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 polished obsidian floor until the room seemed to float on a lake of fire. White anemones—my mother’s favorite, I’d learned—cascaded from every surface, and the air smelled of beeswax and cedar and the particular electricity that fills a room when two powerful bloodlines converge.
Every Alpha in the territory attended. Not out of affection—wolf politics are too pragmatic for that—but out of necessity. The Solcrest Clan’s power was gravitational; you oriented yourself toward it or you were pulled in regardless. And now that power was merging with the Silverveil Clan through a union that would redraw the map of every alliance in the region.
Alaric held my hand as we stood before the assembly, and I felt the warmth of his palm against mine—steady, certain, the hand of a man who had waited twenty years for this moment and was determined to hold it gently.
“May I present,” he said, and his voice carried the particular resonance of an Alpha addressing his world, “my mate. Isolde, heiress of the Solcrest Clan, daughter of Alpha Caelan and Luna Sera. Found. Returned. Home p>
The hall erupted. Applause, murmurs, the calculated recalibration of a hundred political strategies happening behind polite smiles.
I stood in a dress that was mine—not a symbol of someone else’s rank, not a costume I’d been ordered to remove—and felt, for the first time in as long as I could remember, that the ground beneath my feet was solid.
Then a voice tore through the celebration like a blade through silk.
“Isolde p>
The room went still. The applause died mid-clap. Three hundred heads turned toward the entrance, where a figure was pushing through the crowd with the desperate, uncoordinated energy of a man who has nothing left to lose and knows it.
I turned. The voice had said my name with a familiarity that implied history, but my memory—clean, emptied, mercifully blank for the last ten years—offered nothing. No face. No context. Just a stranger shouting in a room full of people who were not strangers, and the instinctive, animal impulse to step closer to the person beside me.
I pressed against Alaric’s shoulder.
The man reached the front of the crowd. He was breathing hard, his suit disheveled, his eyes wild with something that might have been grief or rage or the particular madness that comes from losing everything you failed to value.
Lᴀtєst chαptєrs ιn g𝒶l𝑛ovеℓ𝑠.𝑎𝓂
I didn’t recognize him. Not his face, not his voice, not the desperate, reaching gesture of his hand.
I didn’t recognize him at all.