Episode1
The veil smelled like expensive dry cleaning and pure, unadulterated panic.
I kept my head bowed, staring fixedly at the polished floor of the grand hall while the pack elder droned on about eternal bonds, sacred pack duties, and the unbreakable oaths of the moon goddess. Around us, three hundred high-society wolves murmured their approval, their expensive silks rustling like dry leaves in a storm. They thought they were watching Alpha Damion Ashworth claim his rightful bride—the pampered, aristocratic pack princess destined to secure a fragile peace treaty between our warring territories.
They were actually wrong.
Wren wasn't here. Two nights ago, my twin sister had packed a single designer bag, slipped out the eastern gate with a man she had been secretly meeting on the underground circuit, and left behind a crumpled note on her bed that read simply: “I can't.”
Our father had found it six hours before the ceremony. Panic had turned his face a sickly shade of grey. Rather than face public humiliation, the collapse of his political standing, and a brutal, bloody border war with Damion’s territory, he had dragged me out of my small breezy room in the east wing. Without a second thought, he had shoved me into Wren's couture gown, zipped it up despite the suffocating tightness, and pinned the heavy lace veil over my face.
“You have her height, you have her hair,” he had hissed, his fingers digging into my shoulders hard enough to bruise. “Keep your mouth shut, let him put the ring on your finger, and pray to the goddess he doesn't notice until it's too legal to undo.”
I had agreed because saying no had never been an option in our household. Growing up as the invisible twin meant my entire existence was built around fixing the messes Wren left behind. But standing here now, with the weight of three hundred judgment-filled eyes pressing down on me, I realized the magnitude of my mistake.
"Do you, Alpha Damion, take this woman as your lawfully bound mate and Luna?" the elder's voice echoed off the arched ceilings, cutting through my unraveling thoughts.
"I do," Damion replied. His voice was deep, smooth, and dangerously calm, carrying across the silent hall like a drop of ink in clear water.
"And do you..." The elder paused, squinting slightly through his thick spectacles, sensing the rigid, unnatural tension in my posture. "And do you take this Alpha as your mate?"
"She does," Damion answered for me, stepping in smoothly before my frozen vocal cords could form a sound.
Before my breath could hitch, a heavy, hardened hand wrapped around my wrist to slide the ceremonial platinum band over my finger. I flinched. It wasn't a nervous flutter of excitement, it was a sharp, involuntary physical recoil. Because the moment his
skin pressed against mine, Damion’s thumb didn't just slide smoothly over my knuckle.
It stopped dead.
His thumb hovered right over a scar on the side of my hand, a permanent reminder of a terrible fall I had when we were thirteen, back when I used to stupidly try and impress our father. Wren didn't have that scar. Wren had never spent a week grounded in the dark infirmary, swallowing medicine while listening to the rest of the pack train without her.
I did.
I held my breath, every muscle in my body locking up. I waited for the roar. I waited for him to rip the veil from my face, expose my father’s desperate fraud to the entire High Council, and declare war on our pack right here at the altar. I braced myself for the humiliation, for the screaming, for the wrath of an apex predator cheated in front of his entire court.
Instead, Damion's fingers tightened around my hand with a terrifying, bone-crushing force. He didn't pull back. He didn't drop my hand or alert the crowd. Slowly, deliberately, he pushed the heavy ring past my knuckle, locking me to him with a pressure that promised absolute devastation.
He didn't say a word. He didn't even blink. He just pulled me against his hard chest as the crowd suddenly erupted into thunderous applause, the heavy, intoxicating scent of cedar and ozone washing over me and making my head spin.
"Don't look so terrified, Mara," his voice whispered softly against my ear, low, and dripping with a dark, terrifying amusement that sent a shiver straight down my spine. "The real punishment doesn't start until I get you behind closed doors."
