Chapter 2​

My corpse lay in the pack mortuary for a moon cycle. All that time, Kael never set foot in the manor. He was too busy composing verses with Rin by moonlit lakes, sharing blood wines under starry skies—rituals I, a mere human, could never partake in. The pack council had to intervene before he'd deign to claim my remains.​ By then, my body was beyond recognition. The summer heat had turned my flesh to putrid mush, maggots writhing in the hollow sockets where my eyes had been. The guard swallowed hard. “Alpha , please... identify the body.”​ Kael' lip curled. “No need. Wrap it in wolfsbane-laced linen and dump it in the cursed desert.” He turned to leave, but a sudden wind tugged at the shroud, exposing a sliver of jade-green silk. His posture stiffened. That was the dress I'd worn the day we met: the day I'd clawed my sister' throat for a silver hairpin, then collapsed in a pool of my own blood, weeping pitifully. He'd watched. “Most females feign submission,” he'd said later. “You fight for what you want. I admire that.”​ Now he sneered at the rotting fabric. “You knew the price when you forced your way into this pack. You reeked of human deceit even then.”​ I remembered that hairpin—the one the Matriarch had torn from my scalp and jammed into my sister' skull, screaming that half-breeds don't deserve pack heirlooms. Kael had promised to marry me anyway. Said he saw “fire” in me. But when Rin returned from the Southern Packs, all it took was a single slash of her silver blade across her wrist.​ He'd tried to break off our union at the Mating Ceremony. But I'd waited until the full moon, then plunged into the Moonlit Lake, screaming. When he'd dived in to save me—we'd surfaced bound: my human skin marks branded with his wolfish scent, visible to every werewolf in the vicinity. The pack elders had roared their approval. A forced bond was still a bond, they said.​ On our wedding night, he'd left me sitting alone in the ceremonial shelter, my neck bare of the mating bite. I'd waited till dawn, listening to his growls from the study, where he was doubtless rutting with Rin through the window. When he finally emerged, eyes bloodshot, he'd snarled, “You stole her place. The Moon Goddess will punish you for this, human.”​ Now, as they lowered my coffin into the cursed desert，I felt the earth reject me. No wolfsbane grew here, no silver threads in the soil—just barren dirt where even our kind' bones refused to rest. Kael was absent, of course; Rin was heavy with his true heir, her belly swollen with a pureblood pup.​ The first full moon since my death rose, casting its silver light over my grave. And beneath the soil, my fingers—now skeletal, now regenerating—twitched.​