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The pain hit again right through her chest when Luna Winter was still mid-drill with her warriors. Her wolf whimpered inside her. She finished the session anyway. Walked out. Didn't stumble. Not in front of the warriors who respected her. The healer's verdict was clean and cruel. "Your Fated Mate is with another. Physical intimacy outside the bond triggers a mirrored response." That was the pain of a mate's betrayal. Winter already knew who. Layla. Alpha Dion's Beta. The one he took to Bloodstone—Alpha Zulan's territory—instead of his Luna. She didn't blink. "Destroy the records." Then she went home. In her mother's journal, page forty-three, a name. Zulan. The Lycan King's lost son. The man whose family her parents died protecting. The man her husband had just spent three days with. Dion walked his mistress straight into the presence of a king who didn't know who he was. And Winter—Winter had just found her first weapon. (Winter’s POV) The training grounds were loud in all the ways that mattered. Wooden blades cracked together. Boots tore at the dirt. Men barked when they swung too wide, when they lost footing, when someone’s elbow caught a rib hard enough to bruise. The noise should have blended into one dull rhythm by now. Instead, Winter heard every mistake separately. It was why she walked the perimeter instead of standing still. A Luna who planted herself in one place saw only what happened in front of her. Winter preferred to see everything. “Your guard is too low,” she said as she passed one pair. “If that had been steel, you would be dead.” The younger warrior flinched and corrected immediately. She kept moving. The Ember Soul warriors training under her this morning were new enough to still think effort deserved praise. It did not. Effort without skill got pack members killed. Effort without discipline turned patrols into funerals. A male to her right overextended on a lunge, nearly stumbling into the man across from him. “Again,” Winter said. He stra
