Chapter 5

The next day, Dominic showed up at the motel and said he was taking me somewhere.

I was already shaping the word no when he held the catalogue in front of me — and every thought in my head went silent.

Lot 32. A female self-portrait, oil on canvas. Signed E. Corsini.

My mother's final painting.

She'd done it the autumn before she died. I remembered because she'd set up the easel in the moonflower garden and painted herself the way she wanted to be remembered — not as Viktor's Luna, not as the woman whose fated bond had been betrayed, but as Elena. Just Elena. With moonlight in her hair and defiance in her jaw.

I took the catalogue without a word and got in the car.

The auction house smelled like old money and cedar polish. I gripped my paddle so hard the edge left a groove in my palm. Every time the doors opened, my wolf flinched — too many foreign scents, too many predators in tailored wool pretending to be civilized.

"Lot 32," the auctioneer announced. "Self-portrait by E. Corsini. Opening bid — five hundred thousand."

My paddle went up before he finished the sentence.

"One million."

I knew that voice the way you know a sound that's been drilling into your skull for weeks. Lyra. Seated two rows over, paddle raised, smile radiant.

"One point five." My jaw locked.

"Two million." She didn't blink.

The numbers climbed. Three. Five. Eight. Each bid landed like a claw strike, precise and unhurried. She wasn't even pretending to want the painting. She wanted me to watch her take it.

My palms were slick. Every cent I'd scraped together — savings, liquidated jewelry, the last of my mother's trust — maxed out at twenty million.

"Twenty million and ten thousand." Lyra raised her paddle. The look she gave me was the quietest kind of violence.

She knew exactly what I had. Down to the dollar.

My whole body was shaking. I turned to Dominic.

"Lend me the money." My voice cracked on the second word and I hated myself for it. "Please. That's my mother's painting. It's the only thing she left behind."

Something moved behind his eyes. His hand was already reaching inside his jacket —

"Dominic." Lyra's voice cut through like a blade drawn across glass. Her eyes went wide, wounded, her fingers catching his sleeve. "This is the first piece of art that's ever truly moved me… the light in it would be perfect for my recovery room. Could you ask Sera to let me have it?"

Her grip on his arm tightened. A small, strategic tremor in her lower lip.

Dominic's gaze swung between us. Three seconds. Maybe four. Long enough for my wolf to howl itself raw against my ribs.

"Sera." His voice came out flat. Final. "Let Lyra have this one."

The room turned to dust.

"Going once!"

I opened my mouth. Nothing came.

"Going twice!"

My throat had sealed shut. My wolf was clawing at the inside of my chest, and even she couldn't make a sound.

"Sold!"

The gavel cracked down. It echoed through my skull like a bone breaking clean.

Lyra clapped — a delicate, measured thing. Then she turned to me. "Thank you for understanding, Sera." Every syllable dripping with the kind of triumph that doesn't bother to hide.

After the auction, Dominic went to retrieve Lyra's coat. I walked to the parking garage alone.

Footsteps behind me. Unhurried. Confident.

"Sera." Lyra's voice bounced off concrete. "I have something to show you."

She held up her phone. On the screen — my mother's portrait, propped against a dumpster in an alley. A stray dog nosing at the canvas, smearing mud across Elena Corsini's painted face.

"Don't you think that suits it?" Lyra's mask was gone now. What lived underneath was something cold and polished, like bone stripped clean. "A dead woman's vanity project. Your mother couldn't even keep her fated mate. A wolf like that isn't worth mourning."

The world went white.

Not rage. Something deeper — older. The part of my wolf that existed before language, before reason, before anything except protect what's yours.

I seized her wrist, pulled the silver knife Dominic had given me — a gift from our first year, small enough to hide in a palm — and drove it into the back of her right hand.

Silver meeting wolf-blood. The hiss was immediate. Steam curled from the wound. Lyra screamed — a real one this time, no performance — and stumbled back, clutching her hand as blood and blistered skin wept between her fingers.

"Sera!"

Dominic materialized from nowhere. He shoved me aside, caught Lyra, cradled her hand like it was made of glass. "Have you completely lost your mind?"

"She desecrated my mother's painting. Called her worthless. Said she deserved to die."

"I don't care what she said." His voice was ice wrapped in iron. "Lyra is off-limits. You don't get to touch her."

I looked at him — really looked. At the way he held Lyra against his chest, at the panic in his jaw, at the way his wolf was practically vibrating to shield her. The same wolf that hadn't so much as twitched when a rogue's claw split my arm open three days ago.

"So she can spit on my mother's grave," I said quietly, "and I don't even get the right to bare my teeth."

No answer. He was already on the phone.

"Garrett. Bring men. Take Sera back to the Blackmoor estate. Lock her in the holding den. Two days. She needs to learn where the line is."

The holding den. Below ground. No windows, no moonlight, no air that didn't taste like damp stone and old fear. Where Blackmoor kept wolves who'd broken rank.

Two guards gripped my arms. I didn't fight.

Before they put me in the SUV, I looked back one last time. Dominic was hunched over Lyra's hand, murmuring something low and urgent while she wept prettily against his shoulder.

My wolf went quiet. Not the quiet of surrender — the quiet of something that had finally stopped hoping.

The holding den was worse than I'd imagined.

No light except a thread beneath the iron door. Food shoved through a slot in the floor. On the second night, someone threw a bucket of ice water over me at three a.m. — "Alpha's orders. He wants you to think about what you did."

I didn't know if those were really Dominic's words. But the man who'd put me here was him.

Forty-eight hours in the dark. My wolf pacing in tight circles, whimpering, scraping at walls that wouldn't give. The incomplete bond throbbed like a phantom limb — reaching for him, reaching for him, reaching into nothing.

On the third day, the iron door swung open.

Not Dominic.

Lyra.

Bandaged hand. Victor's smile.

"Let me tell you a story, Sera."