Chapter 28: (END)

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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 part political calculation.

Alaric and I sealed our bond that night.

It was nothing like the first time—the only time, with Thane, which I didn’t remember and would never remember. This was chosen. Deliberate. The slow, mutual surrender of two people who had waited a very long time and intended to get it right.

When Alaric marked me, I felt the bond take hold—a warmth spreading outward from the point of contact, filling spaces I hadn’t known were empty. It was like hearing a song you forgot you loved: not new, exactly, but newly found.

I never saw Thane again.

The news arrived in fragments over the following months, carried by messengers and rumors and the quiet, efficient intelligence networks that Alaric maintained the way other people maintain gardens.

After the wedding, Thane had returned to the Nightblood compound and sealed himself inside. The drinking, which had been a habit, became a vocation. He stopped attending council meetings. He stopped leading hunts. He stopped, by most accounts, doing anything that required him to be the Alpha his clan had once feared and respected.

The territory noticed. Rival factions, sensing weakness the way predators sense injury, began to probe the borders. Small incursions at first—a supply line disrupted, a patrol ambushed—and then larger ones. Without their Alpha’s attention, the Nightblood defenses eroded like a coastline in a storm, and the losses mounted in ways that couldn’t be hidden or explained away.

His people, loyal to a point, reached that point. Whispers became conversations. Conversations became meetings. Meetings became the particular kind of silence that precedes a change in leadership.

And Ravenna.

The news about Ravenna arrived last, and it arrived with the specific weight of a story that has no hero.

She had never recovered from the abortion—not physically, not in any way that mattered. The girl who had once manipulated rooms with surgical precision had become a ghost in her own body, wandering the streets near the compound with the empty, unmoored gait of someone who has lost the narrative that organized her life. She’d been ambitious. She’d been cruel. She’d been very, very young, and she’d played a game whose rules she understood perfectly until the moment they were applied to her.

She found Thane on a Tuesday evening. He was alone—he was always alone now, the house emptied of everyone except the staff who were paid to stay and the ghosts who weren’t. She brought him a drink. Lupine toxin, dissolved in whiskey—a poison derived from wolfsbane that attacks the nervous system slowly, deliberately, allowing the victim to feel each stage of the deterioration with full, unmedicated clarity.

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She sat across from him and watched him drink it.

She watched the confusion arrive first, then the pain, then the understanding. She watched him realize what she had done, and she watched him search her face for the girl he’d once used as a weapon against his wife, and she let him see, in her eyes, exactly what he had made of her.

Then she drank from the same bottle.

They found them the next morning. Two bodies in a house built for a crowd, surrounded by empty rooms and the particular silence that fills spaces where too many terrible things have happened and not enough good ones.

I learned all of this much later, in pieces, the way you learn about weather in a country you’ve never visited—with interest, with a distant sympathy, without the weight of personal investment.

Because I didn’t remember him. I didn’t remember any of them.

What I had was this: Alaric’s hand in mine on a Sunday morning. The sound of our son laughing in the garden—a toddler’s laugh, unreasonable and total, the kind that makes you believe in the fundamental goodness of the world despite extensive evidence to the contrary. The smell of cedar and sandalwood and the specific warmth of a kitchen where someone who loves you is cooking breakfast badly and refusing to admit it.

I had new memories. Good ones. The kind that don’t need to be erased.

And sometimes—rarely, in the quiet moments between sleeping and waking, when the mind loosens its grip on the present—I’d feel something stir. A tremor in the blankness. The faintest suggestion of a room behind a sealed door, where a woman I used to be sat in the dark, holding the things I’d asked to forget.

I never opened that door.

Some doors are meant to stay closed. Some stories end not with answers but with the decision to stop asking questions. And some loves—the first kind, the broken kind, the kind that teaches you exactly how much a human heart can absorb before it rewrites its own operating system—are best left in the past, where they can’t hurt anyone anymore.

Not even the person who lived them.

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THE END.

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Message from Noa: Have a beautiful weekend dear readers. Today we have three new novels on gal novels, and I hope you enjoy them. As always… God loves you, and Noa wishes you all the best. („• ֊ •„)੭

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