"Trust doesn’t break all at once. It cracks—slowly, painfully—until one day, there’s nothing left to hold on to."
Asher was pulling away from me.
Not physically—his presence still lingered in the throne room, in strategy meetings, in the war council discussions that seemed to stretch into every hour of the day. But when I reached for him, when I searched for something solid between us, there was nothing.
And it was worse than if he had just left.
Because staying and pretending not to see me? That was its own kind of betrayal.
We stood in the war room, the table between us littered with maps, battle reports, and letters from neighboring packs still testing the strength of Verauno’s rule.
Kieran cleared his throat, glancing between us like he felt the strain in the air. "Alpha
