The air in my kingdom was rotten.
It was a truth I tasted with every breath, a foul miasma that clung to the back of my throat. It was the scent of sickness, of fear, of a slow, inexorable decay. The Great Hall, once filled with the boisterous laughter of my warriors, now echoed with a symphony of hacking coughs and the low, desperate murmurs of prayer.
My Fated Mate, my Luna Selene, insisted it was a spiritual malaise. A curse brought on by the pack’s lingering impurity, a shadow left by the ‘heretical’ practices of the one I had cast out. She held purification ceremonies daily, the cloying smoke of sacred herbs failing to mask the stench of death that seeped from the infirmary. I stood by her side, my jaw tight, forcing myself to believe. The bond thrummed between us, a divine assuranc
