His voice is deep and quiet inside my mind, laced with a desperation that makes my knees tremble. It’s like he’s repeating this plea over and over in the frantic hope that it will fasten a link between us and find its way to me. My breath catches, and I turn toward him like he’s tugged me with an invisible tether.
He’s already looking at me, relief flickering in his eyes. He knows I heard him.
I swallow against the dryness in my throat and plant my feet. Seren’s fingers tighten on my elbow. Siggy’s touch is light at my shoulder, an anchor I didn’t know I needed. My heart is a caught bird, fluttering wildly within my chest while adrenaline burns through all four of my limbs. Hands trembling, I try to subtly shake out my arms to ease the fire.
Talis stands onstage where he called her, nothing more than a polished ornament beside him. He doesn’t extend his hand again, doesn’t touch her. Like a line drawn in the sand, he keeps his distance. That tiny mercy helps.
His sharp, metal eyes sweep across the room like he’s counting the souls within it. His attention lingers, holding eye contact with every set of eyes that meet his, until the other person trembles from the quiet dominance that is unfurling within him.
Then he starts to speak again, his gravel-wrapped velvet voice carrying into every corner of the open space because of the speakers. “From the moment I was born, my father made sure I understood my future. He was the pack Alpha, and I was his heir. Every conversation, every look, every breath shared with him was forged into some kind of lesson. How to lead. How to hold power. How to command respect.”
Command—that word lands like a stone in the silence. It’s deliberate, chosen. Because everyone in this room who knew Merritt Fallamhain knows he wasn’t the kind of Alpha who earned loyalty. He demanded it.
“I was starving,” Rennick continues, his voice steady, “and I fed off whatever scraps of approval he’d offer. Until I began to resent him for it.I wanted him to just be my father instead of the Alpha I was meant to succeed one day. I spent a lot of years away from this place, splitting my time between here and Seattle, and my resentment was one of the reasons for that. And the times I did come home, I wasn’t truly present, not the way I should have been.Maybe if I had been, I could have seen the signs sooner. Maybe I could have helped before it was too late, but by the time I saw what my father had become, the sickness had already consumed him.”
He doesn’t waver. His words don’t falter. There’s something raw in his honesty, something stripped bare that I’ve never seen him offer anyone else aside from me. But now, he does it before a room of at least a hundred people. It’s also the first time I’ve heard him speak of his father this way. Or at all, now that I think about it.
And when he says the words—“Moon Madness, that’s what they call it”—everything inside me goes still.
I never asked how Merritt Fallamhain died.
Never pondered the possibilities beyond that initial jolt of hearing he was gone, that Rennick now stood in his place. Call it self-preservation if you want, but after spending years believing the stern Alpha with the soulless eyes had exiled me from my home, I didn’t see the point in wondering what became of him. Some wounds heal best when left untouched. Or maybe, I’ve just had too much other shit to survive since reuniting with Rennick to dwell on the ghost of his father. Probably a mix of both, if I’m being honest.
But now I’m thinking I should have asked.
Moon Madness.
The name sounds innocuous, almost gentle, but it isn’t.
It’s a death sentence for shifters—a slow, violent unraveling of the mind. It strips away memory and reason until the person you love is nothing more than a vicious echo wearing their face. Paranoia nips at their heels while hallucinations feed the world they think is real. They grow volatile, mistaking family for foe, empathy bleeding out until there’s nothing human left.
It’s quick. Cruel. There’s no cure. No hope. Just the agonizing wait for the inevitable end.
And italwaysends in blood. Whether by their own hand, or by someone else’s mercy.
I can see it now, as clearly as if I’d been here.Merritt losing himself piece by piece. The pack pretending to not notice or too scared to do anything about it. And Rennick, realizing too late, watching his father turn into a creature that has to be contained.
Rennick pauses. His jaw tightens, gaze distant and haunted. Then his hand lifts, fingers brushing the four pale slashes carved into his temple.
The sound that slips from me is barely a breath.
I understand what happened.
The truth lands slow, spreading like a bruise through my chest. The scars I’ve traced with my fingertips, the ones I thought were remnants of some old fight, aren’t that at all. The truth settles sharp and cold.
Renick didn’t just lose his father.
He ended him.
A mercy kill.
Rennick’s voice slices through the quiet that has swallowed the room. It’s calm and steady, but it carries the kind of weight that only comes from having done the unimaginable.
“My reign was never supposed to begin that way,” he says. “With my father’s blood staining my hands.”
The crowd absorbs the words, and it’s like a collective wound reopening. I can see it in the members of Pack Fallamhain’sfaces—the ones who were there, who watched it happen—mirroring the heaviness pressing against my ribs.
From what I saw as a pup and learned today, there was nothing soft about Rennick’s relationship with Merritt. No warm memories to fall back on, no parental gestures wrapped in affection. It was structured, cold, a hierarchal battle more than a bond. But he was Ren’s dad, and grief doesn’t care how complicated the relationship was.
