POV Blake
"The original plan was for Amelia to marry you and spy," I finally said.
My voice is surprisingly steady for someone detonating their entire life.
Words have weight and I learned that the hard way, watching the confession land on Matthias like physical blows.
"She was supposed to gather intelligence while playing your perfect Luna. But she killed herself rather than go through with it, so lucky me, I got promoted from family freak to active saboteur."
His face went through a masterclass in emotional devastation.
Confusion to understanding to betrayal, with a fun little stopover at 'maybe I can unhear this.'
"The intel I gathered wasn't for a merger." Each word tasted like battery acid. "It was for revenge. The negotiations? Theater. Misdirection. While you're planning joint patrols, they're planning an invasion."
His voice cracked. "Blake—"
"I told them everything," I interrupted him. No point sugar coating it now. "Patrol schedules, defensive weaknesses, which of your warriors have kids and would hesitate to leave them orphaned. Every Sunday phone call home, I served up your pack's vulnerabilities like a fucking buffet."
The mate bond between us lit up like a torture device.
His pain slammed into me—not physical, but something worse. The soul-deep agony of realizing the person you trusted most just confessed to being your personal Judas.
His roar shook birds from trees a mile away. Pure Alpha rage mixed with the specific grief of a wolf whose mate just revealed herself as the enemy.
The sound hit me like a physical force, and I dropped to my knees not from his power but from the weight of what I'd done.
His wolf was howling now, the sound carrying across the territory. Others would hear it and know something was catastrophically wrong.
Good. They needed the warning I'd been too cowardly to give.
Through the bond, I felt everything. Matthias’s trust shattering, his wolf's anguish at being betrayed by their mate, the crushing realization that every tender moment between us was built on lies.
It was like drowning in someone else's heartbreak while simultaneously being the cause of it.
But underneath the tsunami of guilt, something else bloomed. Relief.
Fuck, the relief of finally telling the truth after months of choking on lies.
"Say something," I begged, still on my knees in the moonlit grass. "Reject the bond. Call me a traitor. Just—"
"Leave."
One word. That's all.
No lengthy condemnation, no formal rejection, no Alpha command to never return. Just 'leave,' delivered in a voice so empty it made his earlier roar seem like a lullaby.
Somehow, that single word hurt worse than any elaborate speech could have.
I'd prepared for rage, for hatred, for the formal words that would sever our mate bond. Instead, I got a dismissal. Clean, simple and devastating.
I shifted without argument, my wolf whimpering as we turned away from our mate. But she had one demand before we ran—Sage Helen.
We needed to see her, needed to confess to someone who might understand why we'd waited so long to grow a spine.
The healer answered her door like she'd been expecting me, which, knowing her, she probably had. One look at my face and she pulled me inside, wrapping me in the kind of maternal embrace I'd never gotten from my actual mother.
"Tell me," she said simply.
So I did. Every ugly detail, every cowardly choice, every moment I'd chosen my parents' conditional approval over the pack that had shown me unconditional acceptance.
She listened without judgment, occasionally making soft sounds of understanding that made me cry harder.
"I know I don't deserve forgiveness," I said when the words finally ran out. "I know what I've done is unforgivable. But please, help him understand it wasn't about him. It was never about hurting him. I'm just... broken. They broke me before I even knew what the whole is looked like."
"Oh, child." Her weathered hands cupped my face. "We're all broken in some way. The question is whether we let those breaks define us or whether we grow stronger at the fractured places."
"Pretty sure I just shattered completely."
"Perhaps." She smiled sadly. "But sometimes we need to shatter before we can rebuild. Matthias will need time—his trust doesn't break easily, but when it does, the wounds run deep. But that boy loves with his whole heart, and mate bonds don't simply disappear because we wish them to."
"He told me to leave."
"And you should. For now."
She pressed something into my hand—a small vial of something that smelled like herbs and home.
"For when the running becomes too much. It'll help you sleep without dreams."
I kissed her hands, this woman who'd shown me more genuine maternal care in months than my mother had in decades.
"Thank you. For everything. For seeing me as more than just the spare."
"You were never the spare, Blake Bishop. You were simply waiting to become who you were meant to be."
I left through the back door, shifting immediately and running into the night.
Each step away from Bloodmoon territory felt like tearing pieces of my soul away, leaving a trail of invisible blood behind me.
The mate bond stretched between us like a rubber band pulled to its limit, carrying echoes of Matthias's pain with every mile.
My wolf keened with each stride, mourning the loss of our mate, our pack, our home.
But we kept running, because that's what cowards do. We run until our legs give out, until our lungs burn, until the distance becomes its own kind of prison.