Danae’s POV
The study vanished from my memory in a smear of heat and unshed tears.
I couldn’t remember crossing the apartment.
I only knew I was in our bedroom, pulling through Galen’s belongings with a fury so unfamiliar it felt almost animal.
My hands wouldn’t stop shaking.
They found a concealed compartment in his nightstand.
More photographs waited inside.
Galen and Drusilla, intimately entwined, sharing things he had never shared with me.
Beside them lay a platinum bracelet.
Their initials were engraved within a symbol I recognized from werewolf mating rituals.
Even that had belonged to her.
Then my fingers closed around a little velvet box.
A diamond flashed when I opened it.
An engagement ring—far more extravagant than the one I wore.
For a moment, the two seemed to exist in cruel comparison: hers in the box, mine on my hand, five years reduced to a difference in stones.
The attached card was handwritten.
[For my true love.
Yours, always.
W.]
I sank onto the bed with the ring held between trembling fingers.
Some foolish remnant of hope kept searching for an explanation.
A misunderstanding.
Anything that could leave even a small part of the past five years intact.
But the photographs stayed what they were.
The card said what it said.
I couldn’t unread either of them, and finally the tears spilled hot down my face.
A key turned in the front door.
I went still.
My heartbeat sounded impossibly loud, loud enough for an ordinary human to hear.
What would it sound like to a werewolf?
Then voices reached me from the entryway, and every other thought stopped.
His low voice.
Her laugh.
Galen and Drusilla.
Together.
“We could’ve gone straight to mine,” she said.
I’d never heard her use that voice with me.
Light, teasing, utterly comfortable.
The voice of someone certain of her welcome.
“I need a shower first.
I smell like the gym.” Galen sounded equally at ease.
“Your werewolf nose would complain.”
They came around the corner into the bedroom and stopped.
The color left his face.
Drusilla’s manicured hand dropped from his waist as though she’d only just realized where it was resting.
The floor seemed to shift beneath me, though I hadn’t moved.
“Danae?” His voice broke on my name.
So much for the assured future Delta of the Ashmoon Pack.
“What are you doing here?
You’re supposed to be at Eirwen’s.”
I couldn’t answer.
My throat seemed locked, the words trapped somewhere behind the pain.
Drusilla recovered before he did.
A slow smile curved across her flawless makeup.
Gold flickered at the edges of her eyes.
“So much for keeping the wolf in the bag.” Her laugh was small and cruel.
“I’ve had enough of sneaking around for years, anyway.
I just didn’t expect you to find out on your wedding eve.
Poor little human.”
“Five years.”
The words barely made it out.
Each one hurt.
“I’ve been with you five years, Galen.
And you’ve been with my bridesmaid…”
He stepped closer, looking at the evidence spread across the bed.
Gold began seeping into the amber of his irises.
His wolf, coming nearer the surface.
“You had no right to search my things, Danae.
This is private.”
Private.
That was what he wanted to defend.
I recoiled before I could stop myself.
Something in my human body recognized the danger in him, even while something deeper burned through the hurt and began to turn it into anger.
“Elric.
Is he your son?
How long have you been doing this?”
Drusilla tossed her platinum-blond hair back and adjusted her designer handbag with an arrogance that made my skin prickle.
“Before you came along, darling.
Why else do you think he never spends a full moon with you?”
For a moment, I felt hollow with cold.
Full moons were sacred.
Galen had explained that to me—how the wolf drew closer to the surface, how pack bonds were strongest, how important those nights were.
There were rituals humans couldn’t attend.
Obligations his future rank demanded.
I’d accepted every explanation.
And all that time, he’d been with her.
With their son.
Building the very family closeness I had been imagining for us.
“Was any of it real?” My voice strengthened as the anger gathered beneath it.
“You meant to marry me tomorrow.
Mark me.
And keep seeing her afterward?
Is that all I was for—helping you get your precious Delta position?”
He moved toward me with that effortless werewolf grace.
When he spoke, he used the patient, superior tone he reserved for things he believed my human mind couldn’t grasp.
“This happens in werewolf society, Danae.
Especially when a wolf is moving up.
You’re my destined mate.
The Pack honors that bond.
It doesn’t mean I have no other needs.
Once I’m Delta—”
Drusilla laughed over him.
Her eyes were wholly gold now.
“He needs the Alpha and the elders to see him with his mate.
That doesn’t make you the woman he loves.
He loves me.
We have a son.
You’ll be his political mate.
Powerful wolves need one.”
Political mate.
The phrase stripped the last tenderness from what I was feeling.
They were discussing the place I would occupy as though they had already agreed on it together.
As though I was the only person who hadn’t been told.
“What am I to you?” I demanded.
“An idiot you can use when it suits you?
Another move in your pack politics?
A human trophy for the Alpha to admire?”
Galen caught my wrist.
Pain shot up my arm.
His grip was impossibly strong, and as I looked down, his nails thickened and lengthened.
Not a complete shift.
Just enough to show me how little it would take to hurt me.
“The wedding is tomorrow,” he said.
“You cannot refuse the bond.
My position depends on it.
You know what my father’s relationship with the Alpha means.
This marriage secures our bloodline’s status for generations.”
I tried to pull away.
His hand didn’t yield.
The points of his claws broke my skin, leaving tiny beads of blood.
“Galen, you’re hurting me!”
But the sting at my wrist was almost small beside the other pain.
Five years of manipulation.
Five years of lies.
Now they were speaking over my ruined life, annoyed that their convenient stepping stone had found a voice.
“You deserve each other.”
Rage gave me one sharp burst of strength.
I tore my arm free, his claws dragging narrow red lines across my skin.
The ring flew from my hand and struck his face just beneath the eye.
He flinched in surprise.
His fingers went to the small red mark on his cheek.
“Keep it!” My voice broke, but I didn’t lower it.
“I will not be your mate.
I will not let you mark me.”
Galen bent to retrieve the fallen ring.
When he straightened, disbelief had hardened into anger, and his voice carried an unmistakable growl.
“You have no idea what you’re doing.
This is bigger than us.
There are traditions.
A hierarchy.”
Drusilla moved between us and laid her hand on his arm.
Her nails pressed into his sleeve with an ownership she no longer bothered to disguise.
“Stop being ungrateful,” she told me.
“Human women would do anything for what you’re being offered.
A Delta’s protection.
His money.
His status.
Do you even understand what that gives you?”
Something inside me broke clean through.
My hand moved before thought could catch it.
The slap landed across her face with a crack that seemed to fill every corner of the room.
Silence.
For one terrible heartbeat, neither of them moved.
Then Drusilla straightened.
Her jaw began to lengthen.
Teeth sharpened beyond anything a human mouth could hold.
The gold in her eyes narrowed around predatory slits, and the sound rising from her throat no longer belonged to a woman.
Cold rushed through me as I watched her beauty distort into something that could tear me apart.
“Pathetic little human,” she snarled through her changing mouth.
“You don’t hit a werewolf and survive it.”