The Secretary

For seven years, I suppressed my Alpha aura and took sickening drugs to pass as a human secretary.

All to win a bet with my father, the Alpha King, that Dante loved me for my soul, not my bloodline.

But tonight, Dante proved me wrong in the most public way possible.

While I sat in a taxi, a Times Square billboard lit up with his face. He wasn't working late as he claimed.

He was holding a waitress named Lola, announcing her as his future Luna because she could "breed strong pups" and I was just a "useful tool."

When I arrived at the office to confront them, Lola didn't just mock me. She slapped my face and smashed my mother's silver locket under her heel.

She laughed, thinking she had destroyed a cheap trinket belonging to a weak human.

"You are prey, Seraphina," she sneered. "And you are trespassing in the wolf's den."

She didn't realize that the locket wasn't protecting me from them. It was protecting them from *me*.

With the seal broken, the air in the room instantly dropped twenty degrees. My eyes shifted from brown to glowing liquid silver.

They thought they were discarding a broken secretary. They had no idea they had just declared war on the Royal Family.

I picked up the phone and dialed the most feared number in the werewolf world.

"Papa," I said, stepping over the shattered silver.

"The masquerade is over. Bring the helicopters."

Chapter 1

Seraphina POV:

The silver locket resting against my sternum wasn't just warm. It was searing, a physical manifestation of the agitation roiling inside my soul. My wolf, usually comatose under the heavy dose of Moonshade Herb packed inside the pendant, was clawing at the walls of her cage.

She knew something I was refusing to admit.

"Look at that," the taxi driver grunted, gesturing with a calloused hand toward the massive digital billboard lighting up Times Square. "Another rich Alpha finding his bitch. Must be nice."

I looked out the window. My stomach dropped so hard I felt bile rise in my throat.

There, five stories tall, was Dante Moretti. He was smiling that charming, crooked smile that had convinced me, a naive eighteen-year-old girl, to leave my father's kingdom seven years ago. But he wasn't smiling at me.

He was holding the waist of a woman in a white silk dress. Lola.

The headline scrolled in neon pink: *Alpha Dante Moretti and Future Luna Lola – The Union of the Century.*

"Finally found a she-wolf who can shift, eh?" the driver chuckled, glancing at me in the rearview mirror. He was a low-level Beta, smelling of stale coffee and mediocrity. He saw me as a human. A fragile, breakable thing. "Better than wasting time with those human girls. They can't handle the knot, if you know what I mean."

I didn't answer. I just stared at the screen.

My phone buzzed in my lap. A text from Dante.

*Meeting ran late, babe. The Elders are riding my ass about the quarterly projections. Don't wait up. Love you.*

The lie was so lazy it felt like he hadn't even tried. He wasn't in a meeting with the Elders. He was broadcasting his betrayal to the entire city of New York.

I closed my eyes. The seven-year clock in my head ticked down to zero.

"You lose, Papa," I whispered to the empty air.