Danae’s POV
Galen’s scent reached me before I turned.
Five years had embedded it deep—expensive cologne and something wilder underneath, the mineral-dark note of a predator that I’d once told myself was just cologne fading.
My stomach twisted as I turned.
He was closing the distance with purpose, jaw set, eyes burning with a fury barely contained beneath the surface.
Not the unfocused, animal grief from the hospital.
This was something colder and more deliberate.
“Keep walking,” Eirwen breathed beside me, her fingers digging into my arm.
“Don’t engage.”
But he was already there.
His hand shot out and seized my upper arm, spinning me toward him with a grip that left no room for interpretation.
“Running away again?” he said, voice low and vicious, face close enough that I could see the amber beginning to burn at the edges of his irises.
“That seems to be your specialty lately.”
“Let go of me.” I kept my voice steady through sheer mechanical will, though my pulse was hammering hard enough that he could certainly hear it.
His touch made my skin crawl.
“Not until we talk about what you’ve done.” His grip tightened.
“You’ve ruined everything.
Because of you, I’ll never become a true Delta.”
The irony of that—his career, his ambition, the life he’d built on a foundation of lies and I’d helpfully propped up—cracked something loose inside me.
Anger flooded in behind the fear, burning it back.
“Go to hell.”
The slap came faster than thought.
His palm connected with my cheek and snapped my head sideways.
The crack of it rang out across the concrete expanse of the parking lot. Visit g.com for the full chapter.
I staggered, catching myself against a parked car, more stunned by the fact of it than by the pain—Galen had never hit me.
In five years, never once.
The boundary had just moved, and I understood in my bones what that meant.
“You owe me.” He advanced, eyes flickering between human and something rawer.
“For the wedding I paid for.
For everything I gave you.”
Eirwen stepped into the space between us.
Small and narmed,but utterly unflinching.
“Back off,” she said quietly.
“There are security cameras everywhere.”
His gaze slid to her, curling with contempt.
“You’re next.
Don’t think I’ve forgotten your role in this.”
“My role?” Her voice was level.
“Supporting my friend after you spent five years lying to her face?”
He reached past Eirwen and grabbed my arm again, wrenching hard enough that pain flared through my shoulder and up into my neck.
“I betrayed her?” A cruel laugh.
“She’s the one who spread her legs for another wolf while we were still mated.”
Heat flooded my face—not shame, I realized with some distant surprise, but rage, pure and clarifying.
“I did that after I found out what you’d been doing for years,” I shot back, my voice cracking with the force of it.
“I just chose not to look at your lying, cheating face anymore.”
“You’re no better than me.” His breath was hot against my ear.
“I felt it through the bond.
Every moment of it.” His grip ground the bones of my wrist together until I had to bite down on the inside of my cheek to keep from crying out.
“You owe me.
For every penny I lost.”
“You have a son with my bridesmaid, and you want to talk to me about betrayal?”
Something dark and terrible surfaced in his expression.
His eyes shifted fully—amber drowning to feral gold, pupils going to thin, predatory slits.
Not halfway.
All the way.
The man I had loved receding behind something that had always been there, just hidden.
“You stupid, ungrateful—”
He shoved me.
Hard.
My spine met the concrete pillar with an impact that detonated across my shoulder blades and drove the air from my lungs in a single gasp.
My legs buckled and I went down, sliding against the rough surface, the world briefly white at the edges.
“Stop!” Eirwen rushed forward, fury making her fearless.
“Galen, have you lost your mind?”
He backhanded her without looking.
The force of it spun her into the side of a parked car, and when she caught herself, three raw lines of red stood out on her cheekbone—his nails, slightly extended now, slightly too sharp, slightly too long.
The sound I’d been dreading, the sound I’d been hoping for.
“Enough.”
It rolled through the parking lot like a pressure change before a storm—deep, resonant, carrying the kind of authority that bypassed the reasoning brain entirely and spoke straight to the instinctive one.
My body responded before my mind caught up, something deep in my chest going still and alert.
Caspian Jorah.
Every cell in me knew that voice before I even lifted my head.