Chapter 4

Drake’s glare cut through the parlor like winter wind. “Enough. Thalia is my mate,” he snapped, stepping between his mother and Thalia.

“You will not treat her this way.”

Rabiya blinked, incredulous. “Drake, you defend an outsider over your own mother? Three years you mated her and still no pups—she’s less than a hen! Worthless.”

Her voice dripped with the old breeding-house contempt of pack aristocracy.

Drake opened his mouth, then closed it. Thalia already knew the truth he could not say aloud: the pup she had lost, the sickness in that night—Drake’s complicity. She felt the old wound flare.

“Regardless,” Drake said finally, voice hard, “you will not humiliate her.”

He reached for Thalia’s hand. She yanked it away. “If you wanted a wolf who could give you pups, you should have taken one already.”

Her words landed like stones. Without meeting his mother’s eyes, Thalia turned and went upstairs.

Alarm flickered in Drake’s features, he hesitated, then started after her.

A sudden cry from Fiora halted him. Naeryn scooped the pup up with an expertly performed gasp of alarm. “Fiora! Are you hurt? Is your heart—”

“Drake, she startled Fiora. Will you come see?” Naeryn’s voice trembled with practiced concern.

Drake spun toward them, worry written across his face. He called for the family pack medic and knelt beside Fiora, searching the pup’s small features for any sign of distress. He looked back once at the stairwell, torn, Thalia had already seen too much.

What Thalia could not know in the moment was the small, cruel pinch Naeryn had delivered to Fiora’s arm as Drake turned—an instant that would never register in his eyes as anything but genuine concern.

Even if Thalia had tried to tell him, he would have refused to believe it.

On the landing, Thalia watched his concern for Fiora and felt the last thread of something like faith splinter. Back in their bedchamber she pulled every remnant of their life apart. Photographs, letters—three years of coiled promises—were swept into piles and tossed. Where he had once filled the world with vows, there was now only the echo of their old life.

She had barely begun to sit when Drake’s hand forced the door. He stepped in and froze at the sight of the emptied shelves. “Thalia, what have you done?”

“Nothing,” she said, steady when her voice could have rattled. “Just taking away what isn’t mine.”

His expression was flat. “Bring tea to my mother. I made it. Go down.”

He shepherded her downstairs and shoved a steaming cup into her hands. Thalia moved through the motion as if under water. Just as she reached for the tray, Naeryn slid forward with the grace of a wolf who knows how to use attention as a knife.

“Allow me,” Naeryn murmured, all sugar and predatory ease. “I’ll fetch it for her.”

Her smile was a blade. Thalia stepped to intercept, their hands collided over the cup. The ceramic tipped. Tea sloshed and struck the floor.

Naeryn shrieked, clutching her arm as if struck, as if the silvered porcelain had left wounds. Instantly the room filled with a chorus that sided with the show: Rabiya gasped, attendants clustered, Drake’s jaw tightened.

“Thalia, you’ve gone too far,” he said, voice rising. “Naeryn was trying to help and you attacked her.”

Before Thalia could explain, his hand flashed and struck her—quick, brutal judgment from the pack’s leader where mercy should have been. The sting sent her backward, her back hit the stair rail and she tasted copper. Rabiya’s thin smile widened into triumph.

“I warned you,” the matriarch intoned. “Lock her away before she disgraces us further.”

Two attendants seized Thalia again, their grips trained and cold. They hauled her toward the basement storeroom as if moving a trapped cur. Drake watched, the lines in his face closing like a snarl. He said nothing.

“Drake,” Thalia called, voice small under the weight of the cellar door, “you know I fear the dark. Will you truly let them lock me away?”

He paused at the threshold, conflict visible only for a breath, then turned his face away.

“You hurt Naeryn,” he said, voice clipped. “This is for order. A small punishment.”

The door thudded shut. Cold swallowed the storage room.

Thalia pounded until the hollowness around her took on the rhythm of a heartbeat. She curled in a corner, the world narrowing to the smell of old cedar and the distant murmur of the hearth above.

Memories rose—how Drake, once gentle in storms, had promised never to leave her in darkness. He had known. He had still let them do this.

With each sob that shook her, something inside Thalia unlatched and fell away.