I choked up a mouthful of black blood. As the world dimmed, I heard Edith's vicious laugh cutting through the haze.
"Narelle Silvercrest, you should never have come here to disrupt our pack. Finn has treated me as his Luna for years. If you showed up alive, how was I supposed to go on holding this territory?!"
My daughter and I died like dogs. They rolled our bodies in reed mats and dumped us in a mass grave beyond the territory markers.
After I was gone, Finn wrapped his arms around a weeping Edith and murmured comfort against her hair.
"She's dead. Let it go. Even if she'd lived, I would've burned the mating mark off her neck myself and told her to stay away from our pack."
The meal I'd once given a starving stranger, the vows he'd sworn under open sky, all of it erased from his memory as though it had never existed.
I died with hatred lodged so deep it followed me into the dark. When my eyes opened again, it was the very day Finn inherited the title.
I threw the foraged roots from my hands, sold the den for every coin it was worth, and carried my daughter to my father's territory compound, where I fell to my knees.
"Father. I've decided to reject the mating bond."
...