Betrayed By My Bestie, Destroyed By My Alpha

My bestie Isolde and I were lured to a resort in another country.

Crescent Bay, a place that turned She-wolves into property.

Any wolf with enough money could have us for the night. That was the arrangement. That was what we were worth, once we were in.

When my husband Cael broke through the gates with a unit of Hargrove Pack warriors, I was in the back room counting the night's take. Top earner three months running.

Isolde was in the basement. Brain-dead. Pregnant. The machines were the only reason her heart was still beating.

Hargrove Pack put up half a million dollars for the name of whoever had trafficked us.

I was the only one who knew. I said nothing.

Vivienne — Cael's mother, Isolde's Luna — got down on her knees in front of me and begged. I closed my eyes.

Pack enforcers questioned me three times. I gave them the same answer every time, which was no answer at all.

Then Cael ran out of patience. He called for a witch to extract my memories and put them in front of everyone who had ever known me.

The trial was held in Packhouse. The same hall where we said our vows eight months ago, now stripped of furniture and filled wall to wall with chairs. Every seat was taken.

I saw the chair at the center of the room and my body moved before I could think. I got three steps.

Cael caught me by the arm and walked me back.

He pressed me into the chair himself. His hands didn't shake.

Then he took my face in one hand and tilted it up. His eyes had gone flat. I used to love his eyes.

"Seren."

His thumb dug into my jaw.

"You're going to sit there, and the witch is going to pull out every memory you have, and everyone in this room is going to see exactly who you are."

"Last chance. Who trafficked Isolde into that place?"

I couldn't answer around his grip. I held his gaze and said nothing.

He let go of my face.

The Hargrove relatives came off the walls. Fists, boots. They stripped everything off me and took photos while I was held down. The images went up on the screen at the far end of the hall — all of it, for every wolf in the room to see.

"Let the whole Pack look. Let them all see exactly what you are."

"Isolde loved you like a sister. She brought you into this family, gave you everything — and you watched her rot in that place and said nothing."

"She's worth more than you will ever be. She was worth more the day she was born than you'll be on your best day."

I stopped trying to cover myself. There was no point. I stared at the floor and waited for it to be over.

Cael stepped back in front of me. The room went quieter.

He was holding a silver needle. Slender, the length of his palm. The witch stood behind him, hands raised, the air between her fingers already humming with something that made my wolf go very still.

"Memory extraction," he said. "The witch connects to your Wolf Soul and pulls out everything inside it. Every memory you have gets laid out in front of everyone in this room."

He crouched down to my level.

"The soul-thread burns going in. And then everyone gets to see what you've been hiding."

The thought of what they would see made my whole body lock up. My hands gripped the arms of the chair.

"Cael." My voice came out steady, which surprised me. "Don't. You will regret this."

Something moved behind his eyes. He glanced to the side, where Vivienne stood against the wall — her hair fully white now, all of it gone overnight — and whatever had moved behind his eyes went still.

"Regret." He said the word like he was turning it over. "You want to talk to me about regret."

He stood up.

"I went into that place for you. I pulled you out myself. I brought you home."

"And you've been lying to my face every day since."

"Isolde is lying in a hospital bed with tubes in her arms and a baby she'll never hold, and you won't even open your mouth."

"The only thing I regret is that I bothered with you at all."

He pressed the needle to the base of my skull.

"You should have stayed in that place. Sounds like it suited you just fine."

The needle went in.

The pain took everything. I couldn't hold a thought, couldn't form a word. Whatever sound came out of me wasn't something I recognized.

From the crowd: "Good."

"That's what she gets for covering for a trafficker."

"Serves her right."

The witch's spell caught the first memory and cast it into the air above the hall, vivid and inescapable, turning slow so the whole room could see.