Chapter 28 Chapter 28: (END) The celebration resumed. The music returned. The candles, which had guttered during the confrontation, were relit by attentive servants, and the hall filled again with the sounds of conversation and laughter and the careful clinking of glasses raised in toasts that were part congratulation and

Chapter 27 Chapter 27: “Leave,” I said. “Today is the happiest day of my life, and I would like to keep it that way p> He didn’t move. “Please go.” I kept my voice even. Polite, even—the way you’d address a stranger who has wandered into the wrong room at

Chapter 26 Chapter 26: Thane had fought. Argued. Raged. But the elders of his own clan—the same men who had whispered in his ear at Alaric’s residence—had pulled him aside and done the math for him, and the math was unambiguous. He dissolved the mate contract before the Alpha King

Chapter 25 Chapter 25: “Isolde, you’re my wife!” The stranger’s voice cracked on the last word, splitting it into two uneven halves. “How can you marry someone else p> I blinked. Looked at Alaric. Looked at the man. Looked back at Alaric. “Do you know him?” I asked. The question

Chapter 24 Chapter 24: A month later, we were married. The ceremony was held in the Solcrest Clan’s ancestral hall—a vast, vaulted space built from stone so old it had forgotten what it was before it was a wall. Thousands of candles lined the aisles, their flames reflected in the

Chapter 23 Chapter 23: Alaric told me a love story. The problem was, I could only hear it from the outside. “Our families were close,” he began, leaning back in his chair with the careful posture of a man assembling something fragile from memory. “The Solcrest and Silverveil Clans had

Chapter 22 Chapter 22: I spent a day alone. Not dramatically alone—not wandering through fields or standing on cliffs or any of the cinematic gestures that processing demands in fiction. I sat in the guest room Alaric had given me, on a bed with clean sheets that smelled like lavender,

Chapter 21 Chapter 21: She laughed—a sound so warm and sudden it caught me off guard, like walking into a room and finding the fireplace already lit. “Sweetheart, I’m old enough to be his mother. Well—almost.” She crossed the room in three quick steps, took my hands in both of

Chapter 20 Chapter 20: If he had said these words ten years ago—in the first month, the first year, even the fifth—I would have crumbled. I know this about myself with the certainty of someone who has tested the tensile strength of their own devotion and found it embarrassingly high.

Chapter 19 Chapter 19: The silence lasted five seconds. I counted, the way I always count—because counting is the scaffolding you build around a moment that might otherwise collapse on top of you. When Thane spoke again, his voice was a stranger’s. “Isolde… I’m sorry p> I blinked. In ten