“Haven’t spotted her. Could be anywhere in this crowd.”
I scanned the clearing. I found Andrea before I found anyone else.
She was near the front, standing with Luca’s second, her hand on her belly. Dark blue dress. Hair down, blonde waves against her shoulders. She looked small surrounded by wolves. She looked like she belonged there anyway.
I’d told her to stay inside. She told me to go to hell. That was the end of that conversation, and honestly, I hadn’t expected anything different.
She caught my eye across the clearing. No wave, no smile, nothing soft. Just her gaze, locked on mine, and I could read her from fifty feet the same way I’d read her from across the office for two years.I’m here. I’m not leaving. Go do what you have to do.
My chest ached looking at her. Thirty-four weeks pregnant, standing in front of hundreds of wolves, refusing to hide. Stubborn, gorgeous, mine.
George was on the opposite side with Conrad behind him. Lorraine’s older brother, late twenties, broad-shouldered,sharp-jawed, built like his father but with twice the arrogance. He was bouncing on the balls of his feet, restless energy rolling off him. The dangerous part wasn’t his strength. It was the recklessness, the look in his eye that said he’d rather die than walk away empty-handed.
Conrad stood behind him with his hand on George’s shoulder. Calm, composed, the face of a man who’d been playing pack politics since before I was born. I watched him lean in and say something to George and I wondered if he actually believed his son could win or if he was gambling his kid’s life on a political bet he’d lose either way.
The crowd shifted. A murmur started at the treeline and rippled inward, heads turning, bodies stepping aside. I saw it before I saw her: the crowd opening and Margaret walking through the gap.
She was dressed in black. Full makeup, hair perfect, posture straight, carrying herself the way she used to at official functions when my father was alive. She looked like a Luna. She still believed she was one.
My jaw clenched so hard my teeth ached. Security should have caught her at the perimeter. But hundreds of wolves had streamed in from every direction in the last hour and she’d walked in with the crowd. Timed it the way Lorraine timed everything: precisely, for maximum damage.
I started toward her. Luca grabbed my arm.
“Wait.”
“She’s not supposed to be here.”
“I know. But if you drag her out in front of the pack, she becomes a martyr. Let her talk. She’ll hang herself.”
I hated that he was right.
Margaret walked to the center of the clearing. The crowd went quiet. Hundreds of wolves watching a woman in black who used to be their Luna.
“My pack,” she said, and her voice carried the way it always had, pitched to reach the back row, every syllable placed exactly where she wanted it. “I am Margaret Kingsley. Wife of Paul. Mother of your King. I was your Luna for twenty years.”
She was good at this. She’d always been good at this. The grief in her voice measured to the drop, my father’s name landing exactly the way she intended. She talked about tradition, about legacy, about the pack my father built. She didn’t name Andrea. She didn’t need to.
“Your King’s father built this pack on strength,” she said. “He chose his allies wisely. He chose his Luna wisely. And now his son is being asked to fight for a choice that Paul would never have made.”
Murmurs. Agreement from some, uncertainty from others. I could feel the crowd tilting, her voice pulling at the wolves who remembered my father, who grew up under his rule.
Then she turned to George. Looked at him across the clearing with an expression I knew, the one she used to give me when I was a child and she wanted me to know she was proud. She’d never given it to anyone but me.
“George Ashtor is Paul’s godson. A true Alpha. A man raised in tradition, raised to serve this pack.” Her voice rang out across the clearing. “He has my full support. And if Paul were standing here today, he would have George’s back too.”
The words knocked the air out of me.
My own mother. Standing in front of my pack, backing the man challenging me for my crown. Telling hundreds of wolves that my dead father would have supported my opponent. Using the memory of the man who raised me as a weapon aimed directly at my chest.
I couldn’t move. My own mother just endorsed the man trying to take my crown. In front of my pack. Using my dead father’s name to do it. The hurt came fast, before the anger, filling my chest until I couldn’t breathe. She was my mother. She was supposed to be on my side. That was the one thing that was supposed to be simple.
My fists were clenched at my sides. I wanted to drag her off the grounds. I wanted to roar. But Luca’s hand was on my arm and he was right, if I reacted I gave her power.
And underneath the rage was something worse. Grief. Not for the mother she was. For the mother she could have been. Because there were moments, rare ones, scattered across a childhood spent mostly with tutors and servants. Her hand straightening my collar before a pack function when I was six, her perfume close, her voice sayingstand tall, you’re a Kingsley.A birthday card she signed herself instead of having the staff do it. The one time she came to my room after a nightmare, sat on the edge of the bed, didn’t say anything, just sat there until I fell back asleep. Small things. Scraps I’d held onto becausethey were all I had of her. She wasn’t always this. Or maybe she was, and I just didn’t want to see it. Watching her stand in this clearing backing another man’s son over her own, I wasn’t sure anymore which version of her was real.
Then Andrea moved.
She stepped forward. Away from Luca’s second, away from the safety of the crowd’s edge, into the open ground of the clearing.
