Chapter 25:

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“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?”

I blinked. Looked at Alaric. Looked at the man. Looked back at Alaric.

“Do you know him?” I asked.

The question was genuine. It landed in the room like a stone dropped into still water, and I watched the ripples spread—across the stranger’s face, through the crowd, into the silence that followed. Because there is nothing more devastating than being forgotten by someone you destroyed, and every person in that hall understood it.

Alaric stepped in front of me. Not dramatically—just a half-step, a shift in the geometry of his body that placed him between me and whatever this was. His voice, when it came, was controlled the way a leashed animal is controlled: precisely, and with the understanding that the leash could snap.

“Thane. You were not invited. Leave.”

Thane. The name meant nothing to me. It sat in my mind like a word in a language I didn’t speak—phonetically recognizable, semantically empty.

“You’re the one crossing the line!” The stranger—Thane—surged forward, and the wolves flanking the aisle tensed in unison, a choreography of alertness. “You stole her! She’s my destined mate, my Luna—”

He fumbled in his jacket and produced a photograph. Crumpled, worn soft at the edges, the kind of photo that has been folded and unfolded so many times the creases have become part of the image. He held it up for the room to see.

A beach. Two people. A woman laughing, tucked against a man’s chest. Happy. Obviously, painfully happy—the kind of happiness that photographs well because it doesn’t know it’s being watched.

The woman in the photo had my face.

I studied it the way you’d study a painting in a museum—with interest, with aesthetic appreciation, with the comfortable distance of someone observing a life that belongs to someone else.

“Your wife?” Alaric’s voice carried a razor’s edge wrapped in silk. “Tell me, Thane—did you mark each other?”

The question was surgical. In wolf law, a broken mark is a broken bond. No mark, no claim. No claim, no wife.

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Thane’s mouth opened. Closed. His jaw worked around words that wouldn’t come.

Because he knew the answer. And the answer was the night—that specific night, weeks ago—when the Solcrest Clan’s envoys had found him alone, half-drunk, gutted by loss. They’d explained, with the diplomatic firmness of people who represent a power that doesn’t need to raise its voice, that the bond must be dissolved. That the Alpha King required it. That resistance would be interpreted as an act of aggression against the Solcrest Clan, which was an act of aggression against every ally the Solcrest Clan maintained, which was an act of aggression against roughly seventy percent of the known wolf world.

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