My husband had a curse. Every wolf in Northbridge knew it. Every six months, Alpha Adrian Black would lose fifteen days of memory. Not all of it. Never his name. Never his power. Never the pack he ruled. Never the instincts that made wolves bow when he walked into a room. Only me. His Luna. His true mate. His wife. For fifteen days, the mate bond would go dead in his mind, and another woman would become the center of his world. He would call her his moon, his fate, his only love. And I would become the joke every pack wife pitied behind a jeweled hand. The first time the curse took him, Adrian fell for my rival at the Northbridge Broadcast Center. For his so-called true love, he had me kidnapped on the morning of the most important live broadcast of my career. I was supposed to anchor the national interview that would make my name impossible to erase. Instead, my own mate sent guards into the studio before the red light came on. They clamped a hand over my mouth, dragged me through the hallway in front of the crew, and broke both my legs on his orders so I could not crawl back to the desk. The broadcast went black. My rival took my seat. By sunrise, she was the new face of Northbridge. I was the Luna whose Alpha could break her bones for another woman and still make the whole city laugh. On the fifteenth day, Adrian woke. He collapsed at my feet and cried until his throat bled. Before nightfall, my rival vanished from the city. The official report called it a disappearance. The pack called it justice. No one dared say her name again. The second time, he fell for a maid who had climbed into his bed. She wanted my room. My jewels. My title. My bond. When I refused to leave, Adrian had his guards throw me into the red-lamp quarter outside the pack border. They filmed me being dragged through the streets while drunk wolves howled my name and posted the footage across every pack feed. On the fifteenth day, he woke outside the bond court. He put a blade to his own throat and begged me to let him bleed enough to pay for it. As for the maid, she ended the same way as the first woman: sold across the northern rogue line and returned three days later so broken she no longer knew how to speak. The worst time was the seventh. He chose my adopted sister. I was six months pregnant. For her, Adrian signed the order that sent me to a healer’s room and had our pup cut from my body before his lungs had learned how to breathe. By the time the curse ended, the sheets were soaked red, the crib was empty, and the pup I had carried under my heart was gone. Adrian woke in a room full of blood and silence. He tried to hang himself before the healers could stop him. They fought for three days and three nights to keep him alive. He survived. So did the curse. And now, this was the twelfth time. I stood at the door of our bedroom and looked at my best friend wrapped around my half-dressed husband. Selena Vale wore one of my old silk nightgowns. Pale blue. Expensive. The one I had thrown into the donation basket last week. She had always been delicate in public. Soft voice. Wet eyes. Fingers trembling at exactly the right moment. Now she lay against Adrian’s bare chest like a she-wolf who had won a war. “Elena,” she whispered, as if I were the one who had walked into the wrong room. “I know you’re hurt. But love can’t be forced.” Her hand slid over Adrian’s heart. “He loves me now. You have to accept that.” Adrian looked at me like I was a stranger standing too close to something that belonged to him. Something in my chest should have cracked. It didn’t. I only looked at the calendar on the wall. Day one. Good. I still had fourteen days to bury this marriage before it buried me. “If you run out of protection,” I said, “there’s more in the second drawer.” Selena blinked. Adrian’s brows drew together. I kept my voice calm. “If you want to give him a pup, tell me early. I have a heavy work schedule this week, and I’ll need time to file the rejection papers.” Selena stared at me like I had lost my mind. I turned to her and smiled. “Oh. And Selena?” “Yes?” “Did you buy life insurance?” Her smile froze. I let the question sit between us. Then I turned and walked out. Behind me, Adrian laughed, low and cruel. “Why are you wasting your breath on her? Elena was only ever a political Luna. My heart is yours.” A political Luna. That was what the curse always did. When Adrian forgot loving me, his mind filled the empty space with contempt. It gave him a story that made sense. I stepped out of the Alpha estate and called my lawyer before I reached the gates. “Start the rejection process,” I said. “I don’t care how much it costs. In fifteen days, I want the mate bond severed, my assets locked, and every Luna right removed from Adrian Black’s control.” There was a pause. “Luna Black, are you certain?” I looked back at the house where I had spent seven years bleeding for a male who only remembered loving me after the damage was already done. “Yes,” I said. “And don’t call me Luna Black again.”
By midnight, I was asleep in one of my own apartments across the city. By morning, my phone had almost burned itself dead. Adrian had called thirty-six times. I answered on the thirty-seventh. “Elena,” he snarled. “What did you do to Selena?” I rubbed my temple. “Good morning to you too.” “Don’t play innocent. She’s missing. You hated that I chose her, so you hurt her.” I almost laughed. The little fool had staged her own disappearance already. Fast learner. “Adrian, I didn’t touch your precious Eclipse Mate.” “Don’t call her that.” “That’s what she is, isn’t she? Fifteen days of moonlight before the dark comes back.” His growl shook through the phone. “If anything happens to her, I will never forgive you.” “You won’t remember saying that in two weeks.” The line went dead. Three minutes later, my apartment door broke open. Adrian came in first. His guards followed. His eyes were gold, wild, and empty of me. Before I could stand, his hand cracked across my face with the full strength of an Alpha who had forgotten he once kissed that same cheek. Pain burst white behind my eyes. I hit the floor hard enough for my teeth to cut through my lip. Blood filled my mouth. For half a second, the room went quiet. Then I looked toward the corner. The little red light on the security camera blinked steadily. Good. Adrian crouched in front of me, his expensive black coat brushing the floor. “Still looking at me like that?” he said. “Like I’m supposed to feel sorry for you?” I lowered my head. Not because I was afraid. Because the camera needed the angle. “Adrian,” I whispered, letting my voice tremble just enough, “you hit me for her?” His mouth twisted. “You kidnapped her. That crossed my line.” He stood. “Search the apartment. If she doesn’t tell us where Selena is, make her.” The guards moved at once. One fist landed against my ribs. Then another. Then another. Someone drove a knee into my stomach. Someone wrenched my arms behind my back until my shoulders screamed. I curled in on myself and counted each blow. Not because I wanted to remember the pain. Because every second was being saved to the cloud. A boot hit my side. My breath snapped apart. The room blurred. For one ugly heartbeat, I remembered the tenth curse, when Adrian had almost gouged out one of my eyes for a woman who said she hated the way I looked at him. When he woke that time and saw the blood crusted across my lashes, he locked himself in the cellar for a week and broke both his hands against the stone wall. He begged to tear out his own eye so the debt would be even. Back then, I stopped him. This time, I wondered why I had ever bothered. The last punch landed under my ribs. My throat tightened. I vomited blood onto my own floor. Adrian’s phone rang. His face changed before he even answered. “Selena?” His voice softened at once. “I’m coming. Don’t cry. I’ll be there.” He walked out without looking back. The guards followed. The broken door swung open in the silence. I lay on the floor until I could breathe again. Then I reached for my phone with shaking fingers, opened the live security upload, and saved the file under a new folder. Gift One. For the day he wakes.
Selena’s disappearance ended exactly the way I expected. She was found in a luxury hotel suite an hour later, wrapped in Adrian’s coat, weeping for the cameras. By noon, the whole pack believed I had tried to hurt her. By evening, Adrian froze my accounts. By nightfall, he called the Northbridge Broadcast Center and had me suspended from my own show. My director looked at me across his desk and smiled the stiff smile of a coward. “Elena, you know how this works. In fifteen days, Alpha Adrian will recover. He always does. Everyone knows you’re the one he truly loves.” Love. I looked at the suspension notice on the table. Then I asked, “Do you know how Adrian’s parents died?” The director’s smile vanished. “What?” “His father had the same curse. During his seventy-eighth cycle, he killed his Luna for another woman. When he woke, he jumped from the twentieth floor holding that woman in his arms.” The room went silent. I picked up the notice. “I’m not waiting for history to repeat itself.” Outside the station, Selena’s messages came one after another. Photos first. Adrian on his hands and knees while Selena sat on his back, laughing for the camera. Adrian kneeling at her feet. Adrian washing her feet in a silver basin. Adrian fastening diamonds around her throat. Adrian emptying every luxury store in Northbridge because she had said, laughing, that she wanted a mountain of gifts. Then came the words. You were always the main character, Elena. I was always the friend standing in the background. But now he belongs to me. Soon your crown, your wealth, your home, and your happiness will all be mine. Are you jealous? I hope it hurts. I stared at the screen. Then I took screenshots and uploaded everything. Gift Two. I drove back to the Alpha estate for one reason. My grandmother’s moonweave. It was the only thing I had left from my mother’s bloodline, a silver-threaded tapestry stitched by the women of my family for five generations. It carried our old crest, our birth moons, our names. My grandmother had placed it in my hands before she died and told me never to give it to anyone who did not understand what it meant. Adrian had once begged me for it. “Give me something that matters to you,” he had said, holding me after the seventh curse almost destroyed us both. “Something I can keep safe. Something that proves you won’t leave me.” So I gave him the moonweave. He framed it himself. Now I wanted it back. Clean break. Clean hands. Clean ending. But when I stepped into the estate, Selena was already in the great hall, holding a filthy stray pup against her chest. The animal was wet, trembling, and so terrified it had urinated down the front of her dress. Adrian stood beside her, pale from the fur allergy he refused to admit he had. “Poor thing,” Selena cooed. “Adrian, hand me that ugly cloth on the wall. I need to wipe him down.” My heart stopped. She was pointing at the moonweave. “Don’t,” I said. Adrian didn’t even look at me. He shattered the frame with one hand and pulled out the tapestry. “Why would anyone hang an old rag in the Alpha hall?” he said, disgust curling his lip. “Elena really has no taste.” The male who once kissed that cloth and swore it made him feel safe now tossed it to another woman like trash. Selena smiled at me. Then she dragged the mud-soaked, urine-stinking pup across my grandmother’s moonweave. Something in me finally tore open. I lunged. I didn’t reach her. Adrian caught the back of my coat and hurled me away from her as if I were filth. My body struck the floor-to-ceiling glass. The window exploded. Shards raked across my back, my arms, my thighs. For one second, I heard nothing but the wet sound of my own blood hitting the marble. Adrian froze. His eyes dropped to the blood spreading under me. His face went white. There. A crack in the curse. “Elena...” he whispered. Then Selena sobbed. “Adrian, she scared me. She scared the pup. I don’t want to stay here anymore.” The gold came back into his eyes. He shook his head hard. “No. No, I don’t care about her.” He pulled Selena close. “I love you. Only you.” I lay on the floor and reached for the ruined moonweave with bloody fingers. Selena passed me in Adrian’s arms. Her lips formed silent words. You are just like this rag. If I want it, he gives it to me. Then she let the stray pup slip from her arms. The animal, panicked by the smell of blood and waste, lunged back toward the cloth. Its teeth sank into my arm when I dragged the moonweave to my chest. Pain tore white through me. I held on anyway. By the time I woke again, I was in a private healer’s room. My hand was still clenched around a corner of the stained moonweave. A young nurse changed the bandages along my back and muttered under her breath, “Your Alpha is a monster.” I turned my head toward the window. Morning light warmed the sheets. “Healers called him last night,” she said. “They said you might not make it. They needed him to sign for emergency blood transfer.” I closed my eyes. “What did he say?” The nurse’s mouth tightened. “He said he was busy comforting Miss Vale. He said if you wanted to die, then let you die.” Let you die. I opened my eyes. “Can you repeat that?” I asked. She blinked. “What?” I lifted my phone. “For the record.” Her face hardened with understanding. She repeated every word. I saved the audio. Then I pulled the estate security footage from the backup server Adrian had forgotten I still controlled. The broken frame. The ruined moonweave. The glass. The blood. The dog’s teeth tearing into my skin. His face when he almost remembered. I uploaded everything. Gift Three.
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