Chapter 2

Heat crawled up my throat and locked there, turning every breath shallow. For one wild second, I forgot how to move, forgot how to think, forgot that Beth Lancaster thrived on watching other people crack. All I could hear was the rush of blood in my ears and the echo of Luna Lea’s words. The crescent moon necklace. Ty’s necklace. Mine.

“I—I don’t know what you mean,” Beth said, but the tremor in her voice was tiny, almost elegant, as if she had practised sounding offended in a mirror. Her perfume flooded the room, too sweet, too sharp, the same scent she wore whenever she wanted everyone to notice her before she even spoke.

I didn’t need eyes to know that necklace. I had traced every curve of it with my fingertips the night Ty pressed it into my palm beneath the old cedar tree. The silver crescent had one tiny chip along the left edge where he had dropped it as a child and cried for an hour because he thought he had ruined something precious. “Now it matches me,” he had said when I found him. “A little damaged and still perfect.” Then he had clasped it around my neck with clumsy fingers and told me to keep it until he came back.

“I know exactly what I mean,” Luna Lea replied, voice gone cold enough to frost the room. “Ty had that made for Sila before he left. So I will ask you once, Beth. How did it end up around your neck?”

“Ty gave it to me,” Beth said quickly. “Before he left. He said it suited me better.”

The lie hit me harder than a slap. For a moment I was back under the cedar tree, the night air cool and heavy around us, Ty’s hands brushing the back of my neck as he fastened the clasp. I remembered how his fingers had lingered. I remembered the way his voice had lowered when he said, “Don’t let anyone take this from you, Sila. Not for anything.” Ty had never spoken many promises, but the ones he gave were carved into bone. He would not have given my necklace to Beth. Not then. Not ever.

Alpha Cameron’s chair scraped back so violently that I flinched. “Be very careful with your next answer,” he said. The usual warmth in him had vanished. In its place was the low, dangerous authority that made grown wolves lower their heads and step back. “Because if Ty gave Sila something and it found its way into your possession, I will want to know exactly how.”

“Why is everyone acting like this is a crime?” Beth snapped, dropping the sugary act. “It’s just jewellery. Maybe Sila lost it. Maybe Ty changed his mind. Maybe not everything in this pack revolves around her.”

“She’s lying,” Neeka growled in my head, every word edged with teeth. “Her heartbeat is too fast. And she smells afraid.”

I rose slowly from my chair, palms flat on the desk until I found my balance. The office had gone silent around me, the kind of silence that waits for blood. “I didn’t lose it,” I said. My voice came out quieter than Beth’s, but steadier. “It was taken from me the night of the accident.”

No one spoke. Even the fire in the corner seemed to still. I almost wished I could take the words back. For two years, I had trained myself not to say that night out loud. Not because I had forgotten it, but because I remembered too much: the smell of rain, the screaming, the metallic sting of blood, my body on the forest floor, and hands—someone’s hands—fumbling at my throat before everything went black.

“Sila,” Luna Lea said carefully, all her anger pulled tight beneath gentleness, “are you saying someone attacked you for it?”

“I’m saying I woke up blind and without it,” I replied. That was the safest version of the truth. I did not mention the voice I had heard in the dark whispering that some girls were born to be broken. I did not mention that I had always thought the voice belonged to a woman. I did not mention how often Beth had stood just a little too close whenever the memory returned.

“So now you’re blaming me?” Beth demanded. Her bracelets clinked as she moved, fast and angry. “That’s insane. I was trying to help. I found the necklace weeks ago in my mother’s things and thought Ty might want me to wear it for the party.”

“Your mother’s things?” Luna Lea repeated, and this time there was no softness left at all. “Interesting, considering your mother denied ever seeing it.”

The air changed. I felt it the way a person feels thunder before the storm breaks. Beth had made a mistake, and she knew it. Her breathing quickened. One heel scraped against the floorboards. In another second, she would either run or strike, and with Beth, both options were dangerous.

“Maybe he wanted me to have it because he was tired of pretending,” Beth said, the words vicious now. “Did you ever think of that? Ty grew up. He left this pack and saw the world. Why would he come back for a blind, broken girl who can’t even see the moon she’s named after?”

The words landed exactly where she meant them to, but pain was not new to me. I had lived with it so long it had become another sense, another shape to navigate. I lifted my chin. “If Ty wanted you to have it, he can tell me himself when he comes home.”

Beth laughed, but there was no triumph in it now, only strain. “You really know nothing, do you? Ty isn’t coming home in a few months.” She paused, and I could hear her smile come back, sharp as glass. “He’s already here.”

Every part of me went still. Luna Lea made a strangled sound. Alpha Cameron swore under his breath. And then, from the open doorway behind Beth, I felt it—a presence so sudden and overwhelming that the fine hairs rose along my arms. Power rolled across the room, male and familiar and utterly changed. The bond between wolf and mate was only something I had heard whispered about, something I had told myself I would never know. But whatever slammed into me in that moment was fierce enough to steal the air from my lungs.

Boots crossed the threshold. No one spoke for three long heartbeats. Then a voice I had loved in a hundred memories and feared in just as many answered from the doorway, low and dangerous. “Take off my mate’s necklace, Beth, before I do it for you.”