Chapter 2

SIMONE

"Did I interrupt something?" Olivia stood frozen in the shattered doorway, glass glittering around her boots like she'd stepped out of a nightmare wrapped in silk.

Both our eyes snapped to her, and for one suspended second, nobody moved. Wind poured in through the broken wall, stirring her dark hair, guttering the candles low.

She wasn't supposed to be here. She wasn't allowed to be here. None of that mattered anymore, not with the paper crushed in my fist, the words on it burning through my mind like acid.

"How dare you, Leo." My voice cracked as I turned on him. "You want to enslave my people. The Evergreen pack."

The remorse he'd worn only minutes ago flickered just once, a shadow crossing his face before he smoothed it away. Then it was gone, and something colder took its place. A stranger's face, stitched onto my mate's body.

"Wow." A low, humorless chuckle. His eyes stayed locked on mine, and whatever had flickered there a second ago didn't come back. "So you finally know. What exactly are you going to do about it, Luna?"

The pieces slid into place all at once, and the floor seemed to tilt beneath me. Every strange absence over the last year.

Every closed door meeting he wouldn't explain. Every pointed question about my Father's health and the Evergreen succession line, questions I'd once mistaken for thoroughness, even devotion.

"Is that why you marked me? Because I'm next in line for the Evergreen throne?"

He clapped, slow and deliberate, the universal, mocking sign of you got me. "Not just an amateur, Simone. Dumber than I ever gave you credit for."

The words hit like blows. Behind him, Olivia still hadn't moved, watching Leo with something between disbelief and hunger, like she was waiting for her turn to matter in this conversation.

"You actually thought I married you for you?" His mouth curled. "You were a means to a throne. Nothing more."

I stared at him, waiting for the punchline, waiting for this to be some cruel, elaborate joke he'd laugh off in the next breath. It never came.

I searched his face for even a trace of the man who'd nearly wept at our bonding ceremony, who'd sat up with me the night my mother died, who'd sworn to my father he'd protect the Evergreen line like it was his own blood.

I found nothing. Maybe there had never been anything there to find. Maybe I'd spent five years loving a mask and calling him mate.

I hadn't seen this version of him in five years. Not once. My crush since I was eighteen, my mate, my Alpha. The wolf who'd built me a glasshouse with his bare hands was standing there dismantling me like it cost him nothing at all.

"You're not right, Leo." My voice shook, but I forced it steady. "I should've never trusted you. Not one day of this marriage."

He laughed, actually laughed an ugly, delighted sound, like my heartbreak was the best joke he'd heard all night.

"There it is. Figured it out at last." He straightened his jacket, unbothered, as if my world wasn't collapsing three feet away from him. "Here's one more, then. Today doesn't just mark our anniversary. Today I become Alpha of both packs." He said it the way other wolves announce good weather. "So sorry for you, Luna."

He turned to leave.

I stood frozen, waiting, praying, that he'd stop, turn back, tell me this was some sick test. That he'd sweep me into his arms the way he always did and tell me none of it was real.

Some small, humiliating part of me was still bargaining, even now, even with the evidence trembling in my own hand.

He did turn back.

My heart leapt, foolish and desperate even now.

There was no apology in his eyes. Only one last blow, delivered with the same casual cruelty as the rest.

"I should've never rejected my fated mate for someone like you."

The words landed like a physical strike, and my knees buckled before I understood what he meant.

*Fated mate.*

The two words echoed in my skull, refusing to fit into any version of the marriage I thought I'd lived.

Five years of birthdays and bad days and his hand finding mine in the dark and none of it, not one hour of it, had been real to him. It had all been a debt he was quietly working off toward someone else.

I hit the glass floor hard, palms scraping against the shards, and didn't care. My body had gone numb to everything except those two words, repeating.

A shadow slid across the floor toward me. I lifted my head and saw Olivia crouching down, her face far too calm for the wreckage around us, her silk dress somehow untouched by the broken glass she knelt in.

"What did I do wrong, Olivia?" I choked out, and foolishly, desperately, I let her draw my head against her chest, craving even a scrap of comfort in the ruins of my own anniversary. Some part of me already knew there was no comfort coming. I reached for it anyway.

"Relax, Simone." Her voice had gone soft, almost gentle, and that gentleness was the most terrifying thing I'd heard all night. "You didn't do anything wrong. You just stole my fated mate. Watched me fall apart while you sat pretty as his Luna."

"What do you..."

The sentence never finished. Her eyes flashed gold, pupils narrowing to slits for half a breath, and then white-hot pain tore through my chest.

I understood a second too late that her nails, longer now, curved, wrong had already sunk beneath my ribs.

I gasped, trying to raise my head, and found her watching my agony with something close to pleasure, the way a child watches something breakable finally break.

"You were never meant to be Luna of the André Pack", she whispered, twisting her claws deeper, until my vision fractured into shards of light.

My head spun, the glasshouse blurring into streaks of silver and gold. "Now I get to watch you fall apart. Piece by piece."

She shoved me backward, and I hit the floor with a sickening crack.

Warmth spread beneath me instantly, pooling out in a widening stain, my own blood pouring free as if my body had simply stopped fighting to keep it in.

I thought, absurdly, of the wolf soup going cold on the table. Of the amulet still around my neck, the one he'd said he made someone kneel three years to earn.

Of five years spent building a life inside a lie, brick by careful brick, never once suspecting the foundation wasn't mine.

The pain refused to dull. I forced my eyes upward, past Olivia's satisfied smile, past the shattered door, up to the vaulted glass ceiling Leo had built with his own hands.

Moonlight poured through it in fractured colors, silver, violet, pale gold, the same light that had crowned our bonding ceremony, now scattering across my dying body like some cruel, beautiful joke.

*Five years. And this is how it ends.*

The colors kept shifting above me, further away, until even those began to fade. Somewhere distant, I thought I heard footsteps stop in the doorway, heard him say nothing at all.

Then there was nothing.