The Alpha's Abandoned Mate
“I vow to starve what should starve. I vow to keep my hands out of fires that other people need to stand close to. I vow to stand between her life and the thing that thinks it owns it, even when that thing is the story that brought us this far.”
Lunaris set the knife between their wrists. “Blood,” she said, not unkind.
Ryder smiled, tired. “Always the same currency.”
Sienna smiled, too, smaller. “At least it spends.”
They turned their wrists. The knife moved, a cool kiss, a hot line. Blood welled, tidy, dark with a fine thread of silver in Sienna’s that belonged to no human mother. It ran onto the stone and did not drip from the edges. It soaked in. The altar drank like a thing that had been