My Mate Tried to Kill Me for an Heir

The wooden threshold of the cabin scraped against my spine, a final, rough kiss goodbye from the only shelter in miles. Then, the world turned white.

Lucian didn’t carry me. He dragged me by the collar of my thin sweater like a sack of unwanted refuse. My heels dug useless furrows into the floorboards until we hit the ice-slicked porch steps. Gravity took over. I tumbled down the stairs, my paralyzed limbs flopping uselessly against the frozen wood, before landing face-first in a snowdrift.

The cold was instantaneous and absolute. It didn’t just touch my skin; it bit through it, sinking its teeth into my muscle and bone. The blizzard roared like a living thing, the wind screaming through the pines, whipping snow into a blinding vortex that stung my exposed face. I tried to curl into a ball, to preserve whatever heat remained in my core, but the wolfsbane cocktail Daphne had forced down my throat held my body in a rigid, chemical lock. I was a statue made of flesh, discarded in a frozen hell.

Footsteps crunched heavily in the snow near my head. I forced my eyes open, fighting the heaviness of the drug.

Lucian stood over me, his silhouette framed by the warm, golden light spilling from the open cabin door. He looked like a titan, wrapped in furs, indifferent to the storm tearing at my clothes. Daphne stood in the doorway, her arms crossed, a cruel smirk distinct even through the blowing snow.

"It’s a kindness, really," Lucian shouted over the wind, his voice devoid of the warmth I had craved for three years. "You were never going to survive a real winter. You’re too weak, Riley. You always were."

He nudged my ribs with his heavy boot, flipping me onto my back. I stared up at him, my vision blurring. This was the man who had promised to protect me. The man I had silenced my inner beast for. The man I had worshipped.

He looked down at me not with hate, but with boredom.

"It’s time to cut the dead weight," he muttered, more to himself than to me. He straightened his posture, puffing out his chest in a mimicry of true authority. The wind seemed to hold its breath, waiting for the words that would sever my soul.

"I, Alpha Lucian Arnold of the Silver Creek Pack," he bellowed, his voice carrying a magically amplified weight that pressed me deeper into the snow, "reject you, Riley West, as my mate and Luna."

The pain hit me before the sentence was finished. It wasn't physical; it was metaphysical. It felt like a rusted hook had been inserted into my chest and yanked violently, tearing away a vital organ I didn't know I had. The mate bond—that fragile, one-sided thread I had nurtured for years—snapped with a sickening, silent recoil.

I couldn't scream. The paralysis locked the agony inside my throat, turning it into a silent, internal shriek that rattled my very bones. Tears leaked from the corners of my eyes, instantly freezing on my cheeks.

Lucian watched me convulse, a sneer curling his lip. "Pathetic to the end."

He gathered a wad of phlegm in his throat and spat on me. The warm saliva hit my cheek, a final, degrading mark of his contempt. Then, he turned his back. He walked up the stairs, wrapped an arm around Daphne’s waist, and slammed the heavy oak door shut.

The click of the lock was the loudest sound in the world.

Darkness swallowed me. The cold rushed in to fill the void where the bond used to be. My heart rate slowed. *Thump... thump... thump...* The wolfsbane was doing its job, shutting down my organs one by one. The numbness crept up my extremities, seductive and terrifying. It would be so easy to just let go. To sleep. To die.

*No.*

The voice didn't come from my mind. It came from my blood.

Deep in the marrow of my bones, something ancient stirred. For three years, I had built a cage of steel and will to hold her back. I had starved her, silenced her, denied her existence to fit into Lucian’s small, fragile world. But the cage was built on the foundation of my love for him. And Lucian had just destroyed that foundation.

The rejection didn't kill me. It set me free.

A spark ignited in my chest—not the warm, fuzzy heat of a fever, but the scorching, volcanic fire of a dormant sun. The paralysis fighting to stop my heart met the unstoppable force of a Royal Lycan bloodline. The wolfsbane burned away in seconds, incinerated by the sudden surge of adrenaline and rage.

My fingers twitched. Then my toes. The ice encasing my skin began to melt, turning to steam against the sudden heat radiating from my pores.

*He thinks you are weak,* my wolf growled, her voice a thunderclap in my head. *Show him what we are.*

My eyes snapped open. The blurred gray of the storm vanished, replaced by high-definition clarity. The darkness wasn't dark anymore; it was vibrant, alive. And my eyes... I could feel them glowing, casting twin beams of golden light onto the snowdrifts ahead.

A low, guttural sound ripped from my throat—not a human moan, but a predator’s snarl. My bones cracked, a symphony of breaking and reforming that should have been agonizing but felt like ecstasy. My jaw extended, my spine lengthened, and layers of thick, white fur exploded from my skin, shredding the remnants of the sweater Lucian had dragged me in.

I didn't just shift. I erupted.

I rose from the snow, shaking out a coat as white as the blizzard itself. I stood on four paws, massive and terrible, towering nearly seven feet at the shoulder—twice the size of the cur who had just left me to die. I dug my claws into the frozen earth, feeling the power course through me, raw and unfiltered for the first time in years.

Riley West was dead. The White Wolf had returned.