"Revenge, of course." His voice was ice, his Alpha dominance pressing down on me like a physical weight. "You enjoy being mounted by enemy wolves, don't you? Then I'll make sure you spend the rest of your life as a living widow—bonded but abandoned, marked but untouched."
"Lyra." He leaned in close, his breath hot against the sensitive skin behind my ear where his claiming bite still throbbed. "I want your remaining years to hurt a hundred—no, a thousand times more than what I'm feeling right now."
The next morning, he departed for the Moonlit Isles with Seren.
Our mating journey. Our promised destination.
Alaric had always refused to be captured in memory-crystals, claiming an Alpha's image held too much power to share carelessly. But for her, he commissioned a pack chronicler to follow them everywhere. Hundreds of paired images—him gazing at her on white sand shores under the full moon, her draped against his chest as the sun bled into the sea—all shared through the pack network for every wolf in the territories to witness.
By then, my disgrace had spread across Capital Territory like wildfire through dry brush.