Elara, a half-blood wolf girl, had secretly loved Alaric, heir to Silvermoon City's most powerful wolf clan, for five whole years. Urged on by her best friend Lorelei, Alaric's adopted sister, she married him in a whirlwind wedding. It took three years of marriage for her to piece together the harrowing truth: the man she loved had never truly loved her, but his own adopted sister. Marrying this low-born half-blood was nothing more than a cover for their forbidden affair, and a scheme to use her as a vessel to bear a child, so Lorelei's blood could be swapped in as the clan's rightful heir. Heartbroken, she quietly tricked Alaric into pressing his own blood seal onto the dissolution decree, and vanished without a word. One year later, she returned to Silvermoon City as a relic appraiser of the Frostbound Sanctum. The once-haughty heir had since been cast out of the pack, scraping by with his life on the line in the underground gladiator pits. He drew near again and again, repenting, begging, even throwing himself in front of a runaway beast-cart to shield her. But she never once looked back. The woman no one had ever truly seen had finally learned to see herself—and that was enough.
