Page 43 of Alpha’s Wife

“By saving you.” She’s up on her knees now, the sheet forgotten. “I never gave them anything that could hurt you, Ronan. I swear it on my life. Not your numbers. Not your plans. Not the settlement on the island. I don’t even know where it is—not the wards, nothing that could get a single one of your people hurt. I’ve been protecting you this whole time. I was trying to make them stand down or keep offering peace before they had a reason to come here and put you in the ground.

“The women, their mates, don’t even want this war,” she goes on, faster now and desperate. “Ava, Emily, Serena. They’ve been working on your brothers for weeks, holding them back, and it was working. It was actually working, until…”

“Until they found out I was closer than they thought,” I say, having read Emily’s last email.

“I never gave them that.” Her voice breaks clean in half. “I never gave them anything they could use. You have to believe me.”

And goddess help me, I think I do believe her.

But she still gave them enough. She went behind my back, and she gave them too much. The fact that she reached out to them at all is the betrayal. I don’t want to talk to these assholes, and I’ve made that clear. There is nothing to say.

“You gave them me,” I say, and my voice has gone to gravel. “You have fed them things they have no right knowing, like a scrap under the table. On the tablet I put in your hands. That’s the part I can’t get past. I gave you a way to reach the people you love, and you turned it around and used it to reach my enemies.”

“I told them who you really are.” Her voice cracks. “I wanted them to see…”

“I don’t want them to see me.” It comes out low and dangerous, and she feels it. “I stopped wanting that a long time ago. I don’t need to be understood by them, Selene. I want to be the last thing they ever see.”

She flinches as though I’ve physically struck her.

“And you.” This is the part I can barely get out. “You, I let all the way in. Do you have any idea what that costs me? I gave you the one thing I’ve never handed anyone else. And the second my back was turned, you took it to the people who put us out in the cold to die. So don’t stand there and try to justify it.” I make myself say the rest. “There’s never been one single person who’d pick me over the family that didn’t want me. Not one. I let myself forget it for a few weeks. That’s on me.”

“Ronan, I told you I wanted to stop the war.” She’s crying openly now and furious about it, dashing the tears off her face with the back of her hand. “But I didn’t betray you.”

“Stop,” I growl.

“No.” And when she looks up this time, it isn’t just the guilt on her face. It’s anger, and it stops me in my tracks. “You want to know what I actually see when I look at you right now? I see a man so eaten up with hating Ralph that he’s turning into him.”

The room goes very quiet.

“It’s what Ralph did, isn’t it?” she says, calmly, with her chin tilted in defiance. “He threw away the people who needed him to get what he wanted. His own sons. And here you are, about to do the exact same thing—you’d throw away or use anyone you can. Your pack. Ryder. Me. Feed all of us into the fire so you can have your revenge. That isn’t beating him, Ronan. That’s becoming him.”

For a second, I genuinely can’t breathe.

My wolf, that’s been snarling for blood since the moment I opened that message, goes dead silent. Because no one has ever said that to me. Ryder touched on it but knew when to pull back. She doesn’t seem to understand how close my wolf is to losing control.

I shut down because I have to. If I don’t, I don’t know what I will do, and I can’t risk her or her safety. Despite everything, when I look at her, I know I’ll never hurt her and never let her go. Even if that means never trusting her or letting her live with freedom, because she’s blown that.

I close the door on all of it. On her face, her tears, and the terrible thing she just said.

She clocks the moment it happens. She sees me go, watches whatever we’d built between us disappear, and she scrambles off the bed toward me with her hands out.

“Ronan, no. Don’t do this. Please, this is exactly what they want. You go in there like this, and you’ll lose everything…you’ll lose Ryder, the settlement, everything you’ve built…”

“No, I won’t.” I step back out of her reach because I can’t let her touch me. “All you’ve done is move up the timeline, and all that is lost is the trust I’d stupidly put in you and your freedoms. You’re the one who has lost something, not me.”

“No,” she says fiercely, and grabs for my arm as I step back again. “No, it doesn’t have to be like that. I care, Ronan, that’s why I did this. I care about you and the pack. I care about these people. I don’t want anyone to get hurt. Please just stop and listen to me, let’s talk about this…”

“You lost the right to stand in front of me,” I say, “the first night you wrote to them and betrayed this pack and me.”

She goes white, and it almost pains me to see her natural defiance fading from her eyes.

“Get up and get dressed,” I say, and my voice is flat now. Even. Dead calm. And I watch that scare her far more than shouting would.

“Ronan…” she pleads.

“We’re done hiding.” I’m already turning away, already pulling the phone from my pocket, because if I stand here one more second, I’ll do something I can’t take back, and I’ve done enough of that tonight. “You wanted to know when this is happening. It’s now. And you can tell them,” I tell her, and make a point of smashing the tablet on the dresser, completely destroying it.

I call Cole. He picks up on the second ring, the way he always does.