Chapter 1: Selene’s POV
The paper would not stop shaking. That was my hands. Not the paper.
“Say it again,” I whispered. “Slowly. I need you to be wrong.”
The pack physician looked at me the way people look at a grave that has already been dug. “I am not wrong, Luna Selene. Juniper has Nightwither.”
Something in my chest folded in on itself. Nightwither almost never touched pups. When it did, it did not let go. There was no finished cure. There was barely even a name most wolves were willing to say out loud.
Air felt thin.
June sat on the far bench with her shoes dangling above the floor. She caught my eyes and grinned like this was any other Tuesday, like the room was not quietly ending. That smile used to be the easiest thing in my life. Now it hurt to look at.
“How long?” I asked, and I smiled back at her so she would not hear the break in my voice.
He was quiet for a second too long. “Four weeks.”
I turned so fast the chair scraped. “Four weeks is not a number. That is a countdown.”
His mouth tightened. “No parent ever thinks the time is enough. The only work left is to make the days she still has feel like living, not waiting.”
Tears came anyway. June had been burning with a fever that should not have lasted in a wolf pup. I had told myself it was a bad cold. I had told myself a lot of comfortable lies.
“She is seven,” I said, hand at my mouth. “I am not supposed to outlive her.”
“I know.” He sounded like he meant it. It did not help. “If I could trade the result, I would.”
I took the file. The print was neat. Clinical. Final.
Then he added, carefully, as if hope itself might bite, “The infirmary has a trial running. A possible treatment. The early numbers are poor. I will not dress that up. But the work has not been abandoned.”
I hated how fast my heart grabbed that sentence. Poor numbers still meant numbers. Numbers still meant a door that was not fully shut.
“Mommy?”
June had come up beside my knee. “Your eyes are wet. Did I do something? Am I getting better?”
I wiped my face and put on the smile I reserved for emergencies. “You did nothing wrong. You are going to be fine. Sleep. Eat. That is your only job.”
I bit down until the cry stayed behind my teeth and took the papers from his desk.
On the path home she talked without stopping. Cake. Paper lanterns. Who she would invite to her eighth birthday in a month. I made the right sounds and watched the same month shrink in my head. If the trial failed, that party and her last week would arrive together.
Then she went quiet, which was worse than the talking.
“Mom?” Her voice was small. “Do you think Daddy will come this year? I’ll be good the whole time. I swear.”
She almost never asked for toys. She asked for him.
Thorne Maddox was Alpha of the Blackthorn Pack. He was also my mate. He looked at June and saw me. That was the whole crime, and she paid for it every day she waited by the door.
My vision blurred. I made the vow before we reached the porch: if she only had weeks, she would not spend them still hoping for a father who would not walk into the room.
I put her to bed. I waited until her breathing evened out. Then I called him.
“Thorne. I need a minute.”
Irritation arrived first. “I’m in the middle of something.”
Same tone as last week. Same tone as last year. I swallowed it. “You need to be here for June.”
He laughed once, with no humor in it. “Selene, I don’t have time for another performance. Camille needs help with Ivy. That is where I am.”
Camille. Ivy. The names still opened the same cut. Camille had been the woman he wanted before the bond tied him to me. She vanished for years. She came back two months ago with a daughter and a claim on his attention he had never given June.
“This is not a performance.”
A growl rolled through the line. “What could possibly matter more than—”
“June is dying,” I said. “She does not have long.”
