Chapter 2

Lyric

The bond between us - heavy, unwanted, forged by blood and moonlight - tightens as he walks away. It drags across my chest like a rusted chain, each link scraping over something already raw inside me. The pull doesn’t just hurt; it opens another wound on top of the ones he’s already carved into me.

Star whimpers and presses against my ribs, desperate to follow him. My wolf lives on instinct and loyalty, not cruelty or abandonment. She only knows one truth: mate comes first.

She doesn’t understand that he doesn’t want her.

He doesn’t want us.

I press a palm to my sternum, grounding her. “No,” I whisper. “We’re not going after him. We’re doing this alone. Like always.”

“But our mate,” she breathes, soft and trembling. “We need him.”

“We don’t,” I tell her, even though the ache twisting through me argues otherwise. “He never wanted us. He never needed us. We are not begging.”

I breathe the way the midwives taught me—slow, deliberate, counting each inhale to keep myself from unraveling. In through the nose. Out through the mouth.

Again.

Again.

The cramps gather in a steady rhythm, each one squeezing lower and tighter until my breath stutters.

Sweat collects along my spine and beads at my temples. I force myself upright and walk toward the adjoining bathroom, each step slow, purposeful. The towel the Omegas laid out feels like an executioner’s block waiting on the floor, but when I touch it, it’s warm—soft in a way that shouldn’t matter but does.

A kindness in a night without any.

I lower myself onto it, hands shaking, palms braced on the cool tiles as another contraction tears through me, sharper than the last.

I tip my head back against the edge of the tub, biting my lip until the metallic taste floods my mouth. My vision blurs at the edges.

Then something else hits me.

Heat that isn’t mine. A tearing ache that coils through my belly and crawls up my spine, wrapping around my ribs like fingers.

No.

Not now.

Does he truly have no heart?

My mate is betraying me.

A pained sound escapes my throat. My back arches as the bond twists, warped and wrong. Bryce’s emotions bleed into me: his relief, his pleasure, his claim on a body that is not mine.

It slams into me in fractured, nauseating flashes—heat, dominance, the echo of satisfaction—each one filtered through the slick, sickening film of betrayal.

He went to her.

Leila.

My sister.

She should be here holding my hand, comforting me. Instead, she is holding my mate.

Star recoils as another wave pulses through the bond, sharper this time, blooming into a twisting ache that spreads across my ribs. It’s older than language, older than the laws that govern our kind. Every she-wolf knows this pain.

The moment their mate chooses someone else.

A fresh contraction seizes me just as his pleasure crests, and the two pains collide with such violent clarity that my vision whites out. Star screams inside me, the sound echoing through my nerves even though it makes no noise in the world.

“Stop,” I choke, even though I know they can’t hear me. “Please… make it stop.”

The Goddess does nothing.

She never does.

The bond flares with sudden heat, punishing and bright, like a brand pressed to the center of my chest. My heart stutters. My lungs tighten. For a moment, I truly cannot pull air in, cannot breathe around the pain radiating through me.

For one desperate second, I wish the bond would snap.

I would rather be hollow and unbound than endure this.

But it holds.

It always holds.

So I kneel on the cold tiles while my mate betrays me in the most intimate way a wolf can be betrayed, and my body keeps moving forward because it has no choice.

Another contraction builds, deep and relentless. My muscles tighten, my breath catches, and then everything shifts—an internal release, a quiet finality.

And then it’s over.

I don’t look.

I don’t need to.

I know exactly what it means.

My hands cradle a tiny, impossibly light bundle wrapped in the satin cloth the Omegas left behind. My fingers tremble around it.

“I’m sorry,” I whisper, barely able to hear myself. “I’m so, so sorry.”

I keep the cloth closed. I don’t dare expose her to the cold. Someone will come soon. They’ll take her away, and we will never speak of her again.

She will have no name - it is forbidden. Nameless children leave no grief for the pack to acknowledge.

By morning, the healer who tended me will be gone. Dismissed to some far-flung outpost if she’s fortunate. Punished if she’s not. The Omegas who helped me will disappear as well. My father will allow no record, no witnesses, no whispers that the future Luna of Three Towers lost yet another child.

To the world and the pack, I’m nothing but the purest manifestation of perfection. I can do no wrong. Something as beautiful and perfect as Adam Greyheart’s daughter will only bear strong, magnificent little alphas.

Tomorrow, the cloth in my hands will be ash in the fireplace, indistinguishable from the logs. The pack will eat and drink as if nothing ever happened. They will talk of territory and strategy and the coming winter

When I start to heal, my father will send for me. He will remind me that I am still young, that my mother suffered loss after loss before I was born, and even more after Leila came into the world, more still until she died delivering the baby brother no one speaks about.

“A Greyheart will always rule the North,” he’ll remind me, as if that is supposed to be a comfort and not a curse. “Your body will learn. The Goddess will be merciful eventually.”

He never looks closely enough to see Bryce for what he is.

My father demanded that Bryce denounce his own name and take ours when we were mated. It was the price of marrying me. Bryce smiled and agreed, so very humble, so very devoted. He wears our name like armour now, and my father never sees through it. All he sees is a devoted Alpha who gave away his name and his inheritence to be my mate.

But once my father’s heart stops beating, Bryce won’t need the disguise anymore. He’ll call his Beta. He’ll summon his original pack. He’ll take back his birth name and use my body, my title, my blood, and our divine bond like a weapon to claim Three Towers.

Bryce won’t need me after that.

I look down at the small bundle resting in my lap. The weight of a life that never had the chance to grow. My tears fall quietly onto the cloth, dampening the soft folds.

The bond between Bryce and me pulses faintly, a dull ache beneath my ribs - reminding me he is satisfied, content, lying beside my sister while I remain here, aching and alone.

I draw the wrapped bundle closer to my chest and rock slowly, gently, because it's the only comfort I have left.

My tears vanish in the soft cloth. The room is quiet except for the sound of my sobs and the soft crackle of dying embers.