It was cruel that the sun shone brightly today, when everything would change for me.
Today, when there were no more obstacles to block the dark path my future was treading along.
“Are you ready?” the female shifter who had been tending to my dress and veil asked.
I didn’t know her name. She was new, with bright orange hair. This color was unusual in shifters, but Clarity’s alpha, Lorenze Patche, had been collecting any and all shifters who reminded him of Mera and adding them to the pack.
His obsession with the woman who managed to snag the Shadow Beast was at its peak, but if he’d spent any real time with Mera, he’d have known all these new recruits were pale shadows—ironically—of the shifter who was one of my true friends.
Or maybe former friend, since I’d fucked up in a way that possibly couldn’t be undone.
“No, I’m not fucking ready,” I finally said, and my attendant jerked away. Her brown eyes widened enough that my reflection was briefly seen. White. I was dressed in a sleek white dress, off the shoulder and fitted all the way to my heel-clad feet. My dark hair was pulled up, the red undertones standing out against the white veil.
Just as the alpha wanted.
Bastard.
Today I would mate his youngest son, the alpha in waiting: Grant.
Grant was a pathetic beast, but it was hard to hate someone who was just a puppet, living under the control of his father and older brother for most of his life. When the oldest Patche offspring died a few years ago, Grant was suddenly in line for alpha, about to be mated to a complete stranger.
He overcompensated these days, acting all extra-asshole, but he was a damn boy. He was twenty-two years old to my thirty. Our mating was wrong on so many levels, not the least was the fact that his brother had been my true mate, and Alpha Lorenze was trying to replicate something that could no longer be.
Fuck, I wanted to destroy that bastard, but he held the last precious thing in my world, and I couldn’t lose her too.
“Is there anything I can do to help your nerves?” the female asked, misinterpreting my No, I’m not ready from before.
“I just need some time alone,” I murmured, refusing to look her way again.
She left in a hurry, and I remained in the small white tent that had been erected for the ceremony. The mating was to be held in the forests off to the side of one section of mountain, on this perfect summer day. If I’d been truly mating a shifter I loved, it would be one of the happiest days of my life.
Instead, I was a prisoner.
And my time for a miracle had run out.
