(Althea's POV)

The music was too loud.

It had been fine an hour ago, but now the bass was pressing against my skull like a fist. The lights strobed and spun, and every flash made my eyes ache.

Hannah was still pulling at my hand, trying to drag me deeper into the crowd, but my feet had stopped cooperating.

"I need the bathroom," I said, leaning close to her ear.

She looked at me for a second, reading my face the way she always did.

"Don't disappear on me," she said.

"I won't."

I slipped away from her and moved toward the back of the club, where the hallway stretched away from the noise and the heat. The music dulled with every step. My heels clicked unevenly against the floor.

The alcohol had done something strange to my vision. The edges of everything were soft, like the world had been slightly smudged.

My wolf, Kora, stirred somewhere deep inside me. She felt my pain the way she always did - not as a separate thing, but as her own. She had no words for it. Only weight.

Aaron's face kept surfacing in my mind.

Three years. Three years of standing beside him, fighting for him, believing in him. I had argued his case in front of elders who looked at him like he was nothing. I had spent two years helping him dismantle his stepmother's corruption piece by piece.

And today he had walked past me in my engagement dress to go hold someone else's hand.

I didn't understand it. I kept trying to find the version of events where it made sense, and I couldn't.

The hallway was dim. One of the overhead lights was flickering.

There was a figure at the end of the corridor.

Tall. Dark-haired. Standing with his back half-turned.

My chest lurched.

Aaron.

He came back.

The thought hit me before I could stop it, and the alcohol made it feel like certainty. I moved toward him without thinking, my heels stumbling on the floor, and then I was grabbing his arm and turning him toward me and the words were already coming out.

"Why do you always choose her?" My voice cracked. "I gave you everything. Everything, Aaron. Do you know what that feels like? To watch you walk away every single time-"

He didn't move.

I pressed my face against his chest.

"I love you," I said. It came out broken and raw and I hated how much I meant it. "I love you, and you just - you keep leaving, and I don't know how to make you stay-"

And then I kissed him.

It lasted only a second before something wrong registered in my brain.

His scent.

Aaron smelled like storms and pine resin. Clean and sharp and familiar.

This was not that.

This was something deeper. Darker. Like the inside of a forest at midnight, earth and smoke and something that made Kora go very still.

I pulled back.

The hallway tilted.

I looked up and met a pair of gold eyes. Not gray. Gold. Calm and steady and completely, utterly unfamiliar.

This was not Aaron.

This was not even close to Aaron.

The man looked down at me without expression. "You have the wrong person."

The words landed slowly, one at a time.

The wrong person.

Every drop of alcohol in my system seemed to hit me at once. The embarrassment rose so fast and so hot that my knees nearly buckled. I had just poured my heart out to a complete stranger. I had kissed him.

"I'm - I'm so sorry," I managed. "I thought you were - I'm so sorry-"

My voice broke somewhere in the middle of the apology.

And then, humiliatingly, completely beyond my control, I started crying.

I pressed my hands over my face and the tears just kept coming. All the grief I had been holding at bay since the fitting room, since the phone call, since the word tantrum - it all came flooding out at once.

I felt myself sag forward and there was nothing I could do about it.

He didn't step away.

I ended up with my face against his chest again, sobbing like I had forgotten how to stop, and after a long pause I felt a hand settle carefully on my back. Hesitant. Like he wasn't sure of the protocol for a crying stranger who had just kissed him by mistake.

"I'm sorry," I said again, muffled against his jacket. "I'm so sorry, this is - I'm not usually like this-"

The hallway spun.

Then it spun harder.

And then there was nothing.

The first thing I registered was light.

Soft, natural light. Not the strobing nightmare of the club.

I opened my eyes to an unfamiliar ceiling. I was on a couch, covered with a blanket I didn't recognize, in a living room I had never been in before.

There was a cup of tea on the coffee table in front of me. Still steaming.

The memories came back in pieces.

Aaron leaving. The dress. The phone call. The hallway. The gold eyes.

The kiss.

I sat up too fast and pressed my hand to my forehead.

"You're awake."

He was standing in the doorway. Tall, dark-haired, with those same gold eyes that had looked down at me in the hallway. In the daylight, he was even more composed than I remembered. There was something unhurried about the way he held himself. Like nothing surprised him.

"I-" I opened my mouth. Closed it. "Thank you. For not leaving me there."

"You passed out." He crossed the room and sat in the chair across from me. "I couldn't leave you on the floor."

A pause.

"You were very insistent," he added, and there was the faintest edge of something dry in his voice. "About Aaron. And about leaving him. And about how you deserved better."

My face went hot.

"I was drunk."

"Clearly."

He glanced at my collarbone, and I realized the neckline of my dress had shifted slightly, exposing the crescent birthmark.

"Sable Moon Pack," he said. "The lost daughter. The current heir."

It wasn't a question.

I straightened. "Yes."

And then Kora moved.

She moved the way she only moved when something significant was happening - a slow, certain recognition that bypassed my brain entirely and went straight to instinct.

I knew who he was before I consciously worked it out.

Magnus Blake. Heir to the Shadow Warrior Pack. The future Alpha King.

"You knew who I was," I said.

"I recognized the mark." He tilted his head slightly. "You also mentioned your name several times last night."

I pulled the blanket off my lap and set it aside.

"You said something about wanting to get married," he continued, in the same dry tone. "To prove a point to Aaron."

The name landed like a stone in still water.

And something shifted inside me.

The grief was still there. But underneath it, something harder had formed overnight. Something that didn't want to cry anymore.

I lifted my chin.

"I wasn't wrong," I said. "I want to propose to you. Properly. Now."

He looked at me for a moment without speaking.

"Werewolf law," he said finally. "Bonded pairs cannot remarry."

"Aaron and I were never formally registered," I said. "There is no legal bond. I am free."

I watched his expression. He was listening. That was something.

"You need a Luna," I said. "I am a pureblooded Alpha female with healing abilities. That is not nothing." I kept my voice level. "And I need to walk into my engagement party in three days with someone. Someone who would make it very clear that I am not a girl who was discarded."

I didn't say the rest. That he was everything Aaron had always wanted to be. That walking in on his arm would say more than any words I could find.

He looked at me for a long moment.

Then he leaned back slightly.

"There are a dozen women who would marry me without the complications," he said. "You are an orphan with an unstable position in your own pack. You had a broken engagement before you turned nineteen." His voice wasn't cruel. It was simply precise. "Why would I choose you over any of them?"

The words cut exactly where he intended.

I felt it.

But I didn't let it show.

I stood. Smoothed my dress. Walked to the door and wrapped my hand around the handle.

"Thank you for the hospitality," I said, keeping my voice perfectly cool. "And for the tea. I apologize again for last night's misunderstanding."

I turned the handle.

"Althea."

His voice stopped me.

"Wait."