Danae’s POV
The card sat against my thigh all the way to the parking garage—a silent, pointed weight.
“Your face got hurt because of me.” As we walked to Eirwen’s car, I kept my eyes on the ground, guilt knotting my stomach as I thought of the three red lines on her cheekbone.
Three lines that wouldn’t have been there if I hadn’t been in her life right now.
Eirwen bumped her shoulder gently against mine.
“And you’d do the same for me.” A wink with her uninjured eye.
“Besides—battle scars are kind of sexy, right?”
I adjusted the driver’s seat and mirrors, my hands trembling only slightly as I pulled out of the clinic lot.
Eirwen found a pop station on the radio, and for a few minutes neither of us said anything.
The music filled the space where the silence might have grown teeth.
She turned the volume down.
“So.
Jorah was…
intense.”
I gripped the wheel harder.
My knuckles paled.
“He’s arrogant and presumptuous.
Classic top-of-the-food-chain syndrome.” My heartbeat picked up at just the syllables of his name, which I refused to examine further.
“He’s also scorching hot,” Eirwen said, with the placid matter-of-factness of someone delivering weather data.
“He’s…” I felt the heat climb from my chest to my throat and then my face.
“Acceptable-looking.”
“Acceptable.” She let the word sit there between us for exactly as long as it deserved.
“Danae.
The man looks like a cover designer got lost and accidentally made a real human.
Those eyes.
That jaw—”
“Fine.” I stopped at a red light and stared straight ahead at traffic.
“He’s objectively attractive.
Happy?”
The memories came without invitation: his chest against mine in the dark, his hands moving with intent and certainty, his mouth at my neck.
I shifted uncomfortably in the seat.
“But he’s also arrogant and paranoid and—”
“And?” Eirwen’s voice was gentle, leading.
I exhaled slowly.
The light changed.
“The man I spent the night with four days ago.
After I found Galen and Drusilla.
He’s the one.”
Eirwen choked so violently on her own inhale that I nearly swerved. You are reading on g.com, the official source.
“What?
Caspian Jorah?” Her voice climbed to a register I’d only previously heard at weddings and at the sight of very small dogs.
“The future Alpha of the Ashmoon Pack?”
“Would you keep it down?” I hissed, though we were alone in the car.
My face was at ignition temperature.
“It was a mistake.
A massive, catastrophic mistake that I regret with every available fiber.”
Another lie.
I remembered every detail of that night with the kind of unwilling precision that suggests the brain knows something the heart doesn’t yet.
“How on earth did that even—”
“I’ll explain when you’ve stopped hyperventilating,” I said.
I recounted the Moonlight Bar—the dark corner, the whiskey I’d had no business drinking, the way he’d looked at me like I was someone worth looking at when every other person in my life had looked away.
I kept the telling spare, clinical.
I omitted the way my pulse had spiked when he’d leaned close.
The way his scent had reached me first and made something in me go very still.
“He thinks I targeted him,” I finished, pulling into Eirwen’s complex and cutting the engine.
“Deliberately.
Like I was climbing some pack hierarchy.”
Eirwen was quiet for a moment, processing.
“Well,” she said at last, carefully, “from his perspective—”
“Whose side are you on?”
“Yours.
Always.” She held up a hand, placating.
“But werewolves are built paranoid, especially Alphas.
They’ve been targeted by ambitious wolves and humans for centuries.
He’s not wrong to be suspicious—just wrong about you.”
Caspian’s POV
“Galen.”
The word landed in the training center like a thrown stone, and the room fell silent immediately.
A dozen pack members paused mid-drill, the echo of impact and breath and effort tapering away.
They found other things to look at.
Galen Bryneholm set down his training staff and came to me with his head bowed at exactly the angle of a man who knows he’s in trouble and has decided that submission is his best available option.
“Future Alpha.” A respectful distance maintained.
“How may I serve you?”
The formal greeting irritated me in a way I didn’t bother to conceal.
“Explain to me,” I said, my voice low enough that only he could hear, “how a werewolf comes to physically assault two human women in a public parking lot.”
A flicker of surprise crossed his face before he buried it.
The other wolves in the room were absolutely not watching us with their entire attention.
“One of them is my mate,” he said.
Something inside me recoiled at the claim—a visceral, instinctive rejection of the word in his mouth applied to her.
“She rejected you.
Why?”
His jaw worked.
“There was a misunderstanding.”
“About Drusilla Parker?
About your son?” I stepped closer, dropping my voice further.
My pulse had sharpened in a way that had nothing to do with anger and everything to do with the image that kept surfacing unbidden: Danae’s defiant green eyes looking straight into mine.
“About how you planned to use a human mate for status before discarding her?”
Galen’s head snapped up, shock naked on his face.
“How did you—”
“Why did you put your hands on her?” The question came out rougher than intended.
“And on her friend?”
He shifted his weight, the posture of a man being cornered by something he can’t see clearly.
“I lost control.
The rejection pain—the mate bond—”
“Don’t lecture me about mate bonds.” The wolf in me pressed against its containment, wanting something I wouldn’t name.
My hands curled at my sides.
“You betrayed her trust for years.
You have a child with another woman.
And you claim to suffer from a broken mate bond?”
“I love Drusilla.” He said it quietly, the words carrying the particular weight of a truth admitted against resistance.
“But many of us take human mates for appearances.
It’s not uncommon.”
My control slipped for exactly one second.
My eyes went gold.
Galen dropped his gaze and bared his neck in immediate, reflex submission.
“So you pursued a five-year relationship with a woman you never intended to truly bond with,” I said, letting the disgust into my voice because I saw no reason to conceal it.
“And then assaulted her when she had the audacity to leave.”
“I care for Drusilla.
She’s my true mate.” A pause.
“Danae was just…
she’s just a human.
Nothing special.”
Something twisted inside me—sharp, specific, irrational.
The honeysuckle-and-rain scent that had haunted me for days sharpened in my memory like a window being thrown open.
My skin flushed with a heat that had no appropriate name.
“You’re being considered for the Delta position because of your strategic judgment,” I said, my voice going cold and flat in the way it does when I am most genuinely angry.
“Yet you risked your standing, your career, and your pack’s public reputation for this.
Disappointing doesn’t begin to cover it.”
“I can explain—”
“Garrick will handle this from here.”
I turned and walked out, and the silence behind me was absolute.