Siyah Mcluxe
I 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.
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