He Rejected The Wrong Woman

FOR EIGHT YEARS I WAS THEIR MOTHER.

Not by blood. Their own mother walked out when they were small and never looked back, and I was the one who stayed. I fed them. I sat up with them when they were ill. I ran the whole of their father’s business and let him put his name on every page of it.

They never called me anything but Mama.

I WAS NEVER HIS MATE.

He told me in the first year. His fated bond was already made, to a woman who had gone. What he could offer me was a paper, a house, and two children who were not mine.

I married him anyway.

THEN SHE CAME BACK.

Tears, apologies, regret. And my husband did not hesitate for one second. He asked me for a divorce in his own kitchen with the children I raised standing in the doorway.

Eleven days later I signed it and walked down that drive with one bag, and nobody came after me.

AND THE QUIET LIFE WAS THE ONLY THING HIDING ME.

A fated bond cannot be chosen, refused or undone. Every treaty on this continent rests on that. Every claim to land. Every succession.

My blood can unmake one.

There is not an Alpha alive who would not pay anything for me. Not one of them can force me, because the gift answers only to the woman who carries it.

Which means they will not come for me at all.

They will come for the children.

AND THE WORST OF IT.

I could have cut my husband free of her on any day of those eight years. One afternoon. He would never have known it was me.

He threw me out of that house to go back to a bond I could have ended before breakfast.

EVERYBODY WANTS SOMETHING.

Alejandro wants his wife back. Valeria wants the life she abandoned. Vargas wants one bond broken so he can take three valleys. And Rafael Biltmore, my dead brother’s oldest friend, the only man who ever asked me what I wanted instead of what I was going to do, wants me beside him.

A hundred Alphas have called a Conclave. My name is on the summons. There are only two things that room has ever done with a woman like me.

Claim her, or kill her.

They all believe the same three things. That I am replaceable. That I am powerless. That I will come when I am called.

I came.

He did not reject a wife. He rejected the wrong woman.