Chapter 1
The second I found out my adopted sister, Serina, was pregnant with my mate Alpha Kael's pup, I prayed the Moon Goddess and begged her to sever our mate bond.
But then my mother, Victoria, told me the pup actually belonged to Serina and my little brother, Marcus, and Kael had only been covering for them.
I was just about to beg the Moon Goddess to reverse her decision when Serina and Alpha Kael both jumped into the sea and died. Neither of their bodies was ever recovered.
Victoria sobbed over Serina's belongings, clutching them to her chest and refusing to see me. The entire Silverpine Pack rallied around Marcus and voted him in as the new Alpha. Then, amid a storm of furious accusations and a petition demanding my exile, they cast me out of the pack.
The guilt ate away at me until my wolf stopped answering my calls. I lost all my shifter abilities, so I left the pack territory for good and disappeared into the human world.
At first, I found a job bussing tables at a seedy underground nightclub. But the moment I rejected a customer's harassment, I was fired on the spot.
Without an ID, I had nowhere to go. I ended up homeless, sleeping in a tattered tent beneath a bridge and surviving on expired food from government aid programs. Every night, I prayed to the Moon Goddess, begging her to forgive me for my sins.
Six years later, I was standing in line for free food when I ran into a family of three from the Upper East Side who were there volunteering.
And there he was.
Kael, the Alpha who was supposed to have died jumping off that cliff. His arm was wrapped around my adopted sister as he grinned and taught their little wolf pup how to hand out meals to the homeless people around us.
The sight hit me like a bolt of lightning. I was just about to storm over and demand answers when two people suddenly stepped in front of me, blocking my path.
Victoria and Marcus. Their faces were painfully familiar. Yet there wasn't a flicker of sympathy in their eyes. Only cold, sharp-edged wariness.
Marcus grabbed my wrist so tightly that his fingers dug into my skin, while Victoria spoke, "Don't go bothering them. If it weren't for you, they wouldn't have had to hide their identities and live in the human world all these years."
Tears blurred my vision. I stared at Victoria's face, searching for even the faintest trace of the warmth and affection she'd once shown me. There was nothing.
"But I'm your child too..." I whispered, my voice breaking.
She forced a thin, fake smile. "You're the one who was adopted, remember? Let it go, Elena. Do this for me, and let them have their happiness, all right?"
I glanced at Serina's perfectly bleached blonde hair and Kael's crisp, expensive suit. Then I looked down at my own feet. My sandals were tattered and full of holes. My feet were covered in old frostbite scars from the winters and oozing sores from the summer heat.
I laughed until tears streamed down my face. All that hell I'd willingly put myself through for the past six years had been nothing but a sick, twisted lie.
******
"Let them have their happiness?" I was shaking so hard from sobbing that I could barely get the words out. "Mom, do you have any idea what I've been through these past six years?"
I slept under a bridge and lived on expired canned food. In winter, my hands and feet had frozen so badly that the skin cracked and rotted, and I hadn't had a penny for medicine. In summer, those open wounds oozed nonstop, attracting swarms of flies that buzzed around me as if I were nothing but garbage.
She shot a frantic look around, clearly terrified someone might recognize her, then lowered her voice. "Keep your voice down, Elena. Everyone's staring."
Sure enough, several homeless people who'd just collected their food were already looking our way, curious about the commotion.
Marcus tightened his grip on my arm until I could almost feel my bones grinding together.
"Who do you think was to blame back then?" His voice dripped with irritation. "You had to blow the whole thing out of proportion. You demanded Moon Goddess that your mate bond be severed. If you'd just bitten your tongue and let it go, do you really think those two lovebirds would've been backed into a corner so badly that they had to fake their own deaths just to survive?"
I froze. "So the baby was never yours." I locked eyes with Marcus, my voice shaking so badly that the words barely held together. "You were in on this whole scam from the beginning?"
He didn't even bother denying it. A faint, smug smile tugged at the corner of his mouth.
"Elena, I've always been far more suited to be Alpha than Kael ever was," he said, as casually as if we were discussing the weather. "He's too wrapped up in his little romance to care about power. Victoria wanted me to take the title much more than she ever wanted him to have it."
He shrugged. "Your little meltdown was a godsend. Kael got to walk away from his duties and run off with his girl, I got the Alpha seat, and Victoria couldn't have asked for a better outcome."
My gaze slowly shifted to Mom.
She immediately looked away.
For six years, while I'd been barely surviving in the human world, I'd called her so many times that I'd lost count. She almost never answered. On the rare occasions she did, her voice had been flat and cold. It was a lesson I needed to learn. She was struggling, too. Running the pack was crushing her with stress.
Every time I'd begged her for even a scrap of comfort, she'd cut me off and tell me how much she missed Serina.
Every single time, she'd left me alone to drown in that same crushing guilt all over again.
So absurd that it almost became funny.
I laughed, a harsh, broken sound that tore from my chest.
"Mom." I stared at her. "You knew. You knew every single part of this all along."
A child's laughter drifted over from nearby.
I turned.
Kael was walking toward us, holding hands with Serina and their little wolf pup.
Their volunteer shift had ended, and all three of them wore the polished, perfect smiles of people who'd been raised to look effortlessly put-together.
Kael spotted me first.
At first, he didn't even recognize me. "Hello there. Is there anything else I can help you with?"
He smiled politely, like he was greeting a guest at some high-end charity gala.
Then his eyes settled on my face.
His smile froze.
Little by little, it disappeared.
"Elena?" His voice turned tight and guarded. "What are you doing here?"
I stared at the man who'd been my mate for years.
His suit was crisp and perfectly tailored. His cufflinks caught the light. His hair was slicked perfectly into place, not a single strand out of order. He stood tall, poised, and confident as ever.
"Why did you lie to me?" My voice was so hoarse that it came out barely above a whisper.
Kael stumbled back half a step.
Serina immediately pulled the pup behind her, staring at me with sharp, wary eyes, as if I might lash out at any moment.
"Elena, you're too intense," Kael said. His expression hardened. "Serina was terrified of you. Hell, even I, an Alpha, was intimidated by you. You were too good, too perfect. Being with you felt like I was suffocating the whole time."
He glanced at Serina. "She's the only one who actually understands me."
Something cracked deep inside my chest, like glass shattering against stone.
"So you lied to me, ruined my life, and left me to rot in hell for six years..." I stared straight at him. "And somehow, that's my fault?"
Nobody answered.
Serina busied herself cooing at the pup. Kael stared at some random point in the distance. Victoria stood there in silence. Marcus glanced at his watch, clearly annoyed that this was taking so long.
I dragged in a shaky, ragged breath.
In that moment, all I wanted was to rip away every one of their fake, perfect masks and expose their ugly lies to the entire world.
Marcus moved before I could say another word.
His palm slammed over my mouth.
His other hand clamped around the back of my neck, and he shoved me into the storage closet beside us.
"Shut the hell up," he growled against my ear. "If you so much as breathe a word about them faking their deaths or blow their cover in the human world, I'll kill you with my own two hands. No questions asked."
I thrashed against him and bit down hard on his palm. He yelped and loosened his grip for half a second. That was all I needed.
"I'll tell everyone!" I screamed at the top of my lungs. "The pack! The Werewolf Council!"
His fingers immediately closed around my throat.
The back of my head slammed into a metal shelf, and a burst of white light exploded across my vision.
I'd forgotten how weak my body had become after all those years on the streets. I'd forgotten what it meant to face a pack Alpha in his prime without my wolf.
He hauled me up as if I weighed nothing more than a tattered sack and dragged me toward the car parked in the back alley.
The doors clicked shut behind me. Locked.
I collapsed onto the back seat, gasping for air, five bright red finger marks standing out against the skin of my neck.
Through the window, I caught sight of Victoria standing at the mouth of the alley. She watched as the car pulled away. Her forehead was furrowed in a frown, as if she'd finally dealt with nothing more than a messy, inconvenient problem.
