Sleeping With Danger: The Mafia Boss I Shouldn't Have Crossed

Leona 

"The mating ceremony of my son, Erik, and Leona, daughter of Alpha Alaric, will take place on the next full moon!"

Alpha Caleb's voice rolled out over the hall, and the crowd answered with a roar of applause. I stood beside my fiancé on the stage, his hand in mine, a champagne flute in my other, and felt the sting of happy tears. Everything I had ever wanted was finally within reach.

I was the only daughter of Alpha Alaric, who ruled one of the most powerful packs in the North — and still I had never been anyone's golden princess. My mother died bringing me into the world, and my father married a beta she-wolf Renata, who raised me without cruelty and without warmth. To her I was a living reminder of the woman my father had loved first, and of the children Renata could never give him.

My father had always wanted a son, so I spent my life trying to be one. I was the best on the training grounds, sharp in combat, deadlier still at strategy, and I left grown Alpha males eating my dust. He never praised me for it. All it earned me was the whisper that I was hard, unwomanly — a fighter with a short temper and no softness, the kind of she-wolf suitors admired from a careful distance.

Erik was the one who did not keep his distance. He took me exactly as I was. We had loved each other for three years, and on my eighteenth birthday my wolf rose and named him mine — my fated mate. I had been so sure of him, so drunk on that certainty, that I had given myself to him fully only the night before. I still flushed remembering the heat of him, the way he had pressed his forehead to mine afterward and whispered, "Leona, I love you, now and always. I will never put another woman above you — not even my mother. If I do, let the Moon Goddess strike me down."

Across the front row my father gave a single nod of approval, and beside him, for the first time I could remember, something like pride softened Renata's cold face. We all understood what this was. Not only a love match — a union of power. When my pack joined Erik's, the combined territory would be the largest and richest in the North. Erik would be king. I would be his queen.

The music began, slow and sweet.

"Will you dance with me, my Luna?" Erik asked.

He led me to the centre of the floor. The crowd drew back to give us room, every eye on us, and he set one hand at my waist and lifted the other to begin —

And then he went rigid. His gaze had caught on something over my shoulder, and the colour drained from his face as though he had seen a ghost.

I turned.

She stood in the entrance like something carved from moonlight: small, fragile, impossibly lovely in a long white dress. Rose. The silver light caught the unshed tears in her eyes and made them shine, and every male in the room leaned toward her without knowing why, some old instinct to shield her stirring in their blood.

Rose was Erik's adopted sister. Years ago, when the two of them had grown too close, his mother had sent her abroad to smother the scandal before it could bloom. A childish crush, Erik had called it. Long outgrown. He had sworn it a hundred times. I was his true love. His fated mate.

His hand was still warm at my waist, his eyes still dark with the secret of the night before — and then the first note of the violin soared, and he let me go.

He did not simply step away. He shoved me.

It was not a careless brush. It was a hard, instinctive push to get me out of his path, and I stumbled, heels skidding on the polished parquet, catching myself an inch from sprawling at the feet of every Alpha in the North. He never looked back to see whether I fell.

He ran. Past the centre of the floor, past the crowd, his eyes fixed on the girl in white — and there, in front of the most powerful wolves in the realm, my fiancé, the future king, dropped to his knees at her feet.

"You are burning up," he gasped, his hands hovering over her face with a terror he had never once shown me. Rose let out a small, broken sob and folded forward, and he caught her, gathering her slight frame against his chest, tucking her head beneath his chin, whispering into her hair.

The music played on, the same romantic melody, turned now to a funeral march. The silence of the crowd curdled into a low, venomous hum.

"Look at him," a she-wolf from a neighbouring pack murmured. "Like a man possessed. Someone has finally put proud Leona in her place."

"Poor thing," sighed another, her pity sweet as poison. "Some women are born to fight, I suppose. And some, like Rose, are simply born to be loved."

Heat crawled up my neck. I did not move. I kept my spine straight and my chin level while my fated mate nuzzled another woman's hair in the middle of our engagement.

"Erik!" Alpha Caleb's voice cracked across the hall like a lash. "Control yourself. Your fiancée is waiting. Return to the floor — now."

Erik did not even lift his head. He only tightened his hold on Rose, and the look he threw his own father was pure warning. "Rose is ill. She needs me."

My fated mate had just chosen his first love over his crown, his father, and his mate, in front of everyone who mattered.

My jaw clenched until my teeth ached, locking the scream behind them. My nails carved half-moons into my palms until I smelled my own blood. And still that was a mercy beside the cold, clear thing settling in my chest: Erik had not only abandoned me on the dance floor. He had made me the laughingstock of the entire North.

I lifted my chin and let them stare. Let them whisper. Behind my calm I made the whole room a silent promise: every wolf who gloated over me tonight would one day answer for it. I just did not yet know the cruel shape my revenge would take — or who would hand me the means.