Chapter 3

Dorian's POV

"Bite... bite —"

Ash was still trying to claw his way out.

My wolf Ash surged forward, all teeth and instinct and five years of pent-up longing, and it took everything I had to shove him back down.

Mate! That's our mate, we finally found her! She has no mark, she's waiting for us, let me —

"Shh."

I said it under my breath, but Sloane flinched anyway. She'd dropped her hands. The hiding was over.

Five years, and the first thing I noticed was the damage. Her cheekbones had sharpened past beauty into something that said she hadn't been eating enough.She looked like she hadn't slept properly in weeks.But she was still as beautiful as I remembered.

Her hands, the same hands that used to steal my lecture notes and leave lip-gloss prints on my jacket collar, were cracked at the knuckles. Nails bitten to the quick.

She's hurt. Ash whined so loud my skull ached.

Hold her. Why are you just standing there?

I clenched my jaw and shut him out.

"Why are you dressed like that?" The question came out harder than I'd planned. "Why are you here doing this kind of work?"

She blinked, like the question was somehow unreasonable."I didn't realize I owed my ex a status update." Her voice was even. Practiced.

"If you'd paid the slightest attention to the news, you'd know my pack went bankrupt."

"I'm not asking about your pack." I stepped closer.

Her scent hit me through the gardenia and silk. Still the thing that made Ash throw himself against my ribs.

"I'm asking why you're in this pack. The one you chose, where is he? Why isn't he here taking care of you?"

Her expression changed. Genuine confusion: brow furrowed, lips parted, the kind you can't rehearse.

"I have no idea what you're talking about."

I stared at her. "You don't remember."

"Remember what? Dorian, you're not making sense."

She'd forgotten. She'd thrown me away for someone else and couldn't even recall doing it.

Five years ago, I'd driven through the night to Silver Ridge without sleeping.

I was wrong. Wolfless didn't matter. Ash had been howling her name for weeks, and I couldn't sleep, and I couldn't eat, and my family's standards for a proper Luna could go to hell.

I told myself I was going to apologize. To tell her I'd been an idiot, that I didn't care about the pack's expectations, that we could figure it out together. I rehearsed the speech a hundred times on the way there.

She was standing outside her family's estate, laughing at something, and there was a man beside her—thin, pale, sickly-looking. She was holding his arm. Touching him. Looking at him like he was the center of her world.She was laughing at something he'd said, her hand resting on his arm.

The next morning, at her coming-of-age ceremony, they walked in together. Her arm looped through his. Her mother flanked them with wide smiles.

Her mother kissed his cheek. The whole pack closed around them.

And me? They looked at me like I was dirt. Like I was the one who didn't belong.

I waited for Sloane to come to me. To explain. To say it wasn't what it looked like.

She never said a word.

"It doesn't matter whether you've forgotten."

I pulled myself back.

"Your pack is gone. You had nowhere to go. Why not come to mine? Why scrub someone else's floors when you could have —"

"Come to you?" Her voice cracked on the word.

"You rejected me. In front of my family. In front of everyone I loved."

She took a breath, and the next words came out flat. "If I'd known sooner what you really were, I would have ended things myself."

She's right, Ash murmured.

My teeth ground together. Five years of silence, and she was standing in a uniform telling me I'd been the problem.

"So I was holding you back. From your real choice."

She opened her mouth to argue, but a sound from the hallway cut her off.

"Mama?"

The voice was small. Tiny. It came from the doorway, and when I turned, I saw a little boy standing there—pale, thin, with dark hair and big eyes .He was clutching a stuffed rabbit and staring at me with open curiosity.

Ash surged. My vision blurred.

Is that ours? Could he be our pup?

I looked at the boy's face, and the hope that had flared in my chest went out like a struck match.

His brow. His jawline. His dark, careful eyes.

Every line was a copy of the man from the garden — the one with the narrow shoulders and the wheeze.

"Ellis?" Sloane was past me before I could move. Her voice changed — softer, faster, a frequency I'd never heard from her before.

She crouched and swept him into her arms. "Baby, you were supposed to stay with Nia."

"Wanted you," he said into her neck.

I watched her hold him. The way her hand cupped the back of his head. The way she swayed without thinking about it, that unconscious rocking motion I'd seen in a hundred pack mothers and never once imagined I'd see in Sloane Mercer.

She was a mother. And the boy's father was the man she'd chosen, the same man who'd apparently disappeared, leaving her to drag their child through a stranger's pack.

Jealousy, fury, and something underneath both that I refused to look at tangled in my chest until I couldn't tell which was which.

"Your employers have terrible taste," I said through my teeth. "Do they know their maid used to make me fold her underwear?"

Sloane clamped both hands over Ellis's ears, face burning. "That was one time!And don't—don't talk like that in front of him."

"Looks like leaving me really worked out for you."

Her jaw was locked. She lowered Ellis to the floor, murmured something in his ear, and pointed toward the hallway:"Go wait downstairs, sweetheart. Mama's almost done."

The boy didn't move.He stood there with his fingers in his mouth, blinking up at me innocently.

"I know you," he said."Mama is always looking at your pictures."