again.”

Caspian frowned slightly.

“Doing what?”

“This,” I snapped. “Whatever this is. The pull. The bond. The obsession. I don’t trust it anymore. “I don’t trust my instincts anymore,” I said, my voice breaking.

Caspian’s expression hardened, his jaw ticked that for a second, I thought he was going to argue or push forward but he didn’t; Instead, his entire tone changed. The softness left his face and was replaced by something cold.

“Seraphina,” he said, and the sound of my name in his voice made me look up.

“There’s something you need to know and it can’t wait.”

I frowned, my wolf still pacing inside me. “What?”

“While you’ve been gone, Crestwood has been bleeding.”

My stomach dropped to my feet.

“What do you mean?” My voice was barely a whisper.

“Adams Sinclair,” he said.

The room suddenly felt colder. Laura’s father, the Beta to the Crestwood Alpha.The man whose daughter humiliated me.

“He’s been moving quietly for the last two years,” Caspian continued. “Taking over alliance control, turning our father’s old allies against him. No one noticed because everyone thought you were dead. Your father refused to name a new heir.”

I felt sick to my stomach immediately. 

He’s been using Maxwell’s stupidity as a weapon.” He continued. 

My hands curled into fists on the blanket. The IV in my hand pulled, but I didn’t care.

“Crestwood is one bad full moon away from collapsing,”

Caspian said. “Your father is in and out of the hospital and Adams Sinclair is waiting for the moment he can challenge the Alpha and win.”

My breathing turned shallow, I could see my father’s old and tired face. 

“If nothing is done now,” Caspian said, his silver eyes locked on mine, “the Crestwood Pack will fall. Everything your family built will belong to them, To Laura, to the man who helped throw you off that balcony.”

The rage I felt was instant that it burned through the pain, and shame I felt through the three years of my marriage to Maxwell. 

Without any hesitation I turned to Caspian immediately with my eyes fixed on him. 

“I’ll marry you,” I said, meeting his gaze head on. My voice didn’t shake. “But it’s on my terms.” 

“If I do this,” I said slowly, “there will be no bond.”

His eyes narrowed slightly.

I continued. “It will be a contract.”

“One year,” I said firmly. “Nothing more. No marking, no claiming. No emotions attached. 

A slow silence stretched between us then Caspian nodded. 

“One year,” he agreed.

Relief hit me so fast I almost sagged into the bed.

His eyes held mine, and there was something in them that made my stomach flip.

“But don’t think for a second that I won’t make you want more, Alpha Montclair.”

He extended his hand. “Then we have an agreement.”

I hesitated for a minute then I shook it.