Chapter 313

AURELIA’S POV Sleep didn’t come that night. It hadn’t come easily in years, but this time it wasn’t nightmares that kept me awake—it was truth. Or rather, fragments of it. Shards scattered across my mind, cutting deeper each time I tried to piece them together. Kael’s words echoed again and again, their edges sharp and heavy. Darius is Derek. Draven’s nephew. Alpha of this pack. I sat by the window, staring out at the quiet night while the storm raged inside me. The moonlight fell across the floor in thin, trembling lines, and I felt like I was standing right between them—half in shadow, half in truth. It all started to make sense. Horribly, painfully, perfectly sense. But there were more questions then answers. My marriage to Alpha Draven had never been about me. It had always been about land. About power. About the unclaimed territory sitting between two rival packs—a territory that could either make one of them unstoppable or leave the other vulnerable forever. Father wanted Draven’