Prologue
I had imagined my wedding day so many times that the real one felt like a poor copy of something I’d already lived.
In my imagination, Adrian turned when I came down the aisle. He looked at me the way I’d wanted him to look at me for as long as I’d known what wanting was. He saw me, not as the Alpha’s little girl, but as a grown woman. The doubt and reservation that had lived in his face was gone, burned off by the sight of me in my beautiful white dress.
I was still holding onto that when I stepped into the hall and found the whole pack already looking at me. Adrian was standing at the front, looking exceptionally handsome in a black tuxedo. But the expression on his face wasn’t dazzled devotion.
It was hard, cold, and frosted with pity.
“I can’t do this.”
He didn’t say it to me. He said it to the room. To my father, to the ranking wolves, to the assembled pack in their good clothes — he announced it to all of them.
“I apologize to everyone for the inconvenience, for the expense. But I can’t go through with this mating ceremony. I do not love Lilith Bradford. Now that the Bradford’s real daughter has returned to the family, this mating alliance is no longer necessary.”
The hall went quiet. My skin prickled with apprehension. My wolf whimpered in the back of my mind.
I stood there in the dress I’d been so proud of. The dress I’d let myself feel beautiful in. Everyone was staring at me. Everyone except Adrian, who refused to meet my eyes.
I was being returned. Returned, the way you take back a thing you bought when you find the real one you wanted was in the shop all along.
I looked at my father, and begged him with my eyes to fix it.
He didn’t look back at me. He looked at Adrian, and then he looked at the pack. I saw him weighing me against the family’s standing.
He gave a small nod.
It was permission. He was letting Beta Adrian dump me at the altar.
Worse than that, Father agreed. I saw it in the set of his shoulders. Not just agreement — relief. The loosening of a man handed a way out of an obligation he’d resented for twenty years. Of course his beta shouldn’t be saddled with the fake daughter. Of course the Alpha’s house shouldn’t be diminished by an alliance it no longer needed. I had been a debt he was tired of carrying, and Adrian had just forgiven it in front of everyone.
I felt confused. I stood there frozen, not quite believing what was happening. Adrian and I had been engaged for six months, but I had loved him forever. How could he just stand up there, in front of our whole pack, and flatly tell everyone that he didn’t love me.
He had never loved me, I realized, a beat too late.
“Lily.” My mother was at my elbow, her voice low and urgent, and for one foolish heartbeat I thought she meant to comfort me. “Not here. You’ve humiliated this family enough for one night. Don’t make it worse by weeping in front of the whole pack.”
Don’t make a scene. As though I had done this. As though the humiliation was a mess I’d spilled and I needed to be hurried out of sight before I stained anything further.
And the terrible thing was that some part of me agreed with her. Some deep, well-trained part of me was already ashamed. Already sorry. Already absorbing how badly I had embarrassed the Alpha family just by standing there in my white dress being unwanted in public.
I had ruined Eva’s homecoming. I had made my father look foolish. I had wasted so much money to pay for the ceremony and the banquet. I was so sorry. Even then, even with my whole world crumbling around me, I was sorry for the inconvenience of my own heartbreak.
Eva reached me before they could steer me out.
She took my hands. To anyone watching it looked like sisterly tenderness, the restored daughter comforting the displaced one, and she made sure enough people were watching. Her thumbs moved gently over my knuckles. Her eyes were wet and warm and full of mocking sorrow.
“Don’t blame him,” she murmured, just for me. “How could anyone choose the stand in when they could have the original?” She squeezed my hands, and pitched her voice to carry. “Let me take her up. She shouldn’t have to walk out alone — that’s what sisters are for.”
My mother’s face flooded with gratitude and love and relief — all the things it had stopped showing me — and she pressed Eva’s shoulder. “Thank you, darling.” Then, to the room, she spoke up, warm and gracious: “Everyone, why don’t we move to the reception hall? The staff have prepared a delicious banquet, there’s no need to let good food go to waste.”
And the pack stood, murmuring amongst themselves, and prepared to go enjoy my mating ceremony feast.
A daughter of the Alpha’s house had been discarded and shamed at her own wedding, and every person in that room filed politely off to the banquet because Margery had told them to, because the food was prepared, because I was not worth the interruption.
Eva’s hand closed around my arm, gentle for the watching crowd, and steered me toward the doors.
I let her. I had no fight in me. I had never had any. It had been trained out of me before I was old enough to know it. I walked where I was steered, out of the bright hall and the whispers and the smell of the wilting flowers, into the dim corridor beyond, where the pack could no longer see either of us.
The great doors swung shut behind us.
And Eva let go of my arm while the tenderness went out of her face like a light switched off.
I had watched Eva’s masks come and go in the few weeks she’d been home, but I had never seen this — the whole warm performance simply gone, and underneath it something flat and cold and enormously satisfied, looking at me the way you look at a job nearly finished.
“Goddess,” she said, and even her voice had changed, lower, bored. “You were actually going to cry in front of all of them. You have no idea how pathetic you look.”
I said nothing. There was nothing to say that she wanted to hear, and I hadn’t the strength to find it anyway.
“Twenty years.” She circled me slowly in the empty corridor, pale blue skirts whispering. “Twenty years you slept in my bed. Ate at my mother’s table. Made that poor man pretend you were something. And you believed it, didn’t you? You actually believed you were a Bradford.” She laughed, soft and delighted. “You’re a placeholder, Lily. You always were. They fetched you to fill the hole I left. But now I’m home, and no one has any use for a fake. Not my mother. Not my father. Not Adrian.” Her smile widened.
“Stop,” I said. It came out as barely anything.
