He Chose My Sister, So I Returned His Heirs in BloodChapter 1
I once exhausted every scheme I had to win my intended mate's heart. Ninety-nine times I tried. Ninety-nine times he looked through me as though I were glass, his eyes and his wolf turned always toward my sister.
On the night of our Mating Ceremony, he never came. Instead he had already claimed her before the Council, sealing a bond behind closed doors and leaving me standing alone before every pack in the district. I became the punchline whispered between fangs.
At my lowest, his elder brother gathered me into his arms. He told me he had wanted me for years, that his wolf had known my scent long before he ever spoke the words. He asked me to turn around and see him. In that moment, his sincerity broke something open inside me, and I turned, and I chose him. I became Sylvia Nightfang's mate.
For five years after our mating, he adored me until there was almost nothing left to want. If I asked for the stars he would have clawed them from the sky. Then a storm-tide disaster off the northern coast took everything. The rescue wolves found wreckage, shredded hull, blood on the rocks. No body.
The day of the mourning fire, grief split me in two. I stood at the edge of the cliffs and my wolf went silent inside me, truly silent, as though she had lain down and stopped breathing. I nearly followed her into the dark. I nearly let the tide take me the way it had taken him.
Then the healers found the second heartbeat.
After that, I set down the idea of dying. But I did not pick up living. I drifted through the days like smoke, crying until the pillow was damp, then turning it over and crying again. I thought this was all that remained of my life.
Until the night I heard them.
I was passing a half-open door in the Nightfang Keep when my intended mate's voice stopped me cold.
"Sylvia, the truth is plain. The one who died in that storm-tide was your younger brother. But you buried the truth with him, suppressed your own scent, took his scent-name, and lived inside his identity. All of it so you could stay beside your brother's mate. Aren't you afraid the truth will surface?"
And then his voice. The voice I had mourned for a year and a half, steady and unapologetic: