Betrayed by My Fated Mate

The white dress did not feel like mine.

It was heavy at the shoulders, beaded down the bodice, with a long train that the Blackthorn handmaidens had spent an hour smoothing across the moss of the ancestral grounds. I stood at the center of a ring of torches. Around me, every Alpha on the East Coast watched from carved wooden seats. Behind them, the pack — their pack — waited in rows, their scents braided together into something thick and territorial.

I breathed through my mouth so I would not have to taste it.

My name is Celeste Olson. Tonight I was supposed to become Luna of the Blackthorn Pack. Tonight I was supposed to bow my head and let Jaxon Payne — my fated mate, the man the Moon Goddess had personally tied to my soul — close his fangs on my throat and finish what biology had started years ago.

I pressed my thumbnail into the inside of my opposite wrist. Once. Hard.

Then I lifted my chin.

Jaxon stepped out of the arch of candles and the whole crowd inhaled at once. He was beautiful in the way a knife is beautiful — long-limbed, dark-haired, dressed in ceremonial black. His scent reached me before he did. Warm cedar. Something almost sweet underneath. My traitor body answered the way it always did. My knees softened a fraction of an inch. My pulse climbed.

I hated it. I had spent four years learning to use it.

"Celeste," he said softly, and the word carried.

He took my hand. His thumb moved across my knuckles, slow, possessive. The crowd sighed — a roomful of werewolves smelling a mate bond locking into place. To them, this looked like a love story. To me, it looked like the last second of a long, quiet count.

"Look at me," he murmured.

I looked at him. His eyes were that warm, scent-drunk gold that pack gossip had spent two years romanticizing. I smiled, small and pliant, the way I had been practicing in mirrors since I was seventeen.

His fangs lowered. He bent his head toward my throat.

I tilted my neck for him.

Not in submission.

In signal.

The ceremonial arches at the back of the grounds darkened. Six figures in black regalia stepped through them, silent as fog. The crest on their chests caught the torchlight — the Lycan King's mark.

It took the council a full two seconds to understand what they were seeing.

Then Trevor Payne, standing at the high table with a wine cup half-raised in toast, was seized at both arms. The cup fell. Red spread across white linen like a wound. Trevor — former Alpha, dynasty patriarch, the man who had ordered the Silvercreek Pack erased from the map — opened his mouth to roar an order and a ceremonial chain looped around his throat before the sound left him.

In the front row, Tallulah came up out of her seat hissing. She did not get far.