Nyx
The bottle slipped from my fingers before my mind could even register the command to hold on.
It hit the marble with a sound like a gunshot in a cathedral, sharp, final, irreparable. Shards exploded outward in a glittering spray, champagne foaming across the polished floor in pale, accusing rivers that caught the chandelier light and turned it mocking. The scent of it, sweet, expensive, celebratory, rose up immediately, cloying and wrong in the sudden silence that swallowed the hall.
No one moved for a long heartbeat.
Every gaze in the room pinned me where I stood: frozen, exposed, chest rising and falling too fast. My heartbeat thundered in my ears so violently I was convinced the entire pack could hear it cracking against my ribs from their houses.
My mother recovered first.
"What's your problem, Nyx?" she snapped, voice slicing clean through the hush like ice cracking underfoot. "Can't you even hold a bottle properly? Pick it up."
No flicker of concern. No pause to ask why my hands trembled so badly they no longer answered me. No acknowledgment that something inside her daughter might have just shattered louder than the glass.
I opened my mouth, words crowding my throat, desperate to explain, to beg, to demand, but before a single syllable could escape, my father's voice crushed them.
"Who asked you to come in here?" Alpha Rhygar growled, low and venomous. "Do you exist only to bring shame to me?"
The words landed like open-handed slaps, each one heavier because they were spoken in front of witnesses. The hall might not have been packed wall-to-wall, but it was full enough: maids hovering at the edges pretending to arrange flowers they'd already arranged twice, my brother Rhett leaning against a pillar with his phone screen lighting his indifferent face, Lysera standing beside Thorne in a posture so effortlessly regal it looked rehearsed.
Thorne's parents... Alpha Darion and Luna Maribel, watched with the cool detachment of people who had already decided the outcome. My own parents flanked them like sentinels.
Every person who mattered in this twisted little world of bloodlines and titles was watching me be dismantled in real time.
And none of them looked surprised.
Still, I forced one step forward. Then another. Legs shaking but moving.
"Thorne…" My voice came out wrong, thin as winter air, fragile enough to fracture if I breathed too hard.
I kept walking until I stood directly in front of him, close enough to smell the cedar-and-steel scent that had once meant safety. I searched his face with something close to panic, looking for confusion, for guilt, for any sign that this was a mistake, a misspoken name, a cruel joke gone wrong.
"Thorne," I said again, louder this time, forcing the syllables past the knot in my throat. "It's Nyx. Not Lysera."
I waited.
Gods, how I waited.
Please. Let him blink. Let him laugh that low, warm laugh I'd clung to in the dark for years. Let him reach for me the way he used to, secretly, fiercely, like I was something precious he refused to let anyone else claim.
Instead, Luna Maribel spoke.
"What do you mean, it's Nyx?" she said, tone smooth and glacial. "We know exactly who we're here for. It's Lysera."
Her voice carried the effortless authority of someone who had never once questioned her place at the center of things.
Luna Maribel had never hidden her dislike. I had endured it only because of Thorne, because I told myself that loving him, and being loved by him, would eventually outweigh her contempt.
"I'm sorry, Luna Maribel," I managed, swallowing the burn in my throat. "Please… can I talk to Thorne?"
"I'm sorry, Nyx," Thorne said at last.
Three small words.
They cracked something deep inside my chest, something that had been holding itself together with hope and memory and sheer stubborn refusal to break.
"The one I want is Lysera."
The world did not end with thunder.
It ended quietly.
Silently.
Like a house of glass I had built brick by fragile brick over nine long years collapsing under its own impossible weight. Every stolen kiss in the pine shadows, every whispered promise pressed against my ear in the dark, every time he had pulled me close and told me I was enough, every single one turned to razor-edged shards that sliced me open from the inside.
I wiped at my face roughly with the back of my hand. Tears came anyway, hot, relentless, blurring everything. I refused to sob. I refused to give them that. But the tears refused to stop.
"Thorne," I whispered, barely audible. "Have you… have you forgotten?"
"He has forgotten nothing," Luna Maribel interjected smoothly, stepping half in front of her son like a shield.
"Can you please let him talk?!" The words burst out sharper than I intended, anger finally cracking through the fear.
The hall went deathly still.
"Don't be rude," Thorne said quietly.
Not concern. Not regret. A warning, low, edged, unmistakable.
"I'm sorry, Luna Maribel," I said at once, bowing my head. Not because I meant it. Because terror had already curled cold fingers around my spine. I could not afford to lose him completely. Not yet. Not like this.
"Nyx," Thorne continued, eyes sliding past me rather than meeting mine, "I understand you like me. But I don't feel the same. The only person I want is Lysera."
He reached for her hand.
She took it without hesitation, fingers threading through his with the ease of long practice. Her smile was soft. Sweet. Perfect.
But her eyes were blades, sharp, gleaming, victorious.
I smiled back.
I don't know why.
Perhaps because if I didn't smile, I would scream until my throat bled.
"I was the one you felt the mate bond with," I shouted suddenly, voice ringing off the high ceiling and marble walls. "Not Lysera!"
The confession tore out of me, wild, raw, desperate, like I could force the truth into existence by sheer volume.
Thorne stiffened. Color rose in his cheeks... not anger. Embarrassment. Shame.
Or worse: shame of me. Shame that the mate bond had dared to choose someone so unworthy, so wolfless, so broken, so utterly wrong.
"Sister," Lysera said gently, stepping forward with the grace of someone who had already won. "He already told us he was mated to you. But still… he wants me. Stop embarrassing yourself and bless us."
If I had not been looking straight at her, I might have believed the kindness in her voice.
But I was looking.
And I saw the cruelty curled inside her smile like poison in honey.
"Mother," I whispered, turning to the woman who had carried me, who had once sung me lullabies, who was supposed to stand between me and the world.
"Please… say something."
"There's nothing that can be done, Nyx," Luna Thalira answered, calm as still water.
"Even though he's mated to me?" I asked, pointing at Thorne with a trembling hand, voice splintering on the last word.
"He has the right to choose," she replied without a flicker of remorse. "He's mated to you, yes, but he can reject you and choose another… He's the man."
No hesitation. No softening. No love.
"Father," I tried next.
"Alpha Thorne has chosen your sister," Alpha Rhygar said, anger thickening his voice. "You should be happy for her."
"Rhett," I whispered, last, hopeless hope.
My brother didn't even lift his eyes from his phone.
That was Rhett when it came to me: never kind, never openly cruel. Just endlessly, excruciatingly neutral. As though my pain existed in a separate room he had chosen never to enter. No matter how blatant the injustice, no matter how loudly the unfairness screamed, he chose silence. Always silence.
His indifference carved deeper than hatred ever could. Hatred at least acknowledged my existence. Hatred at least meant I mattered enough to wound.
Sometimes, late at night when the house was quiet, I wondered if he blamed me too. If he, like everyone else, had quietly decided that Eira's death was my fault. He never said it. He didn't have to. The way he looked through me, the way he refused to defend me, answered louder than words ever could.
I staggered forward another step, pride long since abandoned.
"Thorne… I'm sorry if I offended you," I begged, voice cracking open. "Please don't do this to me."
My knees buckled.
He caught me before I hit the floor.
For one blinding, idiotic second hope flared bright and stupid in my chest.
Then he spoke.
"I'm sorry," he said, quiet, final, gentle in the worst possible way. "Lysera is the woman I choose."
Absolute.
Irrevocable.
He had been everything.
The only kindness I'd known for nine years.
The only person who had ever looked at me and seen something worth keeping.
"Since everything is settled," Alpha Darion said coolly, voice carrying the bored finality of someone ending an unimportant meeting, "Princess Nyx, please leave. We need to discuss the marriage between my son and your sister."
Sister.
The word landed like a fist to the sternum.
What kind of sister steals her twin's mate?
I tried one last time, reached for Thorne with shaking fingers.
Luna Maribel seized my wrist and yanked it away with bruising force.
"Get away from my son!" she screamed, voice rising to something shrill and feral. "Don't kill him the way you killed your twin!"
The accusation detonated.
And then, finally, Rhett spoke.
"No sane man would be with you, Nyx" he said flatly, eyes still on his screen. "A girl wicked enough to kill her own twin can do anything to anyone."
The words should not have hurt as much as they did.
I had spent years building armor against Rhett's indifference. I had told myself his opinion carried no weight, that I had survived worse without his support, that his neutrality was better than active cruelty.
But in that moment the armor failed.
His voice, calm, matter-of-fact, almost bored, reopened every wound I had ever tried to stitch closed. It confirmed every whispered rumor, every sidelong glance, every time someone had crossed the street to avoid me. Coming from him, it carried the unbearable weight of family, of someone who should have known me better than anyone and still chose to believe the worst.
The hall tilted.
My body felt leaden, distant, no longer entirely mine.
"Hold her down," my mother said, calm, clinical, as though directing servants to move furniture.
Hands gripped my arms.
A needle bit into the crook of my neck.
The last thing I heard before the darkness rushed in was Thorne's voice...low, uncertain, almost startled.
"What are you doing to her?"
Maybe… just maybe… his parents were the reason.
The thought slipped into my mind like a thief, unwanted, but impossible to evict. Easier to believe they had forced his hand. Easier to believe he had been cornered, threatened, coerced. Easier than accepting he had looked at me, at the mate bond burning between us, and chosen Lysera anyway. Willingly. Freely. Without a single backward glance.
I clung to that fragile possibility the way a drowning person clings to driftwood.
It was the last thing I had left.
With that thin, trembling hope still flickering in my chest, I stopped fighting.
I let the drug flood my veins, cold at first, then warm, then nothing.
I let the darkness rise up like black water and pull me under.
Because staying awake hurt far, far more than falling asleep ever could.