"Essential Reads of 2026" 🔞🔥click here to read it first👉👉
When the woman named Felicity threw red wine all over me, every high-ranking werewolf in Grayhaven was waiting for me to snap. For the past four years, every woman Julian had chosen to take my place at the Winter Moon Thanksgiving banquet had ended up in a fight with me. The worst time, I’d nearly forced her wolf to the surface in a room full of guests. But this time, I just looked at Felicity. And smiled. “Those heels are too thin for the cobblestones in Old Town.” “I’ll have my assistant bring you another pair.” My husband, Julian Hawthorne, went still. He was the heir to the Hawthorne bloodline and the next Alpha of the Stonebridge pack. He stood there, shielding the woman in his arms, studying me with an expression I didn’t recognize. He didn’t understand. He thought this five-year lesson in obedience had finally earned him a victory. We had signed our marriage contract and inter-pack alliance five years ago. Every year since, he’d picked a “more suitable” she-wolf from the East Coast to stand in for me—a wolfless woman from Red Mesa—at the Hawthorne family’s private Thanksgiving banquet on Tidewatch Island. By Stonebridge custom, only a partner presented to the matriarch and elders could qualify for the Luna investiture. Julian had never given me a mate mark, and he had never allowed me to recite the Luna oath. He said he was helping me rein in my southern wildness. That once I learned some grace, he would finally make me Stonebridge’s Luna. And I played my part, acting the jealous, furious, uncontrollable wife. But the game was over. The five years Wyatt and I had agreed on ended this Thanksgiving. If Julian humiliated me one more time, I had to go home to Red Mesa with Wyatt. The Calloway family and the Red Mesa pack were out of patience. So when Julian fastened the Hawthorne family’s antique lunar watch—what should have been mine—around Felicity’s wrist, I didn’t cry. The gold, moonstone-set watch was reserved for Luna candidates being take
