DYLAN
It was supposed to be my day.
My ascension as Pack Leader.
The moment my father’s years of positioning and sacrifice finally crystallized into something real—a title, a future, a pack that would answer to my name.
I had been waiting for it my entire life.
We all had.
And then, in the span of a single morning, it was gone.
I sit in my father’s study with an untouched glass in front of me and I turn it over in my head the way you press a bruise—not because it helps, but because I can’t stop.
The pack.
The title.
The future that was supposed to be mine by blood and by right—all of it dissolved before my eyes like none of it had ever been promised at all.
One man walked through our gates and decided, and the rest of us arranged ourselves around his decision because there was nothing else to do.
And Lillian.
The rage that comes with that thought is unlike anything I’ve felt before.
Not the hot, sharp kind I’m used to—this is something that lives deeper, something that gets into the marrow and radiates outward, and when it hit me in that hall I felt my wolf surge up to meet it before I could stop him.
The shift was right there, right beneath my skin, clawing to get out—
My father’s arms closed around me from behind.
Hard.
Unyielding.
“Don’t.” His voice was low and pressed close to my ear, meant for no one else.
“She is nothing.
You rejected her yourself—a useless half-breed omega who couldn’t even complete her own transformation.
She is not worth your wolf.
She is not worth a single life in that hall.” His grip tightened.
“If you move against him, he kills everyone.
Every person in that room.
Do you understand me?
Stand down.”
I stood down.
I breathed through it and I stood down and I watched Azriel take everything—my pack, my title, my future—and I did not move.
I stood there and I swallowed it whole and I hated every second of it with a clarity I have never felt about anything before.
By the time the caravan rolled out of the gate, something in me had gone very quiet.
Very cold.
The rage was still there—it hasn’t left, I don’t think it’s going to leave—but it had changed shape.
Settled into something harder and less combustible.
Something that doesn’t burn out.
My father sets a glass in front of me and sits across the desk.
“She’s gone to him,” he says.
“That’s different from being gone.”
I look up.
“He believes it’s finished.” My father folds his hands on the desk with the composure of a man who never stopped calculating, not even for a moment, not even while the hall was being reorganized around a foreign king’s instructions.
“He marked her, claimed her, carried her across the border in his royal caravan.
As far as Azriel is concerned, he won.
We knelt.
It’s over.” A pause.
“Let him keep thinking that.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying we give him exactly what he expects.” His voice is measured and precise, each word placed with care.
“Quiet compliance.
Wounded pride.
A defeated pack that has accepted its losses and gone back to living under his rule.
Men like Azriel are never more exposed than when they believe the game is already finished.” He picks up his own glass and turns it once in his hand.
“He showed us something today, whether he meant to or not.
A man doesn’t mark a half-blood breeder in a panic to save her life unless she has already become something he cannot afford to lose.
He has a weakness.
And we know exactly what it is.”
I think of her face.
The mark visible at her throat as she was guided toward his carriage.
The way she didn’t look back.
“We use her,” my father continues.
“When the time is right—and we will know when it is right—we take her back.
And when we have her, we have him.
We use what she means to him to take back everything he took from us today.
The pack.
The authority.
The throne itself, if we’re patient enough.” He sets his glass down.
“Lillian becomes the weapon that destroys Azriel.”
The study is quiet.
I pick up the glass and drain it.
She was mine first.
The Moon Goddess gave her to me before she gave her to anyone else, and I threw that away with both hands because I thought I was choosing something better.
I thought Julia was something better.
I was wrong about a great many things.
But this is not about what I feel.
I know the difference.
What I want is what was taken from me—the title, the pack, the future—and Lillian is the path back to all of it.
That’s all.
“Tell me everything,” I say.
My father smiles and begins.