Alpha Blake and Luna Celeste, the beautiful wolves and a picture-perfect fated couple, mated and claimed each-other in the name of the Moon Goddess. As if this wasn't enough, their human wedding oozed romance. Every unmated she-wolf in Grauberg would go to bed tonight with her head full of dreams about finding a soulmate through the ancient werewolf ritual of seeking a fated mate.

If only a rhyme and your Nana's moonstone ring guaranteed this kind of happy endings! Or happy beginnings, since Celeste glowed with a special glow of a she-wolf carrying her mate's pup under her heart, a secret I was privy to as our town's only werewolf doctor.

Julia the Doc, the Pacific Northwest Pack called me.

Unfortunately, in the overheated romantic atmosphere my old nickname, Julia the Thornback—a slur for an unmated she-wolf—was making a comeback. I caught plenty of whispers during the ceremony: Our poor thornback should ask for a fated mate. It's her last chance. What is she, thirty? About time...

My jaded heart knew better. The ancient custom had almost died off for good reasons until Blake and Celeste revived it. The Goddess was fickle and her will... let's just say her ways were always a mystery to me. She hit the bull's eye with Blake and Celeste, no argument, and I was glad she did. Really glad. Nobody deserved every inch of happiness more than them, but in my case... My case was different.

The Moon Goddess's decrees left me muttering under my breath and shooting incinerating glances at a certain man.

Harold-curse-him-Almarr, who should have been exiled, reduced to a rogue, pronounced an enemy of our pack last year, and who instead got off Scott-free—yes, this infamous Harold Almarr—dodged even the miniscule punishment he'd received, because Alpha Blake had forgiven him amid the celebrations. I suppose winning a war against the rogues and impregnating his fated mate could make an Alpha euphoric.

But the Lupine Council of North America! Why did they let Blake do it? This supposedly wise institution had no excuse when on Blake's say-so they rewarded Harold for his treachery. Unbelievable! Simply unbelievable!

Naturally, the Moon Goddess didn't interfere either.

Somehow, the werewolf world had missed completely that Harold hadn't changed a single bit, remaining as arrogant as ever, as cold and as infatuated by his once fated mate as he had always been. Perhaps only a scorned she-wolf could see this. Alas, I couldn't air my objections to Harold's elevation, because in my bitter experience, a she-wolf ended up bearing all the pain, all the shame, while the man walked away unscathed.

If I had to stay silent, should I move on like the rest of the pack? I searched my heart again and again, and no, I couldn't forgive. Since Blake named Harold a provisional Alpha of the Californian Pack I was stuck in ugly resentment. Me, Julia the Doc, who advised her patients every day to not let things fester...

But I couldn't, just couldn't get over myself, no matter how ashamed I felt about it.

Hence, the scorching gazes during a celebration dedicated to love, joy and rose-tinted happiness.

Until Harold lifted his head and intercepted my glance.

I froze, unable to lower my eyelids. My heart ticked away seconds loudly in my ears. In the milling crowd, he had to look away eventually, attracted by someone shinier than me. He always loved people shinier than me.

Harold being Harold, he maintained our eye contact, his ruby-red irises pinning me in a personal flood-light where I squirmed. Goddess, torturing me had to be instinctive at this point! His birthright or something.

His lips stretched in a smile. It wasn't his customary smirk or a fake smile reserved for a stranger. I'd call it pensive. Almost dreamy.

What the hell? What the actual hell? Harold Almarr had no right to smile at me like that. Like we were still friends. Like he was still in the doghouse. Like he didn't mourn Scarlett's demise in secret.

Another second longer, and I would have howled, but Luna Monica wedged herself in front of Harold. She even grabbed his elbow to gain his attention, and it worked. Harold winced, swinging his gaze to her.

The spell he had me under finally broke. With a shriek of a pup caught at mischief, I turned on my heel and worked my elbows to part the suffocating crowd. I didn't look back, only wanting to get the heck out of the Olympian's grand ballroom as fast as possible. Even without Harold's damn smiles, my mood was not a match to the rose petals drifting from the ceiling, the rainbows practically exuding from everyone else and the promise of a mating frenzy in the air.

Dizzy and overheated, I fought free from the festivities, but didn't find peace neither at the hospital nor at home. Books or paperwork I grabbed fell out of my shaking hands. Zen music set my teeth on edge. I filled the bubble bath and drained it without immersing myself. There was no ice cream in the freezer, and I didn't want any.

This was a werewolf problem, and it needed a werewolf remedy, not a human one.

I returned to the outskirts of the brightly lit Olympian hotel and shifted to my werewolf form.

The surrounding mountains looked refreshingly grim in the gathering twilight. Their violet shoulders would shield me from things I didn't want to think about. People, actually, rather than things. One person to be exact. His name started with H and ended with D.

I took in deep calming breaths as I pushed up the trail to my favorite camping spot until my lungs burned and my nostrils filled with the scents of the wild wolves and their prey, needles of the great fir trees thawing in the March's sun and the decomposing leaves of the past summers.

A narrow trail forked away from the beaten path to the Goddess' consecrated well. It wound through the spruces for a while, the beasts' footprints sometimes disappearing under the ice-crusted drifts of snow. At its end lay my favorite place in the world. It was nothing much as far as natural wonders of the North Cascades Mountains go, but I had discovered it when I first learned to shift as a teen, and I loved it.

It was a small flat sheltered by the branches and a sheer cliff on one side. A skinny waterfall threaded down for twenty feet, to make ice formations around a small basin it carved over the ages. The water that didn't freeze spilled into a stream with a rocky bed.

There, in the perpetual shadows, I shifted into my human form, made a fire for one from the deadfall I picked as I went, set up my one-person tent barely big enough to fit one sleeping bag.

My life consisted of these single servings—all convenient stuff for an unmated she-wolf. I liked it that way. I did. Screw love. Love sucked. Mating was overrated. I figured these simple truths when I was eighteen and wise. A sigh filtered through my lips, because I could have been just a little wiser back then. Specifically, when Harold Almarr—

"Julia?" For a split second I thought that my mind transferred me back into my past, because Harold-No Way-Almarr stuck his head into my tent. "Jules, are you alright?"

No, this wasn't a memory from our past.

It was an eerie replay, because Harold Almarr didn't look fresh-faced, tanned and bright-eyed the way he did at eighteen and in my dreams.

His red gaze didn't dull since then, but crystalized in a different key, intense rather than irreverent with a twinkle. I missed it the most from Harold I used to know when we were kids. The intervening twelve years also thinned him out, hardening the lines of his etched lips, making his aquiline nose stand out all the more. The last year took so much out of him that as a medical professional I had to suggest adding full-fat milk to his diet. It got a rare laugh out of him, and this was probably the last conversation when I felt things were back to normal between us.

Then... then shit happened.

So what was I doing, cowering in the corner of my tent and feeling pity for him? "Get out, Harold. I want to be alone."

"Ah," he said, advancing his shoulders inside the tent. "I need to talk to you. It wouldn't take long and—"

"Which part of 'get out' was hard for you to digest?" I shrieked. "Do you want me to rephrase? Leave! Skedaddle! Off with you!"

"Jules, you're being unreasonable." His hand ruffled his black wavy hair in consternation. "How can you shut off an old friend like that?"

"I learned from the best, Harold," I said dryly. "You."

I watched his eyes widen with some satisfaction. Harold wasn't thick, so it only made it worse when he ghosted me after he checked out of the hospital. Alright, so he didn't know I lost it and wept next to his bed while he was out of it. But he knew I patched him together after he betrayed me, his Alpha and his future Luna and got ripped to pieces for his troubles. "Going out for a coffee once in a while wasn't too much to ask for, don't you think?"

"I was too unwell for anyone to be around me," he said after a suffocating pause. During which he inserted the rest of his torso inside the tent, invading more of my personal space.

"Human world certified me as a medical doctor. Among the werewolf nation, I am a healer."

"Wasn't the kind of sickness I needed medical aid for. Just needed some time to process what happened."

The grin he pulled on was painfully familiar and would have convinced me, if I didn't understand the nature of his ailment. He'd almost died on my watch, yes, but the best human specialists trained me to deal with physical damage. The purely werewolf psychological struggle that came after was the real challenge. It was beyond conventional medicine, yet not beyond me.

"I have an innate affinity for healing fellow werewolves when nature alone can't do the trick, Harold. I could have helped you mend after Scarlett broke your fated bond, if you would have let me." And, more importantly, if he wanted it.

He gaped, trying to sidestep the sad fact that he remained loyal to Scarlett no matter what.

"You ignored both my friendship and my talent," I said.

"Jules. Fuck. I..."

"For a year," I finished mercilessly when he stammered. "A year without as much as a word! Like I didn't exist! Like I was a stranger who didn't understand what was going on with you. Though strangers treat me with more courtesy."

"I didn't think of it that way, Jules."

My lips pinched into a thin line. Of course, he didn't. He chose to be hurt by Scarlett after she abandoned him and for months after her death.

How much did he love her that even this bitter, twisted love was something he clung to! How little he thought of me! Humans say nice guys finish last. Not true. Nice guys finish well ahead of the nice girls.

"I apologize for being a mongrel's turd. I should have reached out instead of doing what I did. Can we... put this year behind us, Jules? Rewind back?"

"Sure, let's rewind. Right to the happy point when you lied to my face and betrayed my trust to get closer to our Luna so you could kill her." Needless to say, he did this for Scarlett. When they call a lover 'more than just a friend,' they don't know how tragically accurate it could be. In my case, a lover stomped all over a friend. "So, on second thought, it's for the best you ghosted me. Keep doing it and get out of my tent. You're crowding me."

"Jules, I'll give you a bigger tent if you only talk to me."

By then, Harold climbed all the way in. Despite his leanness, his body was so large, he filled nearly two-thirds of the physical space with his presence. Plus, all of my oxygen was now laced with his scent. Neither was good for my inner peace.

"Don't need anything from you, let alone a tent. I like mine just fine, when I'm a sole occupant. And that's all I want—my damn solitude."

Harold blinked. "That really blows, because I came to ask you to be my mate."

And this was the closest I'd ever come to fainting like a damsel. I swooned right into Harold Almarr's arms, without playing coy. There was literally no room for slumping onto anything else. And yes, it was uncomfortable on many, many levels I didn't care to explore. I was even less interested in the level on which our embrace felt natural. Unsettled by this discovery, I could barely move my tongue.

"C-come again?" The tent's orange ceiling, Harold's etched lips and left biceps spun around me in fragments. Then something occurred to me that cleared my dizziness in a jiffy. I sat up. "Don't tell me Blake removed his prohibition for you to take a new mate!"

Because that would be rich. It was the only consequence remaining for Harold after only a year.

"No."

"Good!" The exclamation popped out before I could stop myself, but Harold didn't look hurt. He even nodded to it.

"I mean to make amends, Jules, by being loyal to Blake and respecting the Moon Goddess' will," he said. "The Council undermined him by keeping Louis Beaumont's mate, Rieka, as the pack's Luna while approving me as a provisional Alpha."

"Until the Alpha Elect mates a Luna," I murmured, remembering the clause that I couldn't focus on when the shit with the Council went down, because blood pounded in my ears too hotly in my outrage over Harold's elevation.

"If you agree to become my mate in everything but actual mating, I'll ask Blake to interpret his punishment this way for the sake of a political win. Otherwise, Luna Rieka will scheme to push support away from me to one of Louis' and hers brood or send manipulative she-wolves to seduce me."

"I thought manipulative she-wolves were your type." Scarlett was the purest example of it.

Harold cringed and shook his head. "I want you, because if it's you, everyone in Grauberg will understand that I'm not betraying Blake, but the Californians will be clueless and see you as their future Luna if they confirm me as an Alpha Elect."

So much for Prince Charming! "Brilliant plan, Harold. For you. For me, if I agree to your proposal, it would remind the pack that I'm an unwanted thornback unable to go into heat. More taunts, more pity after I spent years building myself up in their eyes... How could you do this to me? Don't you respect me at all?"

He shook his head again, his red eyes earnest. "On the opposite, Jules. I respect you more than anyone else, because I know you're without a mate by choice. I don't know why you keep it a secret from the pack, but I respect it too."

My hands tightened around my knees. I didn't notice I was cradling them, squeezing myself into a small ball. Harold was wrong, we weren't the only two people to know. My parents knew, but they wouldn't tell...I had to make sure of it.

Wait, was I considering Harold's crazy offer?

Meanwhile, Harold went on. "I'm floored by your resolve, because if I had your control over passion, it would have saved me all this grief."

"I wouldn't bet on it," I muttered through the gritted teeth, but he probably didn't hear it. His eyes blazed with the passion he was dissing.

"Jules, I spent my youth watching my father destabilize our pack because his mating with his Luna didn't last well past my birth," he said. "If I loved my Luna, I thought, with every shred of my being, unconditionally, we'd mate for life. Then, I'd be a better Alpha than Dad."

"Great plan."

"It seemed that, okay? I was young and an idiot. This past year... I did a lot of thinking, and it's the opposite that I need from my Luna. A solid ally, a level-headed friend, a worthy soul with no corruption to keep me in check. In short, you. I would have come to you after Blake's punishment ran out. This California opportunity only sped things up."

As the she-wolves of Grauberg went into bed with their heads full of romantic dreams, I, Julia Neilson, was treated to this because I was more plain, wholesome and durable than a laminate countertop. If they wanted romance, they should go bad. Scarletts of this world claimed all the love. Goody two shoes scored a big, fat zero.

Tears stung my eyes, and I turned my head to hide them from him. "I am not a Luna."

"Only because you never asked." Harold beamed. "Jules, there is no Beta in the land... no, in the entire world, who is more deserving of receiving a Mark of Luna from the Goddess! It's yours for the taking."

"Did it occur to you that I might not want it?" A Mark of Luna or anything else from the Goddess. She could bestow her dubious gifts on the other she-wolves. I was through with her.

This stomped him for a second. Then his dark brows unfurrowed, tall forehead smoothed out.

"Don't be scared," he said. "Come with me to California and announce me as your mate before a new pack. It will be a fresh start for both of us. Like a second youth, only better, because we'd already made all our mistakes by now. Away from our past, away from the scorn, we'll have a perfect union of an Alpha and a Luna—"

"—as fake mates—" I parroted his exhilarated cadences, "lying to everyone..."

"No lies!" Harold put his hand over mine. It was hot, while mine was like ice. "Jules, when Scarlett broke the fated bond, my heart burned out, so you won't find a mate more faithful than I. I'll stay with you, I'll have your back and I would never hurt you with public rejection like the stupid pup Kieran."

As his eyes searched my face, eager for the signs of my believing him, all I could do was not to scream into his perfect features. Or laugh like mad at the sheer irony of the situation. Kieran! Harold thought Kieran's rejection had scarred me for life!

She doesn't go in heat! It was our parents that set us up, not me. Please, a wolf has needs.

Sure, the boy's petty attempt at justifying himself before the whole assembled pack hurt. I didn't expect the shitstorm after he outed me, but I could deal with my peers' mockery. If it was only Kieran's indiscretion, I would have healed. This was only a stitch on a young heart, something that paled before the real, grown-up bleeding wounds from which there was no coming back.

My wretched loss, the utter misery, the it's-all-your-own-fault convulsions... that pain was on Harold. And he was clueless. Absolutely clueless.

The longer I stared at my tormentor in disbelief, the less my heart ached.

How could it, when it froze into a block of ice?

A slow, fake smile stretched my lips. "Okay, Harold Almarr. You win. I'll be your fake mate."

"Splendid!" Harold leaned in and kissed me on my cheek. "I'll go talk to Blake and Celeste before they leave the party. Unless... ah... you need help packing up your camp or anything?"

"Don't worry about me. Go." I tried my best to sound like a doormat he took me for our whole life, while hardening my resolve to never be one again.

For starters, I was going to destroy this man when he was at the cusp of victory.

Rejecting him tonight was pointless. He'd run straight to another she-wolf who'd happily promise anything to be his Luna, taking revenge out of my hands. I wanted the front-row seat to his ultimate downfall. More, I wanted to cause it.

So, I'd wait till Harold had his coveted position of an Alpha Elect of the Californian Pack in his grasp, then I'd reject and expose him at our formal mating ceremony. The Californians would chase him away, and he'd fail Alpha Blake. Instead of redemption, Harold would become a rogue wolf, no matter what the Moon Goddess had marked him with. To hell with the consequences to me, because at some point, even the nicest girls can't be pushed any further. They need revenge too. They need it more than anyone else.