When Amara said, “To hell with them,” it did something to something inside Kael.
She remembered.
Every bodysuckin’ second of Moonfire Eve. The night everything changed—when she’d surged up like a goddess clad in silver flame, when she’d screamed the forest into silence, and when Kael had made the one mistake he couldn’t take back.
He should’ve stayed. Fought. Bled beside her. But he had abandoned her, unconscious, in the dirt, to face a world that would never understand what she was becoming.
Because he’d been afraid.
Not her power — but what that meant.
Because if she was Lunari…
Maybe she was never supposed to belong to someone like him.
Not a beast born from war. Not a murderer in the skin of an Alpha.
Kael turned from her now, clenching the tremor of his hands out of sight. He
