Danae’s POV
The morning was too bright.
I moved through it carefully, like someone navigating a room full of broken glass—each step registering the previous night in a low, constant ache.
The sunlight cut into my eyes.
My head throbbed with alcohol and regret in measures I hadn’t yet bothered to separate.
My body ached everywhere: a reminder that was both physical and something harder to name.
I should have asked him for cab fare.
Pride had intervened, as usual.
The same pride that had kept me from seeing what was happening with Galen for five entire years—the version of pride that mistakes looking capable for being okay.
The city moved around me at its normal indifferent pace.
People with their coffees and their briefcases, all aimed somewhere with purpose, all of them in possession of the forward momentum I currently lacked entirely.
Yesterday morning I had been planning a wedding.
Now I was limping home from a one-night stand with a werewolf—a man who had tried to pay me afterward like I was a service he’d ordered, which had landed in the exact center of my chest and was going to leave a mark.
My cheeks burned remembering it.
At least I hadn’t told him my name.
Galen had always called Caspian Jorah “a self-righteous, arrogant bastard,” and last night had given me no reason to disagree.
The money offer, the composure when making it, the way he’d spoken about the contract he lived inside as though I was simply another variable to manage—all of it had been exactly what Galen’s description promised.
“Insufferable egomaniac,” I muttered, hauling myself up Eirwen’s stairs, my body registering each step in protest.
“I hope I never see him again.”
Even as I said it, the memory of his touch surfaced uninvited.
The strange pull.
The inexplicable certainty that had no rational explanation and that I had absolutely no framework for.
I didn’t understand it and I didn’t want to understand it, and I shoved it down.
Eirwen flung the door open before I could knock—the dark circles under her eyes said she’d been awake all night.
“Dana.” Her voice came out thin with relief.
“Where have you been?
Galen’s been calling nonstop.
I’ve been—”
“Did you respond to him?” I walked past her and headed straight for the kitchen.
My throat was dry and I needed cold water desperately.
“Of course not.
I told him I hadn’t seen you since you left.” She followed me, bracelets jingling.
“I’ve been worried sick all night, Danae.”
I filled a glass with ice water and gulped it down in long, wincing swallows, the cold hitting my raw throat.
“I’m sorry.
I should have called.”
Eirwen went quiet behind me.
I could feel her reading me—the tangled hair, the wrinkled clothes, all of it—and then her eyes reached my neck and she went very still.
“Dana.
Oh God.
Was it—did you sleep with Galen?
Those marks on your neck—”
I touched the tender spots where Caspian had kissed me.
“Not Galen.”
Her eyes went wide.
“Not Galen?
Jesus.
You’re supposed to be getting married this afternoon!”
The word *married* hit me like a thrown stone.
I set the glass down before my shaking hands could drop it.
The reality of everything suddenly felt enormous and immediate.
“I’m not marrying Galen,” I said quietly.
Saying it aloud made it real in a way nothing else had—the decision crystallizing into fact the moment the words were in the air.
My legs made their own decision, and I slid down the bathroom doorframe until I was sitting on the floor with my knees pulled up to my chest.
Eirwen crouched beside me, her face full of concern.
“Dana.
What happened?”
“I hate him, Eirwen.” The words came out wrapped in a sob I hadn’t given myself permission to release until this exact moment.
“He’s been sleeping with Drusilla for years.
My bridesmaid.
They have a son together.
His name is Elric.
He’s six years old.”
The pain of saying it aloud was almost physical—a specific, concrete weight that pressed against my ribs.
While I had been planning our wedding, dreaming about our children, Galen already had a child.
A six-year-old boy who had grown up entirely outside the life I thought we were building together.
Eirwen’s mouth fell open.
“I went back to the apartment last night to get my engagement ring,” I continued, my voice scraping thin.
“I found messages on his laptop.
Pictures.
Documents.” I pressed my forehead against my knees.
“He was planning to mark me today, use me for status in the pack, and formally reject me after I gave him an heir.
I was never anything but a stepping stone to him.”
“That manipulative son of a bitch,” Eirwen said quietly.
She sat down on the floor beside me—just down, without ceremony, because that was what you did.
“And then you…?”
“I went to a bar. This chapter was taken from g.com without permission.
I drank too much.
I met someone.” I could feel her watching me.
“It was stupid and impulsive.
I don’t want to talk about it.”
I couldn’t tell her it was Caspian Jorah.
That would complicate everything in ways I had no capacity to navigate right now.
Eirwen took my hand.
“You don’t have to tell me everything,” she said, her voice soft.
“Just—are you okay?”
I shook my head, and the tears came properly then—ugly and uncontrolled, the kind of crying that happens when you’ve been holding everything in place since midnight and something finally gives.
Eirwen pulled me in with one arm around my shoulders and let me fall apart against her, and said nothing, and didn’t try to fix it.
We stayed like that until I could breathe again.
“We’re going to handle this,” she said finally, pulling back to look at me.
Her eyes were soft but her mind was already moving.
“First—shower.
Then the pharmacy, because the absolute last thing you need right now is a strange wolf’s baby.”
I hadn’t thought about that at all.
The possibility hadn’t even surfaced through everything else.
“Oh God.”
“One thing at a time,” Eirwen said firmly.
“Go shower.
I’ll be back in twenty minutes.”
The hot water helped the body.
Couldn’t touch anything else.
I stood under the spray and tried to think through what came next.
No apartment—I couldn’t go back to the place I’d shared with Galen.
Some savings, but not enough to rebuild from scratch.
My father’s medical bills were ongoing.
My brother’s debts were ongoing.
Every calculation led back to the same shortfall.
I was toweling off when I heard the front door hit the wall.
Not Eirwen.
The voice that followed shook the walls.
“DANAE.
OPEN THE DOOR.”