When the Alpha Knelt, My Love Was Already Zero

I spent two years falling in love with a wolf who was never truly mine.

Dominic Thorne — heir to the Blackmoor Pack, the most dangerous Alpha bloodline on the Eastern Seaboard. At night he pulled me close and called me little moon. By daylight, the mate bond between us didn't exist.

I kept a diary of every stolen moment. I secretly commissioned a mating ring. Then I watched him at a pack gala, gently adjusting another she-wolf's shawl with a tenderness his hands had never once shown me.

That was when I understood: his possession was real. His love was not.

So I turned to a fresh page and rewrote my love diary into a deduction ledger. Full marks: one hundred. Every time I was ignored, I docked a point. Every time I was hurt, I logged a line. The handwriting trembled at first. By the end, it was steady as a silver blade.

The day it hit zero, I burned down the den that held our secrets. Then I disappeared — straight into the arms of the enemy. A vampire coven.

Dominic arrived at the wreckage and pulled the half-charred ledger from the ashes. Only then did he realize that what he'd dismissed as tolerating my tantrums had been, in my eyes, one death sentence after another — each signed by his own hand.

Too bad the ledger had reached its final page. And I was never looking back.

But the moment he understood I was gone for good, the Alpha heir who never marked me tore apart every rule he'd ever lived by.

……

To the outside world, I was the disgrace of the Silvercrest Pack — wild, reckless, a stain on the bloodline. Dominic Thorne was the youngest Alpha heir with real power across the Eastern packs — cold, controlled, a wolf permanently leashed beneath human skin.

But every night, he held me tight and whispered the name that belonged only to us — little moon.

Just like two hours ago. For the thousandth time, he'd pinned me beneath him and wrecked me until I forgot how words worked. His wolf rumbling low against my throat, canines grazing the curve of my neck — dragging, pressing, tasting the skin where a mark should have been.

Never biting down.

Even at the peak, when his eyes blazed full silver and his whole body shook with the need to claim — he always pulled back. Every single time. Like something inside him slammed shut the second his teeth touched my pulse.

When he rolled off me, the bedroom smelled like pine and sweat and something feral underneath. I watched him walk to the mirror, fasten his watch, straighten his cuffs. Every movement precise. Mechanical. Like he was reassembling a man from parts.

Thirty seconds. That was all it took him. From the wolf growling my name into my skin to the Alpha heir of Blackmoor who didn't know me at all.

"Again," I said.

"Pack business." He caught my eyes in the mirror. "Don't be difficult, Sera."

Don't be difficult. As if the man who'd just left teeth marks on my collarbone — without breaking skin, never breaking skin — had nothing to do with him.

I sat up. The sheet slid down. His gaze snagged on the bruises he'd left and stayed there half a second too long. His jaw clenched. Then he looked away.

"Dominic."

I wanted to say it. Two years today. You and me. Don't you remember? But his hand was already on the door handle, and I knew that posture — spine locked, shoulders angled away. The posture of a man already gone.

I swallowed the words. They tasted like something I'd swallowed too many times before.

"…Come back early."

He crossed back to the bed. Tipped my chin up with two fingers — the same way he'd grip my jaw when he was inside me, except now there was no heat in it. Just habit. He pressed his lips to my forehead. Cool. Brief. The kind of kiss you give someone you're trying not to think about.

"Sleep."

The door clicked shut. The lock turned — soft and final.

I sat there. The skin from my throat to my chest still hummed where his wolf had grazed me, the bond pulsing faintly under the surface like a second heartbeat only I could hear.

Because he'd never completed it. Two years, and he still hadn't sunk his teeth in. Hadn't let the mark bloom across my skin so every wolf in every territory would know — mine. Hers. Ours.

I'd spent weeks preparing for tonight.

The red dress in the closet — bought last week. He'd never said he liked me in red, but every time I wore it, his pupils bled silver two seconds faster. For Dominic Thorne, two seconds was devotion.

On the kitchen counter, a tiramisu I'd made myself. After ruining six batches, I'd finally gotten one to hold its shape. I'd traced a little crescent moon on top in powdered sugar.

I put on the dress. Lit the candles. Waited.

The sky went from dusk to black. Black to the pale grey of nothing.

Dominic never came.

Four a.m. Wax pooled across the counter in stiff white rivers. The tiramisu had gone soft in the middle, the crescent moon dissolving into itself.

I sat there staring at it. The bond throbbed low beneath my ribs — a dull, stubborn ache, like pressing on a bruise to make sure it still hurts.

My phone lit up. A notification with Blackmoor in the headline. My finger moved before my brain caught up.

A video from that evening's pack gala. And there he was — center of the hall, every Alpha on the Eastern Seaboard watching — turning slowly with a girl in white.

Lyra.

She gazed up at him with wide, trusting eyes. Dominic dipped his head. That faint curve of his mouth — not quite a smile, but close. Close enough to gut me. Then he reached out and adjusted the silk wrap slipping from her shoulder.

The gesture was so careful. So gentle.

My lungs locked.

Two years. I had never once seen him touch anyone like that. The way he handled me was all wolf — wrists pinned overhead, fingers digging into my hips, my back arched against the mattress while he drove into me like he wanted to crawl inside my bones. I'd told myself that was how his wolf loved. That he didn't know any other way.

He did. He'd always known.

He just never used it on me.

The video was seventeen seconds long. I watched it eleven times. On the twelfth, something behind my sternum made a sound — not a crack, not a snap. More like a thread pulled so thin it simply ceased to exist.

I slid off the chair onto the floor. My shoulders shook. I pressed both hands flat against the tile to keep myself from flying apart.

Then I pulled the diary from under the bed and turned to a blank page.

The pen didn't shake. Not because it didn't hurt — because I'd made a decision, and decisions have a weight that steadies your hands.

"Deduction Ledger. Starting balance: 100."

A tear hit the paper. I didn't wipe it.

"Anniversary no-show. He was on the dance floor with another she-wolf while I sat here until dawn. −15."

"Balance: 85."

I closed the diary. Picked up my phone. Dialed the number I hated most.

"I accept the alliance mating. The vampire coven in Miami." My voice didn't waver. "One condition — starting today, I am no longer a Voss."