...Some encounters feel like accidents....

...Until the moment they destroy everything that existed before them....

...

Extended Synopsis:

Ellowen had always been the shame of the Lunar lineage.

Weak. Red-haired. Strange.

While her cousins were admired for the elegant, powerful magic they possessed, Ellowen carried winter inside her — a rare gift, cold and feared even by her own family.

But everything changes when her grandmother announces the final condition for choosing the next Suprema: all heiresses must become pregnant before the matriarch's ninetieth birthday.

The winner will inherit a billionaire fortune… and a power capable of making every witch in the clan kneel before her.

Humiliated by her cousins and desperate to finally earn respect, Ellowen decides to do the unthinkable: pay a man to get her pregnant.

Except the plan goes terribly wrong.

In the wrong room, she finds a creature that was never supposed to exist in her destiny.

An Alpha Lycan.

Massive. Red-haired. A virgin. In the grip of his rut.

What should have lasted a single night transforms into five days of obsession, bites, and promises growled against her skin.

And then she runs.

Six years later, Ellowen is the new Suprema.

Her triplets hide a deadly secret.

And the Alpha she abandoned has finally come to claim what is his.

My mother always said that red was the most honest color in the world.

That it didn't pretend to be gold when it was fire.

I grew up trying to believe her.

It wasn't easy.

My name is Ellowen Volkov, and I was born a redhead in a family where red hair was synonymous with trouble. In the Lunar Witch lineage, appearance had always carried weight. Dark-haired witches were elegant, powerful, respected. Blondes were seen as blessed, full of lunar grace. And redheads? Redheads carried an ancient superstition that no one had the courage to say out loud, but everyone practiced in silence.

Unstable. Unpredictable. Dangerous.

My mother, Enora, was blonde. Wheat-blonde, with honey eyes and the kind of soft beauty that made people look twice. She was everything the family approved of. Delicate, polished, with a luminous, harmonious magic that never frightened anyone.

My father was Russian.

Red-haired like an ember, tall, with that way of filling an entire room just by being in it — or so she told me. She'd met him on a trip to Saint Petersburg when she was twenty-two, fallen in love in three days, and forgotten the world for three months. She came home pregnant and alone. He didn't come with her.

I never really found out what happened. My mother changed the subject every time I asked, and after a while I stopped asking. Some questions you learn to swallow before you ask them.

What I did know was that I'd inherited everything from him.

The hair. The short stature that was even more embarrassing in a family of tall women. The freckles on my nose that appeared in summer and vanished in winter. And the magic.

Ah, the magic.

In our lineage, each witch developed her gift after turning sixteen. My grandmother, Dagnar, controlled lunar magic in its purest form — light, time, memory. My cousins had been blessed with admirable gifts. Beatrice projected illusions so perfect you questioned your own sanity. Latoya manipulated emotions with a single touch. Janiely entered dreams and planted false memories like seeds.

Elegant gifts.

Gifts that made my grandmother smile.

Gifts that people applauded.

I developed winter.

The first time happened at sixteen, during a family dinner. Beatrice had announced in front of everyone that I looked like a maid trying to wear a witch's clothes. Everyone laughed.

I didn't say anything — I never said anything — but I felt something slide down my spine like ice water, and suddenly every flower in the centerpiece wilted at once. The air chilled until people reached for their coats. My grandmother watched me for a long time after that.

It wasn't pride I saw on her face.

It was caution.

"Winter magic," she said later, when we were alone. "It hasn't appeared in this family in two hundred years."

That should have made me feel special.

It didn't.

Because winter magic was considered dangerous. Tied to emotions too directly, without filter, without refined control. When I was sad, the temperature dropped. When I got startled, the windows froze. Once, at Latoya's birthday, she shoved me in front of everyone like it was a joke and it snowed inside the mansion for four minutes.

My grandmother erased the staff's memories that day.

My cousins found one more reason to laugh.

"Careful around Ellowen," Janiely would say. "If she gets sad, we'll need coats in July."

I learned not to feel in front of them.

I learned to smile when I wanted to cry, to leave the room when the anger started sliding down my spine, to breathe slowly until the cold retreated. I got good at it. So good that sometimes even I believed I was fine.

I left for the College of Magical Sciences outside the mansion at eighteen. Four years of relief. I studied enchanted botany, the history of lineages, advanced potions. I earned high marks — not because I was the most talented, but because I worked twice as hard as everyone else to make up for what I thought I lacked.

I came back at twenty-two.

Nothing had changed.

Beatrice still looked at me like I was a stain on the living room carpet. Latoya had perfected the habit of touching my shoulder and injecting a stab of shame that I felt for hours afterward. Janiely simply pretended I didn't exist, which was sometimes almost worse than the other two combined.

My mother tried. She hugged me, told me I was beautiful, that my magic was rare and powerful. But she never stood up to the others for me. Never raised her voice. Never told my grandmother what happened when no one was watching.

I understood. My mother was too gentle for that family. Too much gentleness in that place was almost a disadvantage.

Then on the day I turned twenty-three, my grandmother gathered us in the main hall.

Me, Beatrice, Latoya, Janiely.

Our grandmother sat in the dark velvet armchair that no one dared sit in but her, hands folded in her lap, eyes sweeping over each of us slowly.

"My time is coming to an end," she said, without a shred of drama. Like someone talking about the weather outside.

The silence that followed was heavy.

"The Suprema is not chosen by love or by favoritism. She is chosen by the ancestral magic. And the ancestral magic recognizes one thing above all."

She paused briefly.

"Life."

I didn't understand immediately.

Beatrice understood before I did. I saw the exact moment she grasped it, because her shoulders relaxed in that specific way — the way of someone who has just realized she is going to win.

"You have three months to become pregnant before my ninetieth birthday. The first to conceive inherits everything. My magic, the power of every witch in this lineage, the fortune, the properties, the absolute authority."

She looked at us one last time.

"Whoever inherits will be obeyed by all. Without exception."

Beatrice turned to me and smiled.

It was the smile she saved for when she knew I was going to lose.

I left the hall with my heart in my throat and the air around me growing cold enough that I could see my own breath.

Three months.

With no one.

I had never dated. Never been desired. Never had a man look at me as if I were worth something.

I walked into my bedroom, closed the door, and sat on the edge of the bed for a long time.

Then I opened my computer.

Because if fate hadn't given me what the others had, I was going to buy it.

And this time, no one was going to stop me.

My father used to say that waiting for the right mate wasn't sacrifice.

It was respect.

I grew up believing that with a conviction that bordered on religious. And I paid a price I didn't fully understand until it was too late to turn back.

My name is Dagon Drakhar. I am the Alpha of the Heart of Fire Pack, the oldest purebred Lycan lineage still alive on the continent. Our territory sits in the northern mountains, far from cities, far from humans, far from anything that doesn't belong to our world.

I am forty years old, six foot nine, with red hair my grandmother used to say was the mark of the most ancient Lycans, and pale gray eyes that turn almost white when the Lycan inside me rises close to the surface.

And until recently, I was a virgin.

Not for lack of opportunity. Any Alpha in my position received offers from the age of twenty. Females from other packs, human women who didn't know what I was but sensed something different about me, Lycans who wanted political alliances dressed up as desire. I turned them all down. Not with cruelty, but with a clarity that sometimes frightened more than cruelty would have.

It's not you.

Simple as that.

My father, Aldric Drakhar, was the most feared Alpha this pack had ever seen. Enormous, red-haired like me, with a presence that made wolves from other packs cross to the other side of the road. But with my mother, Seraphine, he was a completely different man.

Seraphine was human. Small, brunette, with an easy laugh and hands that smelled of the herbs from the garden she tended behind the house. She had no magic, no claws, none of what our kind typically valued in a partner. And my father loved her with an intensity I could only describe as absolute.

He never touched another woman.

Never wanted to.

Never needed to.

I was about twelve when I asked why he turned down every female who showed up at pack meetings. He looked at me for a moment as if deciding how to explain something to a child who didn't yet have the vocabulary to understand.

"When you find your mate," he said, "you'll understand that waiting isn't sacrifice. It's the only path that makes sense."

I held on to that.

My Beta, Lizandra, is the most loyal person I know and also the most practical. She tried a few times to convince me I was being irrational, that the pack needed an heir, that waiting for a destined mate was a beautiful idea in theory but irresponsible in practice.

"You don't need to fall in love, Dagon," she said once, wearing that expression of someone being very reasonable. "You just need continuity."

"The pack has continuity," I answered. "It has you, it has the warriors, it has the families. It doesn't need my child with a woman who isn't my mate."

She gave up after the third attempt.

I learned to ignore the comments from other Alphas at gatherings. The giant who won't touch anyone. I let them talk. I knew what I was waiting for.

The problem was that fate didn't warn me the wait would exact a different kind of price.

My mother died when I was twenty-two.

A witch killed her.

To this day I don't know the witch's name. I don't know if it was a contract hit ordered by some enemy or something personal I never uncovered. I know that my mother went to the market in the nearest town on an ordinary Tuesday morning and didn't come back.

We found her on the side of the road.

The spell was of lunar origin. It left characteristic marks — an internal burn that consumed from the inside out without leaving any external sign. She looked like she was sleeping.

My father got there before me.

I will never forget the sound he made when he saw her.

It wasn't crying. It was something that came from a place before crying, a place that has no human name and that I hope I never hear again in my life.

Aldric Drakhar survived his mate's death for eleven months. He continued carrying out his duties as Alpha because that was who he was, because the pack needed him and he knew it. But he faded slowly. Like a candle in a constant wind that nobody could shield.

The morning he didn't wake up, my grandfather, Torvan, was the first to enter the room. He called me in quietly. The two of us stood there in silence for a stretch of time I couldn't measure.

"He couldn't make it without her," my grandfather said finally.

I was twenty-three when I became Alpha.

I grew up fast. I was forced to. The pack needed someone who wasn't broken on the inside, and I was completely broken, but I learned not to let it show. My grandfather stood by me through everything. He is the only man in the world who truly knows me, who senses when I've hit my limit before I realize it myself. He's seventy-two, still stands straight as an oak, and is the only person who can look me in the eye and tell me I'm wrong without making me want to argue.

I built up the pack over years. Expanded territory, strengthened alliances, eliminated threats. I did what needed to be done.

And I kept waiting.

With one difference my father never had.

After my mother's death, the hatred for witches grew inside me like a root that runs too deep to pull out. I didn't try to remove it. I watered it without meaning to every time I remembered the internal burn, the lunar marks on her body, the morning my father didn't wake up because he couldn't endure what a witch had done.

I swore I would never willingly go near a witch.

It was a clear line. One of the few certainties I had beyond the waiting.

Until that week.

The rut of a purebred Alpha Lycan happens once in a lifetime. It's nothing like the common wolf's heat, which can be managed, controlled, ignored with enough discipline. For a Lycan of ancient lineage, it's the body recognizing that the mate exists somewhere in the world.

It is a total collapse.

Fever that won't break. Joint pain that turns into pure instinct. The need to find the mate becoming almost feral with every hour that passes without her.

My grandfather brought me to the hotel because it was the only place with walls thick enough to keep me from putting my hands on someone by accident. Lizandra waited outside, monitoring and standing by. My grandfather was the only person who entered the room, checked whether I was still conscious, left water, and walked out quickly.

"One more day," he said once, watching me with that mix of worry and resignation only he could pull off. "Hold on one more day."

I could barely answer.

I was on the floor because the bed had broken hours earlier. The room reeked of a Lycan in collapse. The claws wouldn't retract anymore, the eyes wouldn't stop glowing, and every minute was a battle against the instinct screaming at me to get out and search.

Search for what? I didn't know.

I only knew she existed somewhere.

And then the door opened.

Her scent entered before she did.

Fresh snow. Crystallized honey. Something sweet and cold that filled my lungs all at once and made the Lycan inside me stop completely — before exploding in a single direction.

I rose from the floor without deciding to.

My body moved before any thought could form.

And when she appeared in the doorway — small, red-haired, with wide blue eyes staring at me as if she'd stumbled into the wrong corner of the entire universe —

everything I had built over eighteen years vanished in less than a second.

Instinct drove through my chest like a bolt of lightning.

"Mate."

And then I noticed what she was wearing.

And what happened next was neither of our decision.