Chapter One

PRESENT TIME

“If I hadn’t left for China to complete my MBA… would you have married her?” I hear her ask him, her voice low and coaxing, curling like smoke through the narrow vents that lead from the foyer to the back of the house.

I freeze. I have one foot on the landing and the other hovering just above the marble step. The question shouldn’t matter. I should keep walking, keep breathing, pretend I never heard it. But I don’t move. I can’t move. I stand there, struck still by something sharp and invisible that presses against my chest, folding me into silence.

“No.”

His voice remains steady, measured with that same restraint he uses during tense negotiations, but the edge beneath it is impossible to miss.

That one word slices through the quiet like a slow blade dragged across soft skin, and I feel it everywhere, in the bones of my fingers and the hollow behind my ribs.

I don’t mean to eavesdrop. It isn’t like me. But I had not left the house this morning as planned. I had stayed in the studio on the east wing, windows flung wide to let in the wild air from the mountains, brush in hand, colors bleeding beneath my fingers. I had been painting, minding my own silence, when their voices floated into the room through the ancient ventilation system that runs through Valebreck Manor.

Now I’m rooted to the spot, hidden behind the curved arch of the grand staircase, the same one that spirals around a carved obsidian pillar Niklath had imported from the ruins of a collapsed werewolf temple. The foyer is as wide as a ballroom, flooded with light from the tall glass wall that looks out over the cliffs and the snow-streaked pine forest below. Everything here is modern and commanding, dark and quiet. The floors are blackwood. The walls are slate. But the warmth… the warmth came from me. Every wall hanging, every burnt orange throw and turquoise ornament, the sculpted bowls and the beaded coasters. My hands chose them. My heart softened this place. My presence turned it into something more than a fortress.

He doesn’t know I’m here. He doesn’t know I stayed. He doesn’t know that right now, I can hear every word he speaks to the woman he once loved, the one he tried to forget. Cecilia. The ex. The one who left him to chase a title. Who now stands in my home. It was chance. Cruel, perfect chance.

I wanted to walk in and clap. Maybe laugh. Maybe scream. But what would I be applauding? What would I even accuse them of? She was his past. I am his present. Or so I thought.

I stay where I am, my heart is racing, my skin hot with betrayal, every muscle in my body trembling with the effort of restraint. The woman in me wants answers.

“Really?” she asks again, and there is a lift in her tone. Feathered, smug and dangerous.

Bitch!

I can almost hear the tilt of her head, the delicate raise of her perfect brow, as if her return makes her untouchable again.

“No. I wouldn’t have married her, because obviously I would still be with you,” he replies, his voice is maddeningly calm, just like the kind of calm he reserves for high-level negotiations and delicate pack disputes. “But you left. I met Mia. And I am with her now.”

Miara. He never calls me that when speaking to others. Only when it’s just us, when we are in bed and his lips brush my shoulder. When we are alone. When it’s safe.

But it doesn’t feel safe now. Behind me, the hallway stretches toward the studio, each door leading to a space I shaped, a life I built beside him. A life I thought was real.

My pulse is a drumbeat in my ears. Their conversation should have ended. But it hasn’t. She pushes again. “Do you love her?”

That question is met with silence and It stretches. Long enough to scrape. Long enough to wound.

I should turn away. I should run. I should let the ache settle and be done with it. But I wait. I wait because there is something ancient in me that refuses to flee. Something that has nothing to do with pride, and everything to do with needing the truth carved out cleanly, no matter how much it costs.

“I care for Miara,” he says at last. The words are clear. They fall like stones. “We have built a life together. One I would never exchange. Not even for you, Cecilia.”

I close my eyes.

Three years…Three years of marriage…of shared mornings and winter walks through the frostbitten trails of Valebreck. Three years of kisses in hidden rooms and tangled limbs beneath heavy furs. Three years of silences that I filled with meaning. I told myself the gestures were love. That his loyalty was enough. That I didn’t need the word. That I could feel it in the way he brushed hair from my eyes or drew circles on my lower back when he thought I was asleep.

I had been wrong…He only cares for me.

I step away from the staircase, walking slowly, the soft glide of my slippers against the blackwood louder than my breath. I make my way down the hall, through the shadows, toward the studio that has become the only place where I still feel whole.

Inside, it still smells of linseed oil and turpentine and faintly of him. The windows are still open, the chill of mountain air curling around the edges of the room. Light slants across the canvas I finished two nights ago. A portrait of him. A gift for his thirty-fifth birthday.

He had tried to peek at it that day, had padded into the studio shirtless, all sleepy charm and mock irritation when I covered it up. I had laughed, kissed his jaw, told him to wait. He had smiled. It had felt so warm then, so safe.

I look at the painting now. Every line. Every brushstroke. His eyes hold that same unreadable calm, but I had painted them with tenderness. With belief. With hope.

I lean against the edge of the table, fingers curling around the wood, and try to steady myself.

In Valebreck, werewolves are born to rule and humans are expected to yield. But I never did. That is what drew him to me, or so I believed. That I could look at him and see the man beneath the wolf, not the Alpha, not the heir, but Niklath. My husband. Mine.

And now I understand. I was never his first choice. I was simply his convenient choice… I was simply the one who fit conveniently into the life he built after she was gone.