[Skyler’s POV]
The bonfire turns Kailani's skin to gold. She's pressed into Leon's chest, laughing at something he's said, her hand sliding from his shoulder to the back of his neck in a gesture that's intimate and proprietary and unrecognizable on my sister.
I've never seen Kailani touch anyone with softness. But tonight she's playing a wife in love with her husband. She's doing it with the kind of conviction that makes me wonder if she rehearsed this in the mirror or if she's simply that talented.
Leon doesn't pull away. He holds her the way an Alpha holds his Luna at a pack event—correctly and publicly. His arm steady around her waist, jaw catching firelight while the pack watches and sees what they're supposed to see.
I should look away instead of putting myself in her place, imagining thing I clearly can’t have with him.
My hand on the back of his neck. My laugh against his chest. My body swaying against his while the fire crackles and nobody whispers about the wolfless girl from Crescent Ridge.
Because in this version of nonexistent reality I belong.
The fantasy dissolves, and what rushes in behind it cuts clean.
Kailani can keep the diamond, the title, the silk. What I'm mourning is the version of this that was supposed to be real—the one where the morning seven years ago wasn't empty and the wire ring meant something besides my own stupidity.
I swayed against a stranger who made me a ring out of wire and kept all of my firsts, my heart and my soul. My first love, my mate. Now I'm watching my stolen life worn by someone else.
The bonfire smells the same, and the music sounds the same, and nothing is.
I set the cider down and slip through the crowd into darkness. The grounds open past the celebration's edge with cool grass and birch trees silver in moonlight. I drop behind them, knees to my chest, pressing my forehead against them.
"Most people at a party pretend to have fun before sneaking off to be miserable alone." Dylan rounds the birch tree and drops beside me without asking permission.
"I was communing with nature." I don't lift my head, but something loosens in my chest at the sound of his voice—a tension I didn't know I was holding.
"You were communing with your kneecaps." He stretches his legs out, close enough that warmth radiates off his arm. "Compelling company, but I thought I'd offer an alternative."
I turn my head sideways. The bonfire's glow catches the auburn in his hair, and the rest of him lives in shadow—forearms loose on his thighs, the expression of a man who sat down because he wanted to.
"You don't have to babysit me, Dylan." My voice comes out flatter than I intend, but he just tilts his head toward me with that easy, calm expression.
"That's what makes this volunteer work." He stretches back on his palms. "Talk to me, or don't."
The music drifts through the trees—something slow, something with a fiddle. For a while, neither of us speaks.
"My father was murdered at a celebration like this one." His voice goes quiet, stripped of everything playful.
My head lifts from my knees. He's staring past the trees at something I can't reach, jaw tight, voice stripped to its bones.
"Everyone knows the facts, but nobody knows what it was like." He picks a blade of grass and turns it between his fingers. Now I recognize it as his tell of anxiety. "Leon stopped sleeping, stopped eating—his wolf went into this silence I'd never seen. Not even grief, just… absence."
"What did you do?" The question comes out barely above a whisper, and I'm not sure I want the answer.
"Held everything together at twenty-two—took meetings I didn't understand, made decisions I wasn't qualified for." His mouth twists. "Every night I stood outside his door listening for breathing. Wondering if he’s gonna leave me too."
The words land with the weight of recognition.
Holding something together when the person supposed to hold you has vanished… I know that architecture from the inside.
"The morning after the festival," I hear myself say, "I woke up and the bed was cold. No note, no trace—just a wire ring on my finger and chaos outside."
Dylan turns his head, listening with his entire body, and the attention almost burns.
"I searched for months—asked every pack within several territories if they knew a fighter named Silas." My thumbnail digs into the grass. "Nobody did, of course. Because he didn't exist."
The silence stretches—Dylan is so attentive that the only thing I hear is my own heartbeat. So I continue on.
"I found out I was pregnant on the floor of a communal bathroom with a stolen test and no one to call." Something tightens in my throat. "The pack… A wolfless girl carrying a mystery litter… I was spat on in the hallways while I was showing."
His breath sharpens beside me, but he doesn't interrupt. Doesn't reach for me, doesn't try to fix it.
"I kept the ring." I twist it on my finger. "Built a whole cathedral out of one night, and the foundation was a lie."
The silence that follows is heavier than the one before. We've traded the worst rooms in our houses and neither of us flinched. "I'm sorry… For all of it, Skyler."
His voice is low, rough at the edges, and I shake my head before he's finished. "That's not why I told you."
"I know—you told me because I told you mine." His shoulder finds mine in the dark, warm and deliberate. "You show me yours, I show you mine—emotional scars edition."
A sound escapes me—half laugh, half something wetter. "That's the most deranged way anyone has ever described vulnerability."
"Thank you, I'm workshopping it." His head turns and he's closer than I realized, the space between us having collapsed without permission.
Whatever he finds on my face strips the humor clean away and he kisses me. Soft, deliberate and warm. His palm against my jaw, thumb tracing my cheekbone, and his mouth meets mine with a steadiness that undoes me more than urgency ever could.
This isn't fire. This isn't the all-consuming blaze of a festival night that left nothing but ash and a wire ring. This is something that grows. Spreading warmth that starts where his lips touch mine, unhurried, like it plans to stay.
I kiss him back. My hand grips his shirt over his ribs and his breath catches against my mouth—a small startled sound, as if the fact that I didn't pull away has rearranged something inside him.
"Skyler…" he says against my lips, and my name sounds different in his voice—not desperate, not reverent, just certain.
I pull him closer and let the kiss deepen. For the first time in years I am chosen instead of fated or doomed. Not destiny or wolves, just a man who sat down in the dark because he wanted to.
Then something shifts behind my ribs, an ache that rolls through me heavy and slow, but I ignore it. Dylan's mouth is warm and his hand is steady against my jaw, and whatever just moved inside my chest can wait.