Chapter 1

Melanie.

“Happy birthday to me.” I whispered to my cake, my heart squeezing painfully. I never thought I’d celebrate my thirtieth birthday alone, but here I was. My wolf answered with a low, restless growl.

The clock above the fireplace read 11:47, the candles had drowned in their own wax an hour ago, and the coq au vin I had spent six hours on sat cold under the pendant lamp.

I was thirty years old, standing barefoot in the lodge I had spent three years restoring with Kingston Sanders, heir to the Crimson Ridge Pack.

And for the first time in twelve years I could not tell whether the ache in my chest belonged to me or to Sable, my wolf, who had been pacing since sunset.

That morning Kingston had kissed my forehead and told me the Alpha’s council had summoned him to the northern border. He promised to return by seven with the necklace I had admired in a jeweler’s window three months earlier, and that we would celebrate alone before dinner with Katelynn the following night.

Katelynn, my closest friend for ten years, had texted at noon to say she was stuck helping her sister move and would see me on Sunday with my favorite lavender latte. Of course.

Even Anabelle, the omega who had served me since we were girls, had arranged the flowers on the table that afternoon, then said she needed something from the market and never came back.

I had wanted so badly to believe all three of them that I ignored how Kingston avoided my eyes at the door, how he had kept his side of our mind-link closed for weeks, and how Katelynn’s message had sounded like a script.

I called Kingston three times between eight and ten, and every call went straight to voicemail, while Katelynn’s phone had been switched off all evening. I paced around, biting my lip. Were they planning a surprise? I wanted to believe that was what it was.

A little after midnight a video appeared in my feed, posted by a guest at the Mistveil Alpha’s mate ceremony on Saltmarrow Island, and I recognized Kingston’s hands before I recognized anything else.

In the footage he took Anabelle’s face between his palms and kissed her beneath the full moon in front of three packs, while the crowd howled its approval and the caption announced that the heir of Crimson Ridge had finally revealed his future Luna. My heart raced, tears filling my eyes fast.

Katelynn stood at Anabelle’s side, straightening the flower crown in her hair and smiling like a proud sister, wearing the yellow sundress I had helped her choose the summer before.

The phone slipped from my hand and the screen cracked across the footage, but I kept watching the broken video through three replays, then sat in the dark for an hour while Sable pushed against my skin and begged me to shift and run for the coast.

Tears rolled down my cheeks. My heart squeezed badly, it was as though someone had reached into my chest and pulled out my heart before it could bleed.

When my legs finally worked again I walked into Kingston’s study, which he never locked because he believed I was the reliable one who never caused trouble, and I opened the laptop on his desk.

I logged into his account, the password still the one he had used since we were twenty, melanieforever, and I scrolled past his mail until I found a group chat I had never been invited to, named The Heir’s Decision.

Someone had posted a poll at the top of the thread asking [Who should Kingston choose as Luna?], and I read it again, just to be sure I wasn’t seeing things.

Option A was my name, the woman who had given him twelve years of her life. Option B was Anabelle, who had spent eight of those years simply waiting right under my roof. The vote was not close, and every avatar stacked beneath it belonged to someone I knew.

[Melanie has no parents and no bloodline, and she is hard as flint. Marrying her would run a man straight into the ground.]

That was Luna Gloria, Kingston’s mother, the woman I had called ‘mom’ for five years and for whom I had organized every Moon Festival banquet.

Another message followed from Hector, Kingston’s best friend and future Beta, the man whose bail I had paid when the human police arrested him: [She’s thirty already. She probably couldn’t even give the pack a healthy heir.]

And under the final tally, Katelynn had left a single line: [Melanie can carry anything. Let her be the one who loses this time.]

I read every message after that, including the way Gloria laughed about how I would never be gentle enough for an Alpha’s hearth while Anabelle would bow her head and give the pack whatever it asked.

Katelynn had posted a photo of me crying at a friend’s wedding with a caption calling me dramatic and saying Kingston had always been meant for someone better.

Then I reached Kingston’s own message from three days earlier: [She’s convenient, but Anabelle is the one I want. I only have to work out how to end it without Melanie’s wolf tearing the lodge apart.]

“Wow.” I whispered, my heart pounding.

That was everything I had ever been to him, the orphan who had no parents, who had done everything to support his training, and who had cooked his meals, smoothed over his quarrels, and repaired every mistake he made because I was so grateful that anyone had chosen me at all.

I laughed loudly, biting my lip enough to draw blood.Sable rose behind my eyes, and the rage that followed wasn’t something I’d ever felt before. It made me grip the edge of the desk until my nails split.

I could smell my own anger in the room, and I understood that every one of them expected the orphan without a family to curl up in the dark and take it, the way I had taken everything for twelve years.

They wanted me gone quietly, so that Anabelle could walk into the Alpha’s house as Luna without a single scene to stain her name. I was not going to be the one who lost.

My phone lit up on the desk beside the laptop, and Kingston’s name flashed across the cracked screen.

I answered, and he said, “Melanie, happy birthday.” His voice was worn down and it still had the same tenderness I had trusted for twelve years. “I had a last-minute trip out of town, and my phone died on me. You didn’t wait too long, did you?”

Behind him a woman’s soft voice drifted through the line, and my wolf recognized it almost immediately, because it was the same voice that had brought me tea every morning for most of my life.

“Kingston, the photographer says we still haven’t finished the beach shots.” He lowered his voice. “Something came up on my end. I’ll smooth things over with you later.”

“Okay.” I heard myself say, and my voice came out calm enough that he never thought to question it before I ended the call.

I had barely set the phone down when the laptop chimed, and a new message appeared in the chat from Kingston himself: [She bought it. She said ‘okay,’ just like always.]

Gloria replied within seconds: [Good. We will all go over first thing in the morning and smooth it over. Where would she even go?]

I stared at that last question until the letters blurred, and Sable’s growl rolled through my chest, because for the first time in twelve years I had an answer they would never guess, and it began with a call to the one Alpha who had never asked me to shrink.