Chapter 1 1

PARIS POV

I woke up gasping from my own scream.

The dream was the same as always, a look of my father's face, pale and broken, reaching for me before it fell away into the dark.

And then she was there. Selene. Wrapping her arms around me and her lips close to my ear. She was whispering the words that bound me forever.

"You belong to me now."

I woke up suddenly, sweat dripping down the small, bare skin of my back. My room was quiet except for the bear of my heart.

My mother died when I was six.

Too weak, the healers said. Alpha Jareth my father remarried almost right away. He married Selene. She smiled at me sweetly then, called me her little dove. But within few years, Father was gone too. And from that night on, the house became a prison.

Selene's house. Selene's rules. Selene's lies.

And me? I was her tool.

At first, it was the parties. She would dress me up and have me sing or dance in front of her guests. I hated the way their eyes followed me, heavy and greedy. I hated it more when she began sending me to the club at night, saying I had a gift, that men would pay just to watch me move.

That was how it started. That was how I became hers completely.

The knock at my door came sharp, three times, but I ignored it because I already knew what it meant; Selene's orders, Selene's rules, Selene's voice reminding me that tonight I would dance for strangers until their eyes burned through me and their hunger made me sick.

But before I could be dragged into that suffocating world of smoke and music and greedy hands, I felt a pull in my chest, a quiet desperate need to see him, even if only for a moment, even if only to feel his eyes soften when they met mine, so I did what I had promised myself I wouldn't do tonight, I slipped out.

And it wasn't Selene at the door after all, just a maid carrying a tray of food I would never touch, her head bowed low as she set it down without meeting my eyes, but even that small mercy of not being caught gave me the chance I needed to move unseen, to take those stolen steps down the shadowed hall toward him. My boyfriend Mason.

The halls were dark, and I held my breath like a thief. Selene had ears everywhere, and Morgana was always looking for a reason to catch me, but I moved silently through the servant's corridor toward the only place where he and I had stolen time before.

People whispered about Mason with suspicion, the pack said he was just Liam's adopted, illegitimate son taken in out of guilt. Liam himself never confirmed it, but the warnings in his glares told me

and I never understood why because if the boy weren't even Liam's real son then what right did he have to come between us?

We kept hidden who we were, meeting in shadows and behind locked doors, holding each other like children deprived of heat, and in those secret nights, I thought of him as my own, the last portion of light left to me after Selene crushed all the other scraps of joy under her heel.

And so, I went down the dark hallway and pushed through the side door of the old guest room that was our spot, my heart pounding with anxiety and hope, ready to see him waiting, ready to steal just one kiss before the night would swallow me again.

When the door opened, my breath froze in my chest. The scent of roses and spice, too heavy and too sweet, surrounded me before my eyes even had a chance to adjust. Then I saw it.

The dark long black silk against pale skin, the black hair tumbling down her back, and then the sound of laughter, slicing through me.

Selene.

My stepmother.

She was there, in the bed where I had kissed him, in the very sheets where I had pressed my face to his chest and whispered my secrets, and her hands were tangled in his hair, pulling him closer, her lips on his as though she owned him too, and my heart broke so suddenly I almost swore I could hear it crack.

He was kissing her back. My lover, my secret, the boy I had risked everything for, was kissing Selene, his mouth devouring hers like he had never known mine.

I stumbled back, clutching the doorframe as my throat closed tight with the kind of rage and grief that makes you want to tear your skin open. It was as if Selene had waited, watching me cling to him, only so she could take him too, just to remind me that nothing in this world could ever belong to me.

I don't know how long I stood there, my eyes burning as though they had been cut open, but when she finally turned her head, when her eyes found mine in the crack of the door, she smiled as if she had been waiting for me to see, like this had been her plan all along and in that moment I realized there was no end to the ways Selene could break me.

And him? He froze when he saw me, his face pale, but not with guilt, not even with shame, only fear, because he knew Selene owned him now too, and maybe he had never been mine at all.

"Paris, please," Mason stammered, his body jerking upright, his hands shaking as he tried to reach for me. "This isn't what you think, I swear to you, it's not what it looks like. She came to me, she forced this on me, I didn't want it, you have to believe me.

Paris, please, I love you, you're the only one I love." His words tumbled over themselves, desperate and broken, but I could still see the red of her lipstick smeared across his mouth and the way his hands had clung to her just moments before, and no excuse in the world could make that disappear.

Selene only leaned back against the bed, and she tilted her head with a wicked little smile that cut deeper than any blade.

"Mason," she purred, her tone soft as honey, "why are you apologizing to her?" She flicked her gaze toward me like I was nothing more than a shadow in the doorway.

"She's just a girl, my little dove, fragile and foolish. Do you really think she has the right to demand your loyalty?"

"Selene" Mason began, but she silenced him with nothing more than a sly curl of her lips, then waved her hand as though shooing away a servant. "Enough of this nonsense. Go, Paris. You have work tonight. The men at the club won't wait forever, and they certainly don't care for tears."

My heart stopped at her words, because she had spoken it out loud, here, in front of him, the one thing I had fought to keep hidden.

Mason's head snapped toward me, his eyes widening in disbelief. "Wait... what?" His voice cracked. "You're the girl at the club?"

I couldn't breathe, I couldn't speak, I wanted to tell him it wasn't me, not truly, that Selene had chained me to that stage, but my voice was gone, trapped somewhere deep inside me.

"You..." he choked, his face twisting, his hand dragging through his hair as if he could rip the truth away. "You've been stripping in front of men? Letting them stare at you like that? Paris, how could you, how could you sink so low?" His words were louder now, cutting me open, each one harsher than the last.

Tears blurred my vision, but still I couldn't explain, couldn't defend myself, not with Selene smiling in the background, her poison dripping into every second of silence.

Mason's chest heaved, his voice breaking into something crueler than I had ever heard from him. "Maybe this is why my father never wanted us together. Maybe he knew the truth before I did." He spat the words like hate.

"Because you're nothing but a fucking slut."