CHAPTER1
Itell myself that I can claw my way back from this, that it’s just another broken heart, another beautiful dream dashed to dust at my feet.
I tell myself that I will swallow down every poisonous thought, lock them away in the darkest part of my heart.
Lock them away like my father locked away my magic.
But that’s the thing about betrayal, isn’t it?
It’s a potent poison, a devastating draught of venom and thorns. You can lock it away, but it’s insidious. It breaks through its confinement like a bitter barb, never dulling as it pierces the most tender parts of you. It makes you bleed, makes you scar, rips you open again and again.
I remind myself that I survived my debutante ball, when I crashed like a wave into the arms of the alpha who chose another. I survived Cassian Leclerc.
I tell myself I’ll survive Luca Anders too, but I don’t believe it.
I don’t believe I’ll ever rise from this pit, this dark despair. That, one day, I’ll be stronger for it.
Ian raps at the edge of my worktable with his scribe and I startle, looking up into my professor’s ice-blue eyes.
What must he see in my drawn expression, in the creases around my trembling lips? His own expression softens, the stern set of his mouth dropping into a worried frown.
“What is it? Are you unwell?”
I am a fragmented shell of the mage I was when I stood before him during my midterms, when I was first able to call my magic and cast spells when he bid me to. Now I am raw and numb all at once, feeling both everything and nothing.
I don’t get a chance to answer.
Whispers curl through class like smoke and, one by one, my classmates drift to the tall windows that span one side of the classroom. Their shocked whispers, their gasps, they build into a cacophony, the roar of a storm, making the hair on my arms stand on end.
Professor Reinhardt tries to call the class back to order, but whatever draws the class away from their worktables is magnetic: a force of nature that not even I can resist. I cross the classroom on leaden legs, dread sinking low in my belly.
Knowing.
Knowing that the sight outside the rain-spattered windows will send me to my knees.
Long slashes of red and blue light cut across the classroom, catching on the polished tops of our worktables and dancing along the walls.
They might have been beautiful if I didn’t know what they meant.
“No!” Alyssa gasps, reaching back and grabbing my hand, tugging me up to the cool glass.
I let out a shuddering breath when I see him, his shoulders hunched up around his ears, his black leather jacket stretched taut across them, ink-covered hands bound behind him in a pair of handcuffs. His long, blond hair slips free from its knot and clings to his face, wet from the November rain.
“Luca,” Alyssa whimpers, when it’s me who should be whimpering for the alpha as a uniformed officer shoves him into the back of the police car.
I don’t. My throat burns with a whine I swallow down, along with all the bitter thoughts.
Everything and nothing all at once.
Both raw and numb until… until all the chatter around me fades like I’ve got cotton wool in my ears.
Until all I hear is my name in his voice, screamed in his mind, echoing in mine.
Fear and agony lace through the tormented “Juniper!” as it echoes in my mind, a final broken plea, a desperate confession.
I blink away the sheen of tears making my eyes sting and turn away from the window, closing my eyes and taking a steadying breath.
Alyssa wraps an arm around my shoulder, and I hear her voice, but it’s far away. Leagues away, swallowed up in a storm of anguish. His anguish and mine.
