Damon got married?
Victor’s mind went blank.
When?
How had he not caught a single whisper of it?
“Grandma.” His voice cracked on the word, his heart slamming against his ribs.
“Dad got married?”
“What, he didn’t tell you?” Queen Mother Margaret’s frown deepened, her tone sharpening with disapproval.
“He grows more thoughtless by the year.
Marriage is no small thing, and he couldn’t be bothered to tell his own son?
Ridiculous.”
Victor barely heard her.
His ears were ringing.
His thoughts spun out into static.
Damon got married.
For years, the Alpha King had been notoriously cold toward women.
He’d turned down high-born she-wolves by the dozen, brushed off every match Margaret ever arranged.
Victor had honestly come to believe his adoptive father simply wasn’t built to want anyone.
And now—without a word, without a warning—he had a wife.
To whom?
Cold dread slid through him like ice water down the spine.
He’d built everything on one fact.
One single, load-bearing fact: Damon wasn’t married.
The Elder Council had been leaning on the Alpha King for years to take a Luna and sire an heir.
If Damon kept refusing, they’d eventually move to impeach him—an Alpha who failed his bloodline duty couldn’t hold the throne forever.
And when that day came, Victor had meant to be ready.
Marry Stella.
Present himself as the stable, family-minded successor.
Let the Council look at the cold, heirless king and then look at him—and choose the better bet.
But a married Damon changed the board entirely.
No impeachment.
No opening.
The King’s seat, locked.
And Victor’s path to it—
Blocked.
“Grandma.” He dragged his voice back under control, pasting on a smile that felt like cracked plaster over a wound.
“When was the wedding?
I hadn’t heard a thing.”
“Just days ago.” Margaret’s irritation hadn’t cooled.
Victor left the estate.
The smile slid off his face the second he turned away.
He pulled out his phone and stared at Stella’s latest text—some sweet, flirty little nothing—and for the first time it made his chest tighten instead of lift.
He’d come here to win Margaret over, to smooth the road to marrying Stella.
Instead he was walking out with a stepmother he’d never met and a future in pieces.
“Sterling Holdings,” he told his driver, clipped.
Sterling Holdings.
Top floor.
The Alpha King’s office.
Damon hadn’t returned yet.
Victor waited in the reception room for nearly two hours, impatience curdling into something worse, before the assistant finally showed him in.
“Father.” Victor stopped before the vast desk, his tone carefully respectful.
Damon didn’t look up from his document.
“What is it?”
Victor was used to the coldness.
But today, with so much riding on it, it cut deeper than usual.
He breathed in slow, steadying himself.
“Grandma said you got married.”
“Yes.” Damon turned a page.
“What about it?”
Victor swallowed the bitterness clawing up his throat and produced a thin smile.
“Congratulations.
I only wondered when the Luna might be free.
I’d like to meet her.
Properly.”
“She’s busy at the moment,” Damon said, even.
“We’ll arrange something.
Later.”
Victor’s jaw ached from holding the smile.
“It happened so fast.
I hadn’t heard so much as a rumor.” A beat.
“Where’s she from?
Which pack?”
For the first time, Damon lifted his eyes.
The look he gave his son was flat, unreadable, and cold enough to raise the hair on Victor’s arms.
“Why,” Damon said slowly, “are you so curious about my wife?”
The question landed like a hand closing around his throat.
Victor’s heart lurched.
Did Damon know something?
No—impossible.
There was nothing to know.
His curiosity was ordinary.
Any son would ask.
“No reason.” He laughed, and it came out a half-tone too high.
“She’s going to be family.
I’d just like to know who I’m calling my stepmother, that’s all.”
Damon studied him a moment longer.
Then, unhurried, he looked back down at his papers.
“You’ll meet her when it’s appropriate.”
The dismissal was absolute.
Victor forced himself onward, to the second reason he’d come.
“There’s something else.
Stella and I want to marry.
I came to ask your blessing.”
Damon’s frown deepened, irritation flickering through.
“Your personal life is your own.
You don’t need my permission.”
“But Grandma said—”
“Alpha King.” Cole, the assistant, appeared in the doorway right on cue.
“The council is convening.”
Damon stood, lifted his jacket from the back of the chair, and shrugged into it without breaking stride.
He didn’t look at Victor again.
“You can go.”
He crossed the office and passed his son on the way to the door—close enough that Victor caught it.
A scent.
Faint, clinging to Damon’s collar.
Victor went rigid.
He knew that scent.
He’d know it in the dark, in a crowd, in his sleep.
He’d spent years with it curled against his side.
Ava.
His mind lurched into motion, scrambling for an explanation—any explanation.
Why would Ava have been anywhere near Damon?
They moved in different worlds.
Damon was the Alpha King; Ava was a nobody architect from a low-ranking pack.
There was no reason on earth their paths should cross.
Unless… work?
Sterling Holdings had its hands in half the construction in the city.
Maybe her firm had pitched a project.
Maybe she’d been in this very building for a meeting, nothing more.
That had to be it.
A coincidence.
Just a coincidence.
But the scent was on his collar.
Not his sleeve.
Not his jacket.
His collar—close, and warm, and lingering, the way a scent only settled when two people had stood near enough to—
No.
Victor slammed the thought shut before it could finish.
“This way, Alpha Victor.” Cole’s smooth voice sliced clean through the spiral.
Victor blinked, dragged back into the room.
He turned, stiff, his smile frozen and brittle on his face, and walked out with the doubt already sinking its teeth in.