KIERAN’S POV
I stood, frozen, watching Sera’s retreating figure until the sway of her hair and the asured lift of her shoulders disappeared behind the arch of the park entrance.
The ache in my chest wasn’t a sharp stab—it was the slow, gnawing kind that crept in and hollowed everything out.
It was pain, yes, but pain I couldn’t quite qualify.
The cruelest part was that it shouldn’t have hurt—not when she had made it clear again and again that there was no room for in her world.
And after that phone call the night I let myself have a little too much to drink, after Lucian’s curt voice ca down the line, practically telling to fuck off and stop disrupting their ti together, I realized: there was no going back for us.
If there had even been a ‘back’ in the first place.
Perhaps that was what haunted the most—the realization that Sera and I had never truly had a past together. Not one worth holding onto, at least.
From the very beginning of our so-called marriage, I had never really seen her. I had looked through her, past her, around her, as though she were nothing more than an inconvenient shadow. The ghost of my mistakes.
My hatred—born of my own blindness, my own misplaced affections—had been the lens through which I saw everything she did.
And through that warped lens, she had always co out small. Invisible. I let myself believe that lie because it was easier than admitting how much of was bound up in soone I refused to acknowledge.
If not for the attack at the funeral—the blood, the screaming, the bone-deep terror of almost losing her—I would have gone on this way indefinitely.
Ignoring her. Overlooking her. Pretending she was nothing more than the silent, unremarkable mother of my child, tethered to my life by duty alone.
And so I asked myself, staring at the empty space where she had stood monts before: what exactly was I losing now? What was I mourning?
Could I even call the cause of this ache in my chest love? Did I have the right to use such a word after all the ways I’d fucked up?
The echo of Daniel’s laughter floated faintly in my mind, and I felt myself drawn back to the bench.
This was his spot, the one he always claid when we ca here, and as I lowered myself onto it, gripping the wooden slats, a mory blood vividly in my mind.
He must have been about seven years old, too young to ask introspective questions. Yet, he’d scrambled up beside and fixed his wide innocent eyes on as he asked: ‘Daddy, what is love?’
At the ti, my thoughts had gone straight to Celeste.
Surely our relationship was proof enough. After all, wasn’t that what everyone said? That Celeste and I were love’s perfect example?
But even in that mont, sothing in held back. Sothing in knew better.
So I had told him instead about my parents—two fated wolves who had overco all odds and chosen each other and stayed by each other’s side until the end.
Their steadiness, their loyalty, the awe with which my father looked at my mother, even after decades together. The way he worshiped the ground she walked on and would burn the world down for her.
That, I’d told Daniel, was love.
It was what I thought I was missing, what I thought Sera had taken from .
But now, with Celeste back in my life, I found myself questioning everything.
The love I thought I had with her—it wasn’t what I had imagined.
Yes, once upon a ti, we had been the golden couple: the Alpha heir and the Lockwood princess.
Together we had been envied, admired, praised. Dating Celeste had satisfied every ounce of ego in .
She was grace and beauty, and she sparked a fire in . We’d been young and wild once—stolen nights, burning kisses that promised more but never crossed the final line.
Edward Lockwood had made it very clear he wouldn’t tolerate his daughter ending up pregnant before marriage, especially not as a minor.
I had respected that, or at least abided by it, believing that our fairy-tale ending was only a matter of ti. The golden couple’s coronation.
I had thought Celeste and I were destined. That nothing could sever what we had.
But then that night—that fateful night—ca, and everything veered off course.
In hindsight, I’m surprised Edward didn’t sink his claws into my heart afterward. After all, it might have been with the wrong daughter, but I’d broken his rules, nonetheless.
Anyways, when Celeste returned to , I expected we would fall back into each other with desperate hunger, feverishly making up for the years we’d lost.
I thought the first chance we got, I would pull her into my arms and never let her go again.
Yet, the truth was damning. I found myself avoiding it. Avoiding her.
Every ti we got close, my body reacted with instinctive hesitation, and I didn’t understand why until I saw Lucian and Sera together.
The way he looked at her, the way her laughter softened in his presence—it enraged . And that rage cracked sothing open inside .
I realized then that I did care for Celeste, but not in the way I had convinced myself.
The fierce possessiveness that clawed through at the sight of Sera with another man was sothing I had never once felt with Celeste. It was primal, raw, uncontrollable.
Everyone around had told I loved Celeste, and I had echoed the words back so many tis I had nearly believed them.
But now? Now my heart recoiled from the script I had been reading my entire life. Resistance, sharp and undeniable, pressed in with every thought of returning to what I once thought I wanted.
With a heavy sigh, I rose from the bench. The weight of the mories crowding in was too heavy. Suffocating.
But it seed I wasn’t through walking down mory lane.
My steps led toward the library by the park almost by instinct.
It was here, only days ago, that I had spoken with the old scholar who lived here—a man whose mind was a treasure chest of lore, half-forgotten traditions, and truths buried beneath centuries of repetition.
I had asked him a question I never thought I would: Was there a way, beyond scent and wolf recognition, to truly identify one’s mate? A way to cut through doubt, to pierce the fog of uncertainty that plagued ?
The scholar’s eyes had twinkled knowingly, as if he saw deeper into than I intended him to.
He told there was. The most direct and effective way was through the mating mark itself.
“If the person is truly your fated mate,” he had said, “then marking them—whether or not you possess wolves, whether or not your senses confird it—would awaken the bond, would bind your souls together with undeniable clarity. Even if all else is muted, the mark will not lie.”
It should have been Celeste I thought of in that mont. By all logic, by every expectation laid on my shoulders, it should have been her.
But the instant the words left his lips, my mind betrayed . I thought of Sera. I thought of her neck beneath my lips, of the delicate curve where her pulse thundered.
And the question tore through like a blade: what would have happened if I had marked her back then at the blood hunt? Or the night I kissed her on her front porch? Or on the yacht? Or in the villa?
Would the truth have awakened between us?
Would I have seen her differently, known her differently? Would all this pain, this tangled ss, have been avoided?
I rembered standing there, bracing my hands against the scholar’s desk, feeling the weight of that possibility pressing down on .
My entire life, refrad by a single choice I had never made.
Before I could follow that dangerous train of thought further, and get consud by regrets and what-ifs, Gavin’s voice ripped through my mind, urgent and sharp. ‘Alpha. We’ve caught him. The mastermind behind Seraphina’s kidnapping. He’s in custody.’
My heart lurched, thundering in my chest.
For a mont, the shadows of the library receded from my mind, and all I could hear was the echo of those words.
The mastermind. The one who had dared to touch her. The one who had tried to take her from .
The hollow ache of loss twisted into sothing else—sothing hotter, sharper, alive with purpose. For the first ti that evening, I felt clarity burning through the haze.
And with it ca relief—because if I didn’t find sothing else to focus on, I would lose my fucking mind.
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