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The phone's vibration shattered the silence at 4:47 AM. I jolted awake, my hand instinctively reaching across the king-sized bed before my eyes fully opened. The cold sheets greeted my fingers. Empty. Again. Three days now since Ethan had last slept in our room. I fumbled for my phone on the nightstand, squinting against the harsh blue light of the screen. Unknown number. The message contained a single encrypted file. I tapped it open. The video loaded slowly, the progress bar crawling across the screen. When the image finally crystallized, my breath caught. I sat there in the darkness, my heart pounding in my temples, in my wrists, in the hollow of my throat. *Breathe,* I told myself. *Just breathe.* But breathing felt like swallowing broken glass. I grabbed the phone, shoved it into my pocket, and threw back the covers. Then I headed for the door. --- The underground training facility sprawled beneath Eclipse Pack House. I headed straight for the heavy bags suspended from reinforced ceiling beams in the dim emergency lighting. My bare feet made no sound on the rubber flooring. I didn't bother with wraps or gloves. I just positioned myself in front of the nearest bag and drove my fist into it with everything I had. The impact sent a shock up my arm, but I welcomed the pain. I hit it again, then again, falling into a rhythm that had nothing to do with technique and everything to do with the need to break something, to hurt something the way I was hurting. Left hook. Right cross. Elbow strike. Knee. The bag swung wildly on its chain, the metal links screaming in protest. Sweat soaked through my gray tank top, plastering it to my skin. My knuckles split open, blood smearing across the leather surface of the bag, but the wounds closed almost as quickly as they formed. I lost track of time, lost in the violence of movement, the satisfying thud of flesh meeting resistance. I was lining up for another kick when the overhead lights blazed to life, flooding the training room with harsh fluorescent brightness. "Bella! I was just looking for you—" Ethan's voice rang out from somewhere behind me. I was already committed to the strike, my body in motion, and I heard his footsteps rushing closer. He was moving fast, too fast, and when I spun into the roundhouse kick, he was suddenly right there in my trajectory, close enough that I couldn't pull back. My shin connected with his left cheekbone with a solid crack. Ethan staggered backward two steps, his hand flying up to his face, his black-framed glasses knocked askew. For one brief, satisfying moment, I saw shock and anger flash across his features. "Fuck," he hissed, straightening up and adjusting his glasses with sharp, irritated movements. I lowered my leg slowly, my expression carefully blank. "I didn't see you there." He exhaled hard through his nose, rubbing his jaw. "Yeah, well. I got too excited, ran right into your kick." His tone was clipped, impatient, already dismissing the incident as he moved on to what he'd actually come here for. He put his hands on my shoulders. I went rigid under his touch, every muscle in my body screaming at me to pull away, but I forced myself to stand still. "Bella, listen," he said, his voice pitched high with barely contained joy. "Faye had the baby. A boy. He's perfect. Completely healthy." The words hit me like individual punches, each one landing with precision in the hollow space behind my ribs. "Mom cried when she saw him," Ethan continued, talking faster now, the words tumbling over each other in his rush to get them out. "She said it was a gift from the Moon Goddess. Grandmother couldn't even speak, she was so happy. And Faye, God, Bella, poor Faye. The labor was so hard on her, she's exhausted. She really needs rest now." I stared at him, at this man I'd mated three years ago, this Alpha who'd stood beside me at the Moonstone Altar and promised to honor me as his Luna, his equal, his partner. "You came back just to tell me this?" My voice came out flat, emotionless. Ethan's hands dropped from my shoulders. His jaw tightened. "I came back because you weren't answering your phone. Mom wanted me to remind you to visit the hospital today. Faye's in the VIP maternity ward at Emberhold General. She really wants to see you." "How thoughtful." "Bella." His tone shifted, taking on that edge of warning I knew too well. "I know this might be difficult for you to hear, but Faye is at her most vulnerable right now. She's been worried sick that you'd resent her for this, that it would create division in the pack. The last thing she wants is for this baby to come between us." The laugh that escaped me was sharp enough to cut. "Then maybe you shouldn't have done it in the first place." Ethan went very still. "What did you just say?" "You heard me." I met his eyes squarely, letting him see the ice in mine. "Go back to your son, Ethan. I'm sure he needs you more than I do." I put extra emphasis on the word *son*, let it drip with all the venom I was holding back, and watched his face flush dark. "For fuck's sake." He dragged a hand through his hair. "How many times do we have to have this conversation? It was medical assistance. Artificial insemination. They used my sperm, yes, but Faye and I never—we're not—" "Then why couldn't you tell me from the beginning?" I interrupted, my voice deadly quiet. He opened his mouth, closed it. The truth was, Ethan hadn't been the only one absent from the House these past few days. The entire Grave family had been camped out at Emberhold General Hospital, waiting for Faye to give birth. Faye Porter, daughter of Duskcrown Pack's Alpha, who had married into Eclipse Pack three years ago alongside me. We'd had a double mating ceremony—I'd been bound to the older brother, Ethan, while Faye had been bound to the younger, Evan. The event had been the talk of Emberhold, two Alphas' daughters joining one of the most powerful packs in the region. But the happiness hadn't lasted long. The night before Ethan and Evan were supposed to compete for the Alpha position, Evan had died in a sudden accident. The Grave family had been devastated, guilt-ridden. They'd urged Faye to move on, to find another mate, but she'd refused. She'd chosen to stay, to honor Evan's memory by remaining part of his family. And the Graves had loved her for it. They'd adored this devoted, loyal girl who'd sacrificed her future out of love for their dead son. Adored her enough to find a way to give her what she wanted most—a child carrying Grave blood. With Evan gone, that left only one source for that bloodline. Ethan's jaw tightened. "You want to know why we didn't tell you? Because we knew you'd react exactly like this. Making a scene, being unreasonable." His eyes hardened. "You're Luna of this pack, Bella. You should be celebrating that Eclipse finally has an heir. Moon Goddess knows you haven't managed to provide one in three years." I held his gaze for a long moment, letting the silence stretch between us, letting him see something in my eyes that made his expression falter. Then I turned away, bending down to retrieve my phone from where I'd left it on the floor. "Go back to the hospital, Ethan. I'm sure Faye is waiting for you." I heard him take a breath, heard him start to say something else, but then his phone buzzed. He pulled it out, glanced at the screen, and whatever he saw there made him curse under his breath. "I have to go," he said, already moving toward the door. The door slammed shut behind him, leaving me alone in the too-bright training room with my bloody knuckles and my shattered illusions. I looked down at my phone, at the lock screen showing our mating ceremony photo from three years ago. Me in the traditional silver-gray Luna gown, Ethan in Eclipse Pack's ceremonial deep blue, both of us smiling under moonlight at the Moonstone Altar. I swiped open the phone. The screen lit up, displaying the video I'd watched earlier this morning. Ethan's suit jacket discarded on the floor. Faye's sundress bunched around her waist. Their bodies moving together in a rhythm that told the real story behind Eclipse Pack's miracle baby. This was the truth of what they'd called "medical assistance".

The moment my husband looked me in the eyes and said "You were never my wife, Isabella—just a transaction," the entire Moretti family raised their glasses and laughed. I didn't cry. I smiled. Because what no one at that table knew—not my husband, not his father, not the blonde sitting in his lap with my ring on her finger—was that the "disposable bride" they'd used for three years was the one person who could bring their empire to its knees. But that came later. First, the humiliation. "Sign it." Marco Moretti slid the divorce papers across the dining table. Twenty-six members of the most powerful mafia family in New York watched. His mother watched. His father, Don Vittorio, watched from the head of the table with the same cold satisfaction he'd worn the day he'd bought me from my father's debts. Natalia—the blonde, his underboss's daughter, the woman he'd been sleeping with since our wedding night—twisted my ring on her finger and blew me a kiss. Three years. Three years of cooking his meals, washing his blood-stained shirts, standing silent at his side while he built alliances with my face and broke promises with my body. "Sign, Isabella. You get nothing. No money. No protection. No name." Marco lit a cigarette, bored. "You walk out the way you came in. With nothing." My chest burned where something had lived for three years—not love. I'd never been stupid enough to love Marco Moretti. Something worse. Hope. The desperate, pathetic hope that if I was good enough, quiet enough, useful enough, someone in this family would see me as human. I picked up the pen. "I, Isabella Crane, sign willingly." My voice didn't shake. "And I want you to remember that, Marco. That I signed willingly. That you let me walk out alive." He smirked. "Why would I remember that?" I signed the last page and stood. "Because one day you're going to realize what you just set free." I straightened my dress—the only thing I owned that was truly mine. "And by then, it'll be too late." Natalia laughed. "She thinks she's in a movie." I looked at her. At the ring. At the man who'd used me as a human shield at more than one arms deal, who'd let his soldiers corner me in hallways, who'd told me on our wedding night that I should be grateful a Crane got to sleep under a Moretti roof. And I felt the second thing no one knew about me—the thing my dead mother had whispered into my blood before she died—wake up like a match striking in the dark. I turned to leave the house I'd never enter again. Behind me, in a penthouse across Manhattan, a phone rang. And the man who answered it had been waiting three years for this exact moment. He'd been waiting for me to be free.

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