Chapter 1
Lyra's POV
The night I regained my hearing, I discovered my boyfriend's affair with my best friend.
Twenty minutes earlier, I had been sitting at my vanity waiting for Kael to return, but as the clock on the mantelpiece ticked past midnight, the apartment door still showed no signs of opening.
Suddenly, the howling of wind reached my ears.
I could hardly believe what I was hearing—after losing my hearing completely three years ago due to accidental poisoning during a bloody coup, I never imagined the Moon Goddess would bless me again and restore this ability.
I opened my mouth tentatively, speaking in a small voice, and only when I heard my own clear sound did I truly awaken from this dreamlike state.
I could actually hear!
I couldn't wait to call Kael and share this miracle with him.
Then I heard footsteps outside the door—his footsteps—and joy flooded through my entire body.
I prepared to surprise him, to greet him with this incredible news.
I walked toward the door, my bare feet silent on the hardwood floor, reaching out to grasp the doorknob, when the voices outside made me freeze—low, intimate, and he wasn't alone.
"She's asleep," Kael said, his voice carrying a tenderness he had never used with me. "I put the powder in her milk this afternoon. She won't wake until dawn."
"Good." A second voice responded, one I recognized—Mira, my only friend, the nun who always spoke in gentle words.
"We can't risk her hearing us, Kael."
"She's deaf, Mira, not blind," he said, the mockery in his tone making my stomach churn.
Mira laughed, the sound like silver bells shattering on ice. "She's so pitiful. Two miscarriages, and she still doesn't know what really happened to her children."
Those words carved themselves into my bones, nearly making my legs give out beneath me.
Those two times I had felt life stirring within me, only to end in pools of blood.
At the time, the healers had said it was because of my weak bloodline, and Kael had held me saying it wasn't my fault, that next time would be different.
"The apothecary says one more transfer should do it," Mira continued, the rustle of clothing accompanying her words. "One more of her children as a catalyst, and I'll be able to conceive our child."
Inside me, my wolf Selah awakened, a low growl reverberating through my bones.
She threw herself against my ribcage, full of fury, howling to tear apart the woman who had stolen the lives of our children.
I pressed my palm flat against the door, every muscle locked in place, resisting Selah's desire to shift.
Not now, it's not time yet!
"We need to get her pregnant again," Kael said, his voice full of calculation.
"You haven't actually fallen for her, have you?" Mira said, her tone carrying that coquettish lilt, the kind of voice that could make a man's bones turn to jelly—one I had never learned to use.
"How could I?" His certainty was like a knife sliding between my ribs.
"But you know how much those old fools value bloodlines," Kael complained with some irritation.
"Once you successfully cure your infertility, I'll declare you the true Luna of Red Fang. As for her... after she gives birth to the next one, her usefulness will end there."
Selah howled within me, crashing against my consciousness with such violent force that I bit through my lip and tasted blood.
She wanted me to go out there, wanted them to know exactly what bloodline I carried.
But I held her back.
Letting them die too quickly would be a mercy—they deserved a far more miserable end.
The sounds outside changed as Kael pressed Mira against our door, the very door behind which I stood.
"Right here?" Mira's voice came with gasps. "What if the drug isn't strong enough and she suddenly wakes up and smells us?"
"Relax, the Nightfall I've been feeding her has been suppressing her wolf. She can't smell anything," Kael said, his words blurred by the wet sounds of lips and tongues.
"Even if we rolled around in her bed, she wouldn't know."
Nightfall.
His words shattered my heart completely—it was a suppressant that made werewolves docile, numbing the senses, imprisoning the beast within. He had been poisoning me all along.
This explained why Selah had seemed so distant these three years, why my lupine instincts had become so dull.
The sounds intensified, unmistakably the sounds of copulation, and I stood there listening to my supposed mate fucking my supposed friend, separated only by a door panel that divided us.
I wanted to walk away, but my legs seemed frozen in place, unable to move. Some masochistic part of me needed to hear all of this, needed this pain to become raw and bloody, to become something I couldn't avoid.
"Kael, tell me," Mira gasped, "who makes you feel better? Me or her?"
"You, always you. She's as boring as a corpse in bed, Mira. No fire, no passion. Half the time I have to get drunk just to get through it."
His voice was full of disgust and mockery.
Something inside me cracked open, not my heart this time, but something deeper—something about the person I had tried to become.
The girl who had fled her father's palace, abandoned her birthright and bloodline, thinking that becoming small and safe and ordinary would bring happiness.
That girl died in the moment her mate copulated with his lover against the door panel.
When the door panel finally stopped shaking, I regained consciousness.
My limbs no longer seemed to belong to me as I walked back to the bedroom and sat on our bed, staring at my trembling hands.
In the mirror was someone I barely recognized—tear tracks cutting through makeup, amber eyes turned cold.
I wiped at my reddened eye sockets and buried my face in the pillow.
Moonlight silvered the wooden floor as I remained silent in the darkness, letting the cold seep into my marrow.
Five years ago, my father's cold and merciless decree, the weight of a crown I never wanted, the shackles of a marriage arrangement made when I yearned for nothing but freedom—all of it drove me to flee the Silver Moon pack.
I was eighteen that year, standing in my father's study, hearing him speak the words that would shatter my world.
"Lyra, you will marry Orion Blackwood."
Not a question, not a discussion, but a judgment as absolute and incontestable as pack law itself.
Orion, the Alpha King of the Northern Territory, the man I had observed from afar at pack gatherings since I was ten years old, whose presence radiated such dominance that even my father would lower his gaze...