Nadia Bennett did not marry Cole Whitmore for love.She married him because Margaret Whitmore asked her to. The woman who took her in at nine years old, put her through school, and treated her like family had one last request before she died: keep this family from falling apart. Cole needs a wife he can trust. You are the only one I trust with him.Nadia said yes. She understood what the arrangement was.What she did not understand was that she would spend eighteen months in the same penthouse as a man who prepared for her future before he even knew her and still cannot say her name like it means something. Or that she would end up pregnant, alone in a clinic, holding a result she does not know how to tell him about.Or that his ex would come back from London in a camel coat and know where the mirror was in the glove compartment.Cole Whitmore signed twenty-two percent of his company into Nadia's name on their wedding day. He has never mentioned it. That is the kind of man he is. Significant gestures made in private, silence where the words should be.Nadia is done waiting for the words.She has Margaret's letter. She has the shares. She has a baby no one knows about and a rival who wants all three.The only question is whether Cole will figure out what he has before she decides she does not need him to.

Kai Stormfang thought he knew who he was. Future alpha. Loyal boyfriend. Trusted friend. One blood moon took all three of those things away. He caught them together in the forest. His girlfriend and his best friend. The betrayal did not break him the way he expected. It changed him. Hardened something. And in the wreckage of that night, his mother arrived at three in the morning with news he did not ask for: a new stepfather, a new alliance, and a new stepbrother arriving by dawn. Jax Nightfang walked in like he owned the silence. Tattooed, pierced, completely unbothered. His scent hit Kai like a system malfunction. His wolf went still in a way it never had before. They are not related by blood. They are connected by a political arrangement neither of them chose. And they are living in the same room, attending the same classes, and training in the same pack sessions three days before the Shifting Ceremony, where every senior must shift in public and declare their intentions. Someone on campus knows what is forming between them. And they are not going to let it stand.