Chapter 1

Elara's POV

"I'm sorry, Ms. Vance."

Dr. Landon set the chart down, avoiding my eyes. "The bone marrow match has been reassigned. There's nothing more we can do."

"But we've been on the waiting list for a year." My voice was steady, even as the tears beat the words out. "Who? Who took my daughter's donor?"

He didn't answer.

My daughter, Mia, has Bloodwither Syndrome. A bone-marrow transplant is her only shot at survival. For an entire year, I'd chased every lead, pulled every string, and burned every favor I had left. Today was supposed to be the turning point, but he was telling me the race was over before it even began.

Dr. Landon tried one more time, his tone softening with a look that bordered on pity. "You might still want to reach out to the child's father for a compatibility test. If he's a match…"

Mia's father. My husband. Alpha Orion.

The memory of the first time I'd gone to ask him hit me like a physical blow. He'd been sitting behind that massive desk, looking up at me for half a second before saying he was too busy. The second time, he had a meeting. The third time, he shoved me back with barely contained contempt.

"Begging me is literally all you know how to do, isn't it? Stop bothering me over something this trivial."

Three times. Not a single yes. After that, I stopped asking.

But now, I had nowhere else to go. I pulled out my phone and dialed Orion's number. One ring. Then silence—declined.

A few seconds later, a text flashed across the screen: In a meeting.

As a human, I had no other way to reach him. No mind-link, no mate bond. So I brought Mia home and I waited.

By ten o'clock that night, he still hadn't returned. I called again. It took two tries before he finally picked up.

"What?" Background noise bled through the line, his voice sharp with his signature impatience.

I raised mine so he could hear me over the din. "Could you come in tomorrow for Mia's compatibility test? We need you, Orion—"

"I'm busy."

"But Mia is your daughter too! You can't just stand by and watch her die."

He let out a slow, heavy breath. When he spoke again, his voice dropped into that condescending tone—the one that always made me feel two inches tall. "That's enough, Elara. Stop exaggerating Mia's condition just to get my attention. Act like an adult for once."

"I'm not exaggerating. This is serious. The doctor said—"

"Mia looks fine to me. Quit being so dramatic."

He was about to hang up. And then, I heard it. A small, bright voice on the other end of the line: "Daddy, come over here!"

Orion murmured something back to her. His voice was warm. Easy. A version of him I hadn't seen in years.

The call went dead.

My phone slipped from my hand and hit the floor. I sat on the couch, paralyzed. That single word—Daddy—echoed in my skull, sinking through bone, pinning me in place.

Who was that little girl? Had I misheard? Why was she calling my husband Daddy?

Then my screen lit up with a F******k notification. Celeste has posted a new photo.

I reached down with trembling fingers and tapped the notification.

Fireworks bloomed across a night sky. Orion was holding a little girl in his arms the way you hold a child who belongs to you—head dipped, lips pressed to her cheek. Celeste stood beside them, her arm hooked through his, her face tilted against his shoulder. She was radiant.

A birthday party at Bayfront Park. The three of them, together, looking exactly like a family.

My fingers froze. Those fireworks were brilliant and blinding, falling out of the sky like a hundred knives, one after another, straight into my chest.

"So he wouldn't take my calls because he was celebrating Celeste's daughter's birthday…" I whispered to the empty, dark living room. "Does he even know our daughter is running out of time? That without that marrow, she's going to die?"

Tears slid down my face and splashed onto the back of my hand. Cold.

I thought back to the first time I ever saw him. I was seventeen, working a summer job at the same supermarket where my mother had worked before she passed. He walked through the door and stopped at my register.

He wore a black suit, tailored to a standard I'd never seen in person. The fabric moved like dark water, making the sharp, handsome angles of his face look like something out of another world entirely. Powerful. Untouchable.

I had never seen eyes that shade of blue—like sapphires dipped in moonlight. One look, and my heart just… lurched.

"Can I… help you with something?" My voice came out embarrassingly unsteady.

He didn't answer right away. He just stared—the kind of look that felt like he was reading every chapter of my life. Slowly, his eyes shifted to silver. Something moved inside them, hot and restless.

But his voice, when it finally came, was perfectly composed. "I've imagined this a thousand different ways." A short, humorless pause. "I never pictured my mate being… someone like you. An ordinary human."

Mate? Human?

So he was one of them. A werewolf. The mysterious, obscenely wealthy elite people whispered about in Newland City. My fingers froze on the cash.

Growing up in a world where werewolves and humans lived side by side, I'd heard the stories my whole life: they were built like athletes, smart as whips, and moving in circles so far above mine they might as well have been a different species. But I'd never actually met one.

I was seventeen—a high school junior whose dad drove long-haul freight and whose brother had dropped out to work at a local auto shop.

And yet, standing right in front of me was a werewolf who looked like he'd been carved for a magazine cover: at least six-foot-three, wearing a tailored suit with a Patek Philippe on his wrist, telling me I was his fated mate.

There was no way this was real.

"Sir, I think you've got the wrong person." I looked down, trying to count change, but my hands were shaking. What the hell was wrong with me?

I could feel his gaze like pressure—sharp and ancient and heavy, like a warning from something older than either of us. I couldn't breathe right.

There was a scent coming off him. Cedar and whiskey. My palms went damp. My face went red. My breath got short in a way I had no good explanation for.

I didn't know what to call what I was feeling. The closest thing I had was the stolen, guilty rush from the one time I'd accidentally stumbled across something I shouldn't have on my brother's laptop—hot and unwanted and impossible to put back.

Fear tangled up with want. Insecurity twisted up with the desperate urge to close the distance between us.

The contradiction was dizzying. And when I finally worked up the nerve to look at him again—those pale silver eyes pulling something out of me I hadn't known was in there—a voice I didn't recognize rose up from somewhere deep in my chest:

We want him.

But… who said that?

I'm human. I don't —

His fingers closed around my jaw. Gentle enough not to hurt, tight enough that I couldn't look away. His teeth were clenched. Whatever was happening inside him, he was barely keeping a lid on it.

And then he said the words that broke something open in me.

"Having a human for a mate is the greatest failure of my entire life."

My heart cracked clean in half.

I ached for him. I felt guilty that I wasn't what he needed. I wanted to apologize. And somewhere in the rubble of all that, without any logic to justify it at all—

I fell for him. Right then and there.