Chapter 1

(Serena’s POV)

When the silver knife plunged into Miles’s chest, his eyes nearly bulged out of their sockets.

“You dare kill your own mate? You’ll die too!”

I didn’t let go. Gripping the hilt with all my strength, I drove it in deeper and dragged him down with me into the freezing lake.

“You deserve to die!” I screamed in his face. “Go keep my mother company in hell!”

“You’re insane!” He choked on the water, blood spilling from the corner of his mouth. “You brought this on yourself! You were the one who climbed into the Alpha’s bed! Your mother died because of you!”

Even with death staring him in the face, he was still trying to smear me. I twisted my wrist and shoved the blade another inch into his heart.

A violent stab of agony shot through our mate bond. His heart gave out, and his eyes stayed wide open.

Inside me, my wolf, Clara, let out one final howl.

I released the silver knife and sank with him toward the bottom of the lake.

Shouts erupted from the shore.

Then came heavy footsteps, followed by the sound of someone crashing into the water like a cannonball and cutting through the waves toward me with desperate force.

Alpha Dominic.

I had never seen that kind of terror on his face before, as if he were losing the most precious thing he had ever possessed.

How ridiculous. The man who had personally ruined my entire life was putting on that expression now—for whose benefit?

His lips were moving, probably calling my name, but the water had sealed over my ears. I couldn’t hear a thing.

Everything around me was going dark.

I saw Miles handing me that glass of wine laced with Enchanted Herb, coaxing me to drink it, then turning around and delivering my weakened, limp body straight into Dominic’s bedroom.

The smell of alcohol mixed with the sharp scent of cedar. Dominic shoved me down into the mattress and kissed me until I could barely breathe.

“Daisy… you came back…”

That was the name he called, with reverent tenderness.

“Let go! I’m not Daisy!” I fought with everything I had—kicking, clawing, my nails raking bloody lines down the side of his face.

He didn’t stop.

My wolf spirit, Clara, cried out in pain inside me. She wanted to fight back, but the Alpha’s pheromonal pressure left her limbs weak and useless.

What made me want to die even more was that my body betrayed me too. Under the combined effects of the Alpha’s pheromones and the Enchanted Herb, I climaxed over and over, soaking everything.

The pleasure was so intense it turned my stomach. I bit through my lip, but I still couldn’t keep the sounds from escaping.

I hated my own body even more than I hated him.

The next morning, Miles came to pick me up.

His fingers lightly brushed the purpling bite mark of the temporary mark on my neck, and then he buried his face in my shoulder and trembled as he cried.

“I’m sorry… I’m sorry, Serena. I really had no choice. He’s the Alpha. He asked for you by name—how could someone like me, just a low-level assistant, possibly resist? But I swear, no one else will ever know. I’ll protect you.”

Clara growled low in my heart, but I looked at the tear mole beneath Miles’s eye, at his shaking shoulders, and I believed him.

I told myself that as long as no one knew, as long as Miles was still on my side, things weren’t that bad.

Two weeks later, Miles was promoted to Gamma’s assistant.

That same day, I found messages on his phone of him fawning over Dominic’s cousin and confessing his feelings to her.

I confronted him in a rage and smashed his phone. By the next day, word had spread through the entire pack that I had climbed into the Alpha’s bed.

Overnight, the way everyone looked at me changed.

“Disgusting. A half-blood mutt was bound to be trouble. She betrayed her mate just to become the Alpha’s mistress.”

“Who would’ve guessed she was such a slut?”

“Her husband’s the real victim.”

By the next morning, my car had been splashed all over with red paint, and the word BITCH was sprayed across the hood in letters big enough to be a billboard.

When I demanded a divorce, Miles laughed until tears came to his eyes.

“Baby, do you think this is human society, where you can walk away with a signature? Let me tell you something—as long as I don’t agree to dissolve the mate bond, you’ll be a servant to me and my family forever.”

He gave the master bedroom to his mother, Margaret, let his sister Brianna take over my things, and had me shoved into the storage room.

Then my mother came looking for me after she couldn’t reach me.

She didn’t ask a single question. She just pulled me into a fierce embrace.

“Mom’s here to take you home.”

I didn’t dare let her see the mess inside the house, so I dragged her to the supermarket nearby under the pretense of buying groceries.

Then Margaret’s voice rang out from the end of the aisle.

“Well, look who has the nerve to show her face.”

She wasn’t alone. Three or four middle-aged women stood behind her, all staring at my mother with the eager gleam of people anticipating a spectacle.

“Your daughter is a born whore! She dumped her own mate to crawl into the Alpha’s bed! Are you human trash just like she is? Mother and daughter—both sluts!”

“Shut up!” I lunged forward to stop her, but my mother had already clutched her chest, gone deathly pale, and collapsed.

Margaret flinched backward in fright, then turned and ran with the others.

My hands shaking, I called emergency services and rushed my mother to the pack hospital. But all through the night, the nurses only looked at me with disgust and coldly repeated that there were no beds available.

At two in the morning, my mother stopped breathing in my arms.

I went mad. I bought a pure silver dagger on the black market and cornered Miles by the lake while he was sunbathing with a bikini-clad woman in his arms.

“So this was your plan from the start, wasn’t it? You drugged me, sent me to the Alpha’s bed, and traded me for your future!”

Miles looked at me the way someone might look at a pet that had finally learned to talk, the corner of his mouth lifting.

“So what if I did? I was sick of the way you lorded your dowry over me. A mongrel with only half a werewolf bloodline—what use were you except pleasing the Alpha?”

“Was it planned from the very beginning?” I asked again.

He smiled then—a real smile, cruel and naked.

“Yes.”

The sensation of the blade sinking into flesh came back to me, and freezing lake water crushed against my chest.

“Serena? Serena, wake up!”

Someone gently shook my shoulder twice, and the suffocating pressure vanished all at once.

I broke into violent coughing, my hands instinctively clutching the leather seat beneath me.

No lake water. No smell of blood. Outside the car window, rows of streetlights slid backward into the night. Warm air drifted from the vents, carrying the faint scent of car freshener.

“Why are you drenched in sweat? Bad dream?”

That familiar voice sounded by my ear.

I turned stiffly and saw Miles in the driver’s seat, one hand on the steering wheel, glancing over at me while they waited at a red light.

He was wearing the dark blue designer suit I had just bought him. Lean and handsome, gentle-looking, with that tear mole at the corner of his eye made softer by the streetlights.

He reached over and wiped the cold sweat from my forehead with his thumb.

“Look at you—you’re terrified. Your face is white. Has the shop been too busy lately? Are you overworking yourself?”