LOGINThey called me worthless. The weakest omega in the pack. My own mate rejected me, my Alpha husband betrayed me with my sister, and they left me for dead. But death had other plans. I woke up with power coursing through my veins—power they never knew existed. Now I’ve returned with a new face, a new name, and secrets that could destroy them all. They don’t recognise the omega they discarded, and I intend to keep it that way. My ex-mate? He’ll bow before me. My sister? She’ll lose everything she stole. The pack that scorned me? They’ll beg for mercy I won’t give. They should have killed me when they had the chance. Because this omega isn’t weak anymore—and revenge tastes sweeter than any mate bond ever could. He thought he broke me. He only made me dangerous.
View MoreI scrubbed the marble floor of the packhouse on my hands and knees, my fingers raw and bleeding. The other wolves walked past me without a glance, some deliberately stepping on the section I had just cleaned. I bit my lip and started over.
This was my life. Aria Moonstone, Luna of the Silver Crest Pack, was reduced to a servant in her own home.
“You missed a spot, Omega.”
I looked up to see Beta Marcus sneering down at me. He kicked over the bucket of dirty water, sending it splashing across the floor and soaking my thin dress.
“Clean it up,” he said, then walked away laughing.
I wanted to cry, but I had no tears left. Five years of marriage to Alpha Damien had taught me that tears changed nothing. I was the weakest wolf in the pack, unable to shift properly, slow to heal, and worthless in every way that mattered to our kind.
The other omegas at least had each other. I had no one.
I gathered rags to soak up the spilt water, moving slowly because my wolf was too weak to help me heal from yesterday’s injuries. My sister Elena had “accidentally” pushed me down the stairs. Again. The bruises on my ribs made every breath hurt.
“Aria!”
My husband’s voice boomed through the packhouse. I flinched. Alpha Damien only called for me when he needed something or when I had disappointed him. Lately, it was always the latter.
I abandoned the mess and hurried toward his office, my wet dress clinging to my thin frame. I had lost so much weight this past year. Food was scarce for me, always given to the “stronger” wolves first. By the time I was allowed to eat, there were only scraps.
I knocked softly on the heavy oak door.
“Enter.”
I pushed open the door and kept my eyes down, as was expected of a weak omega. Even if that omega was technically the Luna.
“You called for me, Alpha?”
He hated it when I called him by his title instead of his name, but he had forbidden me from using his name in public months ago. Now I could not bring myself to say it even in private.
“The Bloodmoon Pack is visiting tomorrow,” Damien said, not looking up from his papers. “I need you to stay out of sight. You embarrass me in front of other Alphas.”
Each word was a knife to my heart, but I had learned to keep my face blank.
“Yes, Alpha.”
“Your sister will act as hostess. She knows how to represent this pack properly.”
Of course. Beautiful, strong, perfect Elena. Everything I was not.
“Is there anything else?” I asked quietly.
“Yes.” He finally looked at me, his handsome face twisted with disgust. “Take a bath. You smell like wet dog and failure.”
I nodded and turned to leave, but his next words stopped me.
“I do not know why the Moon Goddess bound me to something like you. You are not fit to be a Luna. You are not fit to be a wolf.”
I left before he could see my hands shaking.
The walk to my room felt endless. Wolves whispered as I passed, their words cutting deep even though I pretended not to hear.
“She is so pathetic.”
“I heard the Alpha has not touched her in over a year.”
“My cousin’s pack would have banished her by now.”
“She will probably be rejected soon. No Alpha wants a defective mate.”
I climbed the stairs to the third floor where my small room was located. It used to be a storage closet. Damien had moved me here two years ago, saying the Luna’s chambers were wasted on me.
I locked the door and finally allowed myself to collapse on the narrow bed. My whole body ached. My heart ached worse.
Tomorrow I would have to watch Elena play Luna while I hid like the shameful secret I had become. My own sister had taken everything from me except my title, and lately I wondered how long even that would last.
The mate bond thrummed weakly in my chest, connecting me to Damien. Once it had felt warm and full of promise. Now it only brought pain. I could feel his contempt through it, his disappointment, his wish that I was anyone but me.
I closed my eyes and remembered the girl I used to be. The one who believed in true love and happy endings. The one who thought being mated to an Alpha meant being cherished and protected.
That girl died slowly over five years of cruelty.
A knock on my door made me sit up.
“Aria?” It was Elena’s sweet voice. “May I come in?”
I should have said no. Every instinct screamed danger. But she was my sister, my only remaining family. Surely some part of her still cared.
“Come in.”
Elena entered, her beautiful face arranged in false concern. She wore a designer dress that showed her curves, her long blonde hair perfect, her skin glowing with health and power. We were twins, but you would never know it. Where she was everything, I was nothing.
“I wanted to check on you,” she said, sitting on my bed. “I know Damien was harsh today.”
“He is always harsh,” I said quietly.
“Yes, well.” She examined her perfect nails. “That is what happens when you are mated to someone so beneath you. He cannot help his disappointment.”
The words stung, but I said nothing.
Elena smiled, and something cold flickered in her eyes. “I came to tell you something important, sister. Something you deserve to know.”
My stomach twisted with dread.
“Damien and I are in love,” she said simply. “We have been together for two years. I am carrying his child.”
The world stopped.
My sister. My husband. Two years.
“You are lying,” I whispered.
“Am I?” She placed a hand on her flat stomach. “Ask him yourself. Or better yet, come to Luna’s chambers tonight at midnight. See the truth with your own eyes.”
She stood and walked to the door, then paused.
“You were always too weak, Aria. Too weak to be a wolf, too weak to be a Luna, too weak to keep your own mate. This pack needs strength. It needs me.”
The door closed behind her, and I shattered into a million pieces.
Spring came back.The third spring since the Remembering and the first spring of the full connection and it arrived the way it always arrived, without asking permission, the particular insistence of a season that knew what it was for and did it regardless of whether anyone was ready.The crocuses came up in the same places.Of course they did.The ground remembered.The violet against the north wall produced its first bud of the season on a Tuesday morning in April and Anya documented it with the careful attention she had brought to every stage of its existence since January of the previous year.Third spring, she wrote in the garden journal she had started keeping.The violet returns.She showed it to me over breakfast.Her handwriting had matured over the year in the particular way that ten-year-old handwriting matured into eleven-year-old handwriting, more confident, more itself.She was eleven now.She had grown two inches and had developed opinions about several things that had n
Three days passed before the world felt ordinary again.Not because anything was wrong.Because the channel expansion took time to settle into people the way any large change takes time to settle. The ninety-seven Lunar Wolves connected to the web had each received the full opening in their own way and were each processing it at the pace their own experience allowed.Nyx reported through the monitoring data.The void signatures across the continent had resolved completely by the second day. Not degraded. Resolved. The foundational presence is fully integrated into the channel rather than operating separately below. The six thin place signatures were gone as though they had never been. The geometry dissolved.The void itself was quiet again.Not the quiet of absence.The quiet of something that had completed a very long piece of work and was resting in the specific quality of that completion.The web felt different.Not dramatically.The warmth was the same.But underneath the warmth w
I reached into the channel with both hands.Not physically.The reaching that had no name for how it worked, the reaching that operated below the level of technique, below the level of anything that could be taught or practised. The reaching that was simply the willingness to go toward something fully and without reservation.I reached toward the golden warmth first.The Moon Goddess.She was there immediately.Present and warm and sorrowful and ready in the way she had been since the midnight conversation.I felt the full quality of her presence.Three thousand years of loving the Lunar Wolves.Three thousand years of the channel that ran between her warmth and the world she had arrived in and stayed in.Real.All of it is real.The warmth was not a lie.The love was not a taking.It was what it was.A divine presence that had found something beautiful and had loved it and had stayed.And in the staying had covered something older.Not maliciously.With the complete innocence of some
She spoke at dawn.Not through the channel in the way she had spoken before, the four sentences that had arrived complete and clear in the space shaped to receive them. This was different. More direct. The quality of someone who had been present through a long conversation and had heard everything and was now choosing to speak rather than continuing to listen.I was still in the records room.We all were.None of us had slept.The fortress had moved through its deep night around us, the sleeping presences in the web warm and steady, and we had sat with the question and each other and the weight of what the midnight conversation had produced.Cassius had talked more through the night.Not the testimony. He had given us that. What he talked about through the small hours was the thirty years. The work. The teachers before him. What Ora had been like. How she had found him at seventeen in a small coastal territory where he had been living an ordinary wolf life and had sat across a table f
We left before dawn.Three of us in a vehicle that Kael had chosen for its reliability over long distances rather than its comfort, a practical machine with a full tank and two spare fuel containers in the back and the kind of suspension that handled poor roads without complaint.Kael drove.I sat
It arrived on my desk on a Monday in November.Not from outside.From inside the fortress.Slipped under the door of the shared office in the early morning before I arrived, the envelope placed with the careful precision of someone who had thought about where to put it and had chosen the floor rath
The solstice fell on a Wednesday.The shortest day of the year arrived with the particular quality of winter light that knew its own briefness and offered what it had without apology for the offering being small. By mid-afternoon it was already retreating, the golden quality of the low sun moving a
Selene told me on a Sunday morning.Not in any planned or formal way. We were in the kitchen before anyone else was awake, which was where we sometimes ended up on the days when both of us surfaced early and found the other already there, the particular quality of early morning in a shared house wh
Welcome to GoodNovel world of fiction. If you like this novel, or you are an idealist hoping to explore a perfect world, and also want to become an original novel author online to increase income, you can join our family to read or create various types of books, such as romance novel, epic reading, werewolf novel, fantasy novel, history novel and so on. If you are a reader, high quality novels can be selected here. If you are an author, you can obtain more inspiration from others to create more brilliant works, what's more, your works on our platform will catch more attention and win more admiration from readers.