ALPHA KANE

The dagger came from his left. Kane caught the wrist before the blade reached his ribs, twisted, and felt the bone snap under his grip. The man screamed and dropped. Kane didn't look at him. He was already turning toward the second attacker coming in from the altar steps. Three of them. All Dorian's men. All inside the ritual chamber where only pack-sworn blood was supposed to enter. "You picked a stupid place to die," Kane said. The second man swung a silver-edged baton. Kane sidestepped, drove an elbow into his throat, and the man folded to the stone floor gasping. Kane grabbed his collar and slammed his head down once. He stopped moving. The third hesitated by the altar. Smart. Kane advanced anyway. "Where's Dorian," Kane said. "Too much of a coward to do this himself?" No answer. The man bolted for the side door instead of fighting, and Kane let him go. Three against one wasn't the part that worried him. Lira showing up was. She stepped out from behind the altar pillar like she'd been standing there the whole time, watching, waiting for the right second. "Kane." "You knew about this." It wasn't a question. He could see it in the stillness of her face — no shock, no fear, nothing a wife should show watching three men try to gut her husband. "I need you to be distracted," Lira said. "You fight too well when you're paying attention." He didn't understand yet. He took a step toward her, and that's when he felt it — a pull behind his sternum, hot and wrong, like something inside his chest had been hooked and was being dragged out through his skin. "What did you do?" Lira held up her palm. A blood mark was burned into it, dark red, the edges still raw like it had been carved that morning. Kane recognized the pattern half a second too late — a binding sigil, drawn from pack lore so old most Alphas thought it was myth. The kind of mark that needed contact. Skin against skin. The memory hit him: three nights ago, her hand against his chest in bed, lingering there longer than it should have. He'd thought it was tenderness. It was a stamp. "You marked me." "I marked you weeks ago," Lira said. "Tonight just finishes it." The pain spread fast. Kane's knees buckled and he caught himself on the altar edge. His vision narrowed, then doubled. He could feel the pack bond — the hum that had lived in the back of his skull since the day he was born First Alpha, the sense of every wolf under his command breathing in rhythm with him — and he could feel it being torn loose, root by root, like teeth pulled without numbing. "Stop this," he said, forcing the words out through his teeth. "Lira. Stop." "I can't. I wouldn't if I could." He lunged for her anyway. His body still remembered how to move even as the bond ripped further apart — he got one hand on her shoulder before his legs gave out completely and he hit the floor on one knee. The chamber tilted. The torches along the wall blurred into long smears of orange. "Why," he said. It came out smaller than he meant it to. Lira crouched in front of him, close enough that he could smell her — and that's when he realized he couldn't smell her anymore. No trace, no signature, nothing. The wolf-sense that had let him read every person in a room by scent alone was just gone, like a light switched off mid-sentence. "Because Dorian is what this pack needs," she said. "And you were never going to step aside on your own." "Dorian." The name came out as a snarl, except it wasn't a snarl anymore — just a human voice, rough and short of breath. "He's not pack-strong enough to —" "He's strong enough now. Stronger than you, actually, once this is finished." The last thread of the bond snapped. Kane felt it go all at once, a final yank that emptied something out of him he didn't have a word for. He collapsed forward onto both hands, head down, breathing hard against the cold stone. The silence inside his skull was the worst part. Eighteen years of pack-hum, gone in under three minutes, and what was left behind didn't feel like peace. It felt like a missing limb. Footsteps crossed the chamber floor, slow and unhurried. "Get up," Dorian said. Kane lifted his head. Dorian Vask stood in the doorway in full Beta regalia, like he'd dressed for this. Behind him, two more men — pack enforcers Kane had personally trained — stood at ease, watching their former Alpha on his knees and showing nothing. "You planned this with her," Kane said. "We planned this together, yes." Dorian crossed his arms. "You were always going to be a problem eventually, Kane. Better to remove the problem before the Council vote than after." Kane tried to stand. His legs answered slower than they should have — not broken, not injured, just ordinary. Human ordinary. He'd spent his whole life never knowing what that felt like, and now it had been dropped on him in the space of one ritual. "The Council will ask questions," Kane said. "They'll smell what you've done." "They'll smell nothing," Lira said, straightening beside Dorian, "because there's no bond left in you for them to read. You're not pack anymore, Kane. You're nobody's Alpha. You're not even pack." The words landed harder than the binding had. Kane looked at the two men he'd raised through their first hunts, who'd sworn loyalty to him under this same roof, and neither of them met his eyes. They already belonged to someone else. "This isn't finished," Kane said. Dorian smiled — not cruel, just certain, the smile of a man who'd already won and was waiting for everyone else to catch up to that fact. "It is, actually. You'll be exiled by morning. The Council won't fight me on it. They never liked you as much as you thought they did, Kane. You were just convenient. Now you're not." Kane forced himself upright, one hand braced on the altar, breath ragged in his chest the way it had never been before in his life. He looked at Lira one last time, searching her face for something — guilt, hesitation, anything — and found nothing waiting there but patience. She was waiting for him to leave so she could move on to the part of her life that didn't include him. "You'll regret this," he said. "Maybe," Lira said. "But not tonight." She turned and walked out of the chamber without looking back, and Dorian's men closed in to drag Kane toward the doors, toward the cold, toward whatever was left of his life outside the only pack he'd ever known.