The Mate They Threw Away
I intended to make sure she never got the chance to decide that she did.
Below, the city was waking properly now, the grey light sharpening into something closer to gold as the sun cleared the eastern towers. Black Crest had never been a beautiful place, not in the way Silver Crest prided itself on, no manicured courts, no ceremonial gardens, none of the performance of civility that the other Alphas wrapped around their cruelty to make it more palatable. Here, the cruelty simply was, plain and unhidden, and I had built an empire on the honesty of that.