Lewis’s voice was low when he told me about the twins, and every word landed like a stone in still water. The old woman had never seen them as children. She had seen them as tools, weapons carefully sharpened to cut the Hale pack where it would hurt the most.

They were eight years old when everything fell apart. The girl had stepped in front of her brother without hesitation, the way pack loyalty runs deepest in the young, before life teaches you to calculate the cost. She didn’t survive. Her brother did, barely. Both his legs were broken, his body a wreck, but it was the emptiness behind his eyes that told the real story. He was still breathing, still moving, but something essential in him had gone quiet, like an animal that had given up fighting the trap. He ate when food was placed before him. He answered when spoken to. But no one who looked closely could pretend that the boy behind those eyes was still whole.

The worst part, Lewis said, was how much he looked like a young Jeffrey.

That was why she kept him close. Not out of mercy, not out of guilt. She wanted a child with Hale blood running through its veins, and this boy was the closest thing she had to a key for that door. We had all assumed her obsession was about money, about territory, about the kind of dominance old women like her spend their whole lives chasing. But it was never about that. It had always been about Jeffrey.

Years ago, they were meant for each other. Two good families, a match that made sense to everyone who saw them together. She had believed it was settled. She had believed it the way you believe in something you’ve never had reason to question. Then Jeffrey’s instincts pulled him somewhere else entirely, toward a woman who sold flowers at a street corner, soft-spoken and warm in a way that had nothing to do with status or bloodline. And just like that, everything Brynn had built her future on crumbled.

She had agreed to the Commander’s bond thinking it would shake Jeffrey awake, force him to see her as the one he was supposed to choose. It didn’t. It only showed her what she had refused to see all along: he had never looked at her the way a man looks at his mate. She had been a sister to him. Nothing more.

She gave him years. Her loyalty, her patience, the quiet ache of being close to someone who would never reach for you. And then she gave up and accepted a bond that meant nothing to her heart, walking into a life that grew colder the moment she entered it. The Commander was not unkind in the beginning. But kindness without warmth is only courtesy, and courtesy was never what Brynn had wanted.

Every time she saw Jeffrey with the woman he had chosen, something in her broke a little more. His affection for her didn’t fade or flicker the way Brynn had probably prayed it would. It deepened. And the colder Brynn’s bond with the Commander became, the more her bitterness took shape, the more it wrapped itself around her like something living, something that needed to be fed.

It was the sight of happy mates that hurt her most.

She had seen Jeffrey at the temple once, his arm around his pregnant mate, his lips close to her ear, saying something that made her smile. That tenderness, that ease between them, it cut through Brynn like a blade. It was everything she had wanted. Everything she would never have. She stood watching them for longer than she should have, long enough that the servant beside her shifted uncomfortably and looked away.

But my grandmother had not gone to that temple for reflection or peace. She had gone for one reason. She had seen Mrs. Blackwell Senior there, round with a child, seeking blessings, and something dark had clicked into place behind her eyes. "She must be close to giving birth," she had said to the servant beside her, her voice stripped of anything warm.

The servant carried those words exactly where my grandmother intended them to go.

The Commander noticed Mrs. Blackwell Senior immediately. It wasn’t only her appearance that drew him. It was her kindness, something he had long stopped expecting to find in his own home. He grew attached quietly, made plans, and then hid her away with the Sander family because he feared what his mate would do if she found out. He was right to be afraid.

When Brynn learned the truth, the rage that moved through her was not the hot, impulsive kind. It was cold and deliberate, the kind that plans. She could not stand it, another woman receiving the gentleness she had been denied, and so she dismantled Mrs. Blackwell with the precision of someone who had been rehearsing cruelty for years. She sent her into another man’s bed and broke her in every way a person can be broken. With that, she didn’t just destroy Mrs. Blackwell. She destroyed whatever quiet hope the Commander had been quietly carrying. After that, he stopped trying to reach for anything soft. She had made sure of it.

As for my grandfather, he was a man who needed to be led. My grandmother understood that early. She never loved him, not the way mates are supposed to love each other, but she was not careless about it. She managed him, guiding him gently toward other women, loosening his grip on loyalty one quiet suggestion at a time. It was calculated and it was patient and it set the entire stage for what the Blackwells would eventually do in return.

His health had already started to slide when the Blackwells moved. They knew exactly what to add to the equation. A few more women, a little poison introduced with the patience of people who had been waiting a long time. His death was already written by the time it arrived.

But the one person Brynn had never been able to stop hating, not really, was Mrs. Hale. The woman Jeffrey had protected with everything he had. The woman who had walked into his life and never left it. Brynn had sent women to him over the years, women she had quietly drugged, hoping instinct would do what manipulation could not.

Every single plan fell apart.