Chapter 40 40
Thunder Wolfgang POV
At Wolfgang Mansion
The bottle was half-empty. Or maybe it was half-full. Hell if I cared.
I tipped it back, the bitter burn of whiskey coating my throat, drowning out the gnawing ache in my chest. Around me, my chamber was wrecked—chairs splintered, glass shattered, clothes and wolf pelts tossed like the aftermath of a storm. And maybe it was. Maybe I was the storm.
Because I had lost her.
Margaux. My Margaux.
The girl who had been promised to me since we were pups. The future Luna of Wolfgang Pack. The woman who was supposed to carry my name, my pups, my legacy.
Now? She was dressed in royal silks, draped on the arm of the prince like she had never belonged to me at all.
The council sang her praises. The king and queen embraced her as if she were one of their own. And me? I was left here, in my own father’s house, humiliated.
I slammed the bottle down so hard the neck shattered, spilling amber liquid across the table. My wolf snarled inside me, restless, clawing, demanding blood.
It should have been me.
Not Prince Leon.
That bastard Alpha Gregor—I could still see his smug face, hovering around Margaux like some shadow protector. The whispers had reached me: how he guarded her, how he stood in the throne hall like he had every right to be at her side.
My wolf roared at the memory.
Alpha Gregor, the brute. Alpha Gregor, the traitor. Alpha Gregor, who dared to keep me—me—from the woman who belonged to my bloodline.
And Prince Leon. Don’t even get me started on Leon. A prince. A royal. Born with everything, yet he dared to take what was mine.
I threw the broken bottle against the wall, where it shattered into glittering shards.
“I’ll kill them both,” I growled under my breath. “I’ll tear their throats out and drag Margaux back where she belongs.”
The whiskey haze blurred the edges of my rage, but it didn’t dull it. If anything, it sharpened it. Every memory of her smile, every image of her slipping further away, carved deeper into my skull.
She was supposed to be mine. My Luna. My future.
And instead, I was left with nothing but cheap liquor and broken pride.
A knock came at the door. My mother’s voice floated through, calm, cold, as always. “Thunder. Enough. Drinking will not bring her back. You must be patient.”
“Patient?” I snarled, stalking toward the door. My claws extended, raking against the wood. “She’s in the arms of another man! Two men! And you want me to be patient?”
There was silence on the other side. Not disapproval. Not sympathy. Just silence.
Because they didn’t care.
Not really.
To them, Margaux was a pawn, a piece on the board. If the prince wanted her, then so be it. If Gregor hovered close, then so be it. As long as their family rose higher, what did it matter?
But to me… it mattered everything.
I slumped against the wall, breathing hard, the alcohol making my vision spin.
“Margaux…” I whispered, the name breaking on my lips.
And then my wolf answered with a snarl: She should have been ours.
A few days later.
Thunder did not like masks. Masks were for courtiers and cowards, for men who hid their faces because they had nothing brave to show.
And yet the thought of walking into the villa with his face known—walking into their presence, into the arms of the prince or the orbit of that black-mouthed Alpha—made cold logic choke on bile. Pride was a dangerous thing; so was restraint.
If he wanted Margaux back, subtlety had to live behind a mask.
The mask was nothing elegant—just a plain cloth, dark as midnight, tied tightly behind his head so no hair escaped. Over it he dressed like a gardener: rough wool trousers, a mud-streaked linen shirt, a cap pulled low.
He doused his hands and hair in a bitter tincture of crushed sage and cedar bark, a crude antidote to wolf-scent and to the blood-whisper that would otherwise betray him in a room full of trained noses. Then, when the scent had settled to something human and foul and unremarkable, he took one last breath and stepped out into the cold night that smelled of rain and roses.
He told himself it was strategy. He told himself it was patience reworked into a weapon. The truth nipped at him like a raw-backed hound: it was obsession. Every memory of Margaux was a live coal he cupped in his mouth—not to warm himself, but to punish, to remind. He had to see her. He had to be near her. He had to watch.
The villa gate opened before dawn. Thunder moved like a shadow, shoes silent on the gravel, hands already chalked with the grime of the earth he intended to tend.
The staff took him in on the word of a paper signed by some minor steward—a forged note, a whispered favor paid in coin, another sin folded into the long night—and led him to the greenhouses where the orchids grew in rows like sentries.
He worked with the plants the way men pray: patient, unblinking, fingers learning the exact direction to prune so growth bent toward where he wanted it.
From the first morning he learned the rhythms. The servants’ steps, the times the maids brought Margaux tea on the veranda, the cadence of Gregor’s patrols at dusk. He learned the quiet window where Sugar read through her plans like some small, dangerous priestess. He learned the route the prince took when he slipped from the guest chambers for nights so soft he had to check his own pulse to prove he still existed.
And then—there she was.
Margaux did not announce herself. She came like sunlight behind the grape vines, robe slipping off one shoulder in a way that made his wolf thrash against its chains.
She laughed at something Sugar said, a high sound like glass, and Gregor’s hand brushed her arm in a gesture so possessive and familiar that Thunder’s hands tightened around the pruning shears until his knuckles whitened.
She was Margaux to everyone else. Glinting jewelry, a smile that did not reach the eyes at court, the practiced tilt of a head that read royal life like a script.
But he saw what they could not—or would not—see: the tremor in her fingers when the servants brought her tea, the way she blinked too fast as if she were keeping some part of herself pressed under glass.
He watched her at the pantry door stuffing dumplings into her mouth like a starving woman who had learned to hide hunger under a smile. He watched how she glanced over her shoulder when her father’s name whispered across the courtyard, and something like pity and hate braided inside him until it felt like a hunger anew.
The wolf inside him responded to everything she was not—her silence after the council, the way she did not call for family despite their speeches.
Why did she not scream? the wolf demanded. Why did she smile? Thunder did not have an answer that did not taste like acid. He only had the truth that he had been promised her as a future Luna, and the world, the pack, the crown had not kept that promise.
Days bled into a ritual. Sweep. Water. Plant. Prune. Watch. Wait.
He was careful. He kept his head down around the maids and whispered only when no one stood within earshot. He learned the shifts: when Gregor’s sentinels stood at the east wall, when they were at the west—gives him access for thirty minutes unmonitored, not enough to do what he fantasized in the hours that smelled of cedar and soil, but enough to leave small marks.
A ribbon untied from a curtain, a silver spoon placed in an odd angle on a table—small provocations that could be written off as carelessness. The villa staff began to whisper of a clumsy new gardener whose hands seemed more adept with secrets than trowels.
He smiled into the dirt when the gossip curled like smoke. Little disruptions did not overthrow kings, but they gave him the knowledge that the place was not perfect. Imperfection was his friend.