Chapter 4

When I arrived home, the staff couldn't meet my eyes.

They stood in the hallway like witnesses at a sentencing — rigid, silent, trading glances weighted with the kind of pity reserved for Luna wolves whose Alphas have already chosen a replacement. Every one of them had their wolves tucked low, submissive, radiating the sour tang of secondhand shame.

I didn't need them to tell me. I could scent Seraphina the moment I crossed the threshold — jasmine and amber and something warmer underneath, threading through the house like a territorial claim. She'd been here long enough for it to settle into the upholstery.

I found them in the guest suite on the second floor.

Seraphina lay across the bed on her stomach, the back of her dress unzipped to the waist. Across her shoulders, a single claw mark from Helena's hand cut a vivid line against pale skin — already closing, but slowly, the way wounds heal when the wolf beneath them is weak or dormant. Dominic sat beside her, pressing a cloth soaked in calendula tincture to the wound with the kind of focus he usually reserved for reviewing territorial maps — methodical, reverent, completely absorbed.

Every time the cloth touched her skin, she flinched. Small, precise flinches, calibrated to draw him closer.

By the third pass, she was crying. Soft, elegant tears — the kind that made Alphas want to burn the world down.

"I'm sorry," Dominic murmured, and his voice carried a tenderness that hollowed me out. "You shouldn't have had to endure that."

Seraphina's tears slid down her cheekbones. "It's nothing. If a few marks is the cost of your mother accepting me into the pack, I'd take a hundred."

He bent his head and pressed his lips to the edge of the wound — once, twice, three times — and I felt the bond between us shudder as his healing energy, the warmth an Alpha was supposed to reserve for his bonded mate, poured into another woman's skin.

I recognized every gesture. After I'd survived my own ninety-nine moons of trial — the sleepless hunts, the ritual challenges, the night a rival Beta had dislocated my shoulder to test whether I'd cry in front of the pack — Dominic had knelt beside me with that same expression. Raw. Wrecked. Promising the moon.

Now he was giving that moon to someone else.

I didn't go in. I went downstairs and made myself a cup of coffee.

The kitchen was quiet. The staff had vanished — the way people do in dens where the violence is domestic and the exits are watched. I sat at the stone island and drank my coffee and felt, for the first time in months, something close to calm.

It was the calm of a wolf who has already left the pack. The body remains in the territory, but the soul has already crossed the border.

"You're still here."

Dominic appeared in the kitchen doorway, sleeves rolled to his elbows, a trace of calendula still on his hands. He looked at me the way you look at a piece of furniture you'd forgotten was in the room.

"How's Miss Volkov?" I asked. "The wound didn't look too deep."

He studied my face. Searching for the fracture — the howl, the shattered glass, the shift into fur and teeth he'd come to expect from me. The spectacular collapse that always proved I still loved him enough to break.

He found nothing.

"You're not angry?"

"Should I be?"

If this had been a year ago — six months ago — I would have shifted in the middle of the kitchen, torn the curtains from the windows, and left claw marks in every wall between here and the front door. He was counting on that version of me. The Luna who raged and burned and always, always came crawling back with her belly to the ground.

That woman was dead. She'd died on her feet in the corridor of the Gilded Den, watching her mate fasten another woman's necklace, and the wolf who replaced her had no interest in performing grief for a man who would only use it as proof she was still his.

Dominic crossed the kitchen and pulled me against him. His chin settled against my hair, and his voice dropped to the low, intimate register that hummed through the bond — the one designed to make a mate feel safe, feel chosen, feel like the only wolf who mattered.

"I know the article was your way of punishing me. And I deserved it. But you need to understand — whatever I feel for Seraphina, it's fascination. Infatuation. You are my bonded mate. You will always be my Luna."

He paused, and when he continued, his tone carried the easy certainty of a man who believed his own mythology.

"You've been part of this pack long enough to understand how it works, Lyra. The Lunas on the Eastern Council — they understand. An Alpha in my position has needs that go beyond a single bond. History is full of Alphas who kept chosen companions alongside their fated mates. It doesn't diminish what we have. It means the world I operate in is bigger than one bond."

I stood very still inside his arms.

Eight years. Eight years of blood and silence and learning to smile at pack summits where Alphas carved up territory over rare steak and wolfsbane wine. Eight years of building myself into the Luna this dynasty required — and he was asking me to shrink further. To fold my wolf down small enough to make room for another woman inside a bond that had already made me invisible.

I placed both hands flat against his chest and pushed.

Not violently. Firmly. The way you close a door you never intend to open again.

"You're right," I said. "The Lunas on the council understand. And so do I."

His eyes lit with relief — the desperate, self-serving relief of a man who mistakes surrender for forgiveness.

"I knew you'd —"

"I understand that I was wrong to expect anything different from you."

The relief flickered. Not quite dead, but wounded.

"Get some sleep, Dominic. It's been a long night for everyone."

I turned toward the stairs and caught, at the edge of my senses, a heartbeat retreating around the corner. A whisper of silk. The faintest ghost of jasmine.

Seraphina had been listening. Of course she had.

I climbed the stairs, closed our bedroom door, and began — quietly — to pack.

That night, Dominic didn't come to bed. I found him at three in the morning on the living room couch, half-shifted in his sleep — claws extended, canines out, the way wolves sleep when their instincts are at war with their choices. Empty bottles of wolfsbane whiskey lined the coffee table, and draped across the back of the adjacent chair was a woman's cashmere wrap — Seraphina's, left behind like a scent mark on conquered ground.

Seventy-two hours later, Helena's bonded attorney delivered an envelope to my door.

Inside: a formal decree of bond severance, sealed by three pack elders and filed with the Inter-Pack Council. My copy. Clean, binding, irreversible.

That same afternoon, Dominic's phone rang eleven times. Then fourteen. Then twenty-six.

The calls weren't for me.

They were from Greymoor Hall.

By evening, I was gone — a single suitcase, a new phone, and a set of credentials for the Council network seat Helena had promised me two weeks earlier. I left behind every piece of jewelry, every fur-lined coat, every artifact of the life that had never truly been mine.

The last thing I heard before I closed the front door was Dominic's voice — raw, cracking, half-wolf — echoing through the foyer as a trembling housekeeper held out the severance papers he'd finally been forced to read.

"This isn't — I didn't sign this. I would never have — where is she? Where is my mate?"

But I was already in the car. Already pulling away from a den I'd lived in for three years and never once called home.

My phone buzzed. A single message from Helena Ashford:

He knows. His wolf is tearing him apart. Don't look back.

I didn't.

The bond in my chest flickered once — a dying ember, gold fading to grey — and then went quiet. Not severed. Not yet. But close enough that when I rolled down the window and let the night air fill my lungs, the only wolf I could scent was my own.