---- The day I had been so excited about wasn't just our mating ceremony. It was also the day I had decided to leave forever. "She knew everything," Damon said, his voice hoarse as if the words were being squeezed from his throat. " She's been planning to leave me this whole time." He looked up at his assembled pack members, and they took an instinctive step back at the devastation in his eyes. "She's gone," he said simply. The Gamma wolves looked at each other, faces full of shock and growing unease. "Gone?" Marcus repeated. "What do you mean gone, Alpha?" "The bonding application,'' Damon said numbly. " She withdrew it. Three days ago." The silence that followed was deafening. Finally, James broke it with a low curse. "Holy shit. So now the Alpha can't bond with Sage Rivers, which ---- means he can't auction off her sex videos and mating rights like we planned." "The entire plan is completely ruined," another pack member added, his voice rising with panic. "Five years of work down the drain!" "Wait," Thomas said urgently. "If the plan to threaten Garrett Rivers gets exposed and he finds out what we were going to do to his sister, he'll definitely kill you, Alpha! He's just as crazy and ruthless as you are!" Marcus shook his head, trying to find some silver lining. "Not necessarily. Sage Rivers is so gentle and soft-she might not tell him what she overheard. After all, she's kept quiet all this time and just silently withdrew the bonding application instead of confronting us." "That's true," James agreed. "She's still... heartbreakingly well-behaved, even after discovering our betrayal." "But for how long?" Thomas pressed. "What if she ---- changes her mind? What if she tells him everything?" Damon said nothing during this entire exchange. He just stared at his phone screen as if he could somehow will the email to change, as if he could still see the sweetness and hope in my eyes when we'd first signed that bonding application together. His mind was in complete chaos, but one voice kept echoing above all the others-Lydia's mocking words from their last confrontation: "How ridiculous you are-madly in love yet still thinking about using her!" She'd been right. He had fallen in love with me somewhere along the way, but he'd been too proud, too focused on his original plan to admit it to himself. Now it was too late. The pack members around him continued their heated discussion, voices rising as panic set in. "We need a new plan," someone was saying. "Maybe we can find another way to threaten Garrett ---- Rivers," another suggested. "What about the Ashford alliance? Can we still use that?" But Damon seemed unable to hear any of their voices. Their words sounded distant, like they were speaking underwater.