Caspian’s POV
The formal greeting irritated me before it finished.
My jaw locked.
“Explain to the room,” I said quietly, “how a werewolf comes to put his hands on two human women.”
Surprise crossed Galen’s face before his discipline covered it.
Around us, the training yard went through the motions—weights lifted, sparring continued—but every ear in the space had swung toward us like a compass finding north.
Galen swallowed.
His gaze found the floor.
“One of them is my mate.”
“Was,” I corrected.
The word came out sharper than I’d planned, carried by something that had nothing to do with pack law.
“She rejected you.
Why?”
His jaw tightened.
“There was a misunderstanding.”
“About Drusilla Parker?” I kept my voice low, meant only for him.
“About the child?
About five years of calculated deception while you planned to use a human woman for status and then set her aside?”
His head snapped up.
Amber eyes wide.
“How did you—”
“Why did you put your hands on her today?” I cut across him.
“And on her friend?”
He shifted his weight, working through the options.
“I lost control.
The rejection—the pain of a broken mate bond, you know how it—”
“Don’t.” The word dropped like a stone.
“Don’t tell me about mate bonds.
You chose to betray her trust for years.
You have a child with another woman.
And now you want the language of sacred bonds as a shield?” My fingers had curled into fists without my noticing.
I forced them open.
“What does that make you, Galen?”
“I love Drusilla,” he said, his voice stripped down to something raw and private.
Many do it.”
My control slipped by a fraction.
My eyes went gold.
Galen’s gaze dropped immediately, throat exposed in automatic submission.
The wolves nearest us found reasons to look elsewhere.
“So you ran a five-year relationship with a woman you never intended to honor,” I said, each word its own sentence.
“Sacrificed your professional standing.
Risked your position in this pack.
For the sake of a private arrangement you could have ended cleanly at any point.” I let the silence stretch.
“I find that disappointing.”
“It wasn’t like that.” His voice had gone thin.
“I do care for her.
She’s just—”
He stopped himself.
Not quite in time.
“Just what?”
“She’s human.
Nothing special.” He said it the way people say things they’ve rehearsed into convenience—flat, practiced, emptied of its own cruelty.
“Ordinary.”
Something moved through me that I didn’t name.
Danae’s face surfaced without invitation—the exact green of her eyes, the line of her chin when she refused to back down from something.
The particular quality of her defiance, the way it didn’t waver even when her hands shook.
The scent of her: honeysuckle and rain, still present somewhere at the back of my skull even now.
My chest tightened.
My pulse spiked—and not with anger.
I put it down.
Filed it away.
“Garrick will handle this from here,” I said.
“You’re done with it.”
I turned and walked out of the training center without waiting for a response.
In the car, I sat for a long time before I started the engine.
My hands gripped the wheel too hard.
The thought wouldn’t file away—kept surfacing the moment I released it.
Danae.
The specific quality of her that had followed me since that night: her skin, the sound she made when she stopped pretending to be composed, the gravity of her attention when she focused on something and forgot to be careful.
The wolf inside me was pacing in long, restless circuits, insisting on a conclusion I refused to reach.
Ordinary, Galen had called her.
The word landed wrong.
Not insulting—absurd.
Like calling a fire unremarkable.
My hand moved before I made a conscious decision.
Down.
Unzipping.
My eyes closed against the afternoon light bleaching through the windshield, and her face was there before I’d summoned it.
Her laugh when she forgot to guard herself.
Her skin under my hands.
The low sound of her voice against my throat in the dark.
My jaw set.
Teeth grinding.
Everything in my chest pulling toward something I had no vocabulary for and no intention of surrendering to.
Her name left my mouth before I caught it.
Low.
Rough.
Not a word so much as a concession.
“Danae.”
I sat in the silent car for a long time after, engine still off, staring at nothing, and did not start driving until I’d made no decision at all.