LOGINI spent five years believing I understood what a mate bond was supposed to feel like. I was wrong about almost everything else that mattered too. The night our son was poisoned, I called Alpha Aiden several times. He didn't answer because he was in our bed with my best friend, claiming her as his true mate — not an affair he'd stumbled into, but a bond he insisted the Goddess herself had corrected him toward. By midnight, I had been struck, accused, rejected, and left with nothing but divorce papers and a pregnancy the healers once told me was impossible. By the end of that same night, I had also lost my son. I thought that was the worst of it. I was wrong about that too. Someone paid rogues to make sure I didn't survive long enough to carry this pregnancy to term, and I nearly didn't. I woke up in the territory of a Supreme Alpha I'd never met, kept alive by people who owed me nothing, trying to understand why a stranger's kindness felt more disorienting than the cruelty I'd just escaped. I don't know yet what I'm going to do with what's left of me. I know I'm not interested in simply surviving this. I know that somewhere underneath the grief, I am already calculating — carefully, patiently — what it will cost the people who did this to finally understand what they threw away.
View More~Malia's POV~ I woke to softness, and that was the first wrong thing. Soft pillows. Soft mattress, the kind that didn't creak when I shifted. Sunlight filtered gold and gentle through curtains I didn't recognize, and the air smelled like lavender and clean linen instead of blood and wet earth. A vase of white flowers sat on the nightstand, perfectly arranged, like someone had thought about my comfort before I was even conscious enough to need it. My head felt wrapped in wet cotton. I blinked at the ceiling for a long moment, chasing the shape of a single question. Where the hell am I? Then the night came back all at once, ugly and loud — rogues circling in the dark, the wet crack of a half-shift, a voice saying 'boss wants you gone, nothing personal' like that made it kind, the ground disappearing under my heel, the warm wrongness of my own blood on my palm. I tried to sit up. Pain lanced through my ribs so sharp I gasped and nearly folded in half. My baby. My hand
~Malia's POV~ "Leaving so soon?" Nora's voice floated down from the top of the stairs before I even had my hand fully around the door handle. She came down slow, one step at a time, wearing nothing but Aiden's shirt, buttoned crooked, her claiming mark still dark and raw above the collar. Her smile didn't reach her eyes. It never had. I'd just never bothered to check. "I'm always three steps ahead of you, Mal. Did you know that?" She crossed her arms and leaned into the door frame, blocking it with her whole body. "You've had the perfect things your whole life without even trying. Perfect bond. Perfect pup." Her eyes dragged over me, slow, deliberate, the way you size up something you're about to throw away. "Meanwhile I had to actually earn what I wanted. Do you know how many rooms I walked into where he looked straight past you and straight at me, and you never even noticed? You were too busy being comfortable in a bond you thought was safe to realize nobody else wa
~Malia's POV~ "You like that, baby?" Aiden's voice, low and hungry in a way I'd never once heard it mid-thrust, not even with me. "Deeper. Fuck me like the Alpha you are." Nora's voice, familiar in the worst way. "I want more Aiden. Faster." "As you wish, mate" The word hit harder than anything else in that hallway. The sheets were half on the floor — our sheets, the ones I'd chosen this morning because he liked the color against my skin. Nora was under him, back arched, nails dug into his shoulders, and every sound she made wasn't soft or accidental. It was a claim. Drawn out and shameless, like she wanted the whole packhouse to hear whose name she was saying. And there — just above her collarbone, raw and dark and freshly closed — a mark shaped exactly like the one on mine. Not a hickey. A claiming bite. The same one he'd given me the night we bonded, five years and a lifetime ago. A sound tore out of my throat before I decided to make it. Smaller and uglier than a
~Malia's POV~ The bond didn't break quietly. It tore. One second I was on my knees on the infirmary floor with Killian's small body seizing against my arms, and the next, something behind my ribs tore loose so fast I screamed before I understood why. Not grief. Not fear. A physical thing — a wire snapping taut then slack, five years of tether gone in an instant, and for one disorienting heartbeat I didn't know which pain belonged to which, the one convulsing in my lap or the three weeks old that I didn't even know existed yet. "Malia." Cora's hands were already on Killian, glowing faintly gold with a suppression working. "I need you to breathe. His heart's still going. Yours needs to keep going too." "Something happened." My voice didn't sound like mine. "Something happened to the bond, I felt it snap—" "Bonds don't snap on their own." Cora didn't look up from Killian. "Something has to sever them. Someone has to want it gone." I didn't have room to sit with that yet.
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.