XANDER
I had always known I was destined to die young.
But never had that truth struck me with such brutal clarity as it did in this very moment.
I was only twenty-five.
I had thought that even if I couldn’t live as long as Grandma Paulina, I would at least make it into my forties—maybe my fifties. After all, my predecessors had all reached, or come close to, the century mark.
My father himself had passed at ninety-nine.
So no, I wasn’t ready.
Nothing was ready.
Jaxon wasn’t prepared to take over. The Pack wasn’t prepared to lose its Alpha. Without proper succession or preparation, Crescent Ridge would plunge into chaos the moment I died.
And with that, I would have failed—not just my people, but the ancestors who had sworn, generation after generation, to protect this land.
A vi
