In the end, she had chosen the darkest road available to her. She engineered the death of Jeffrey’s mate during the birth of their pup, then planted lies so twisted they drove him to abandon his own children. She had been certain that grief and time would crack him open, that he would break his vow and take another woman to his side.

But Jeffrey surprised her. He never did. Years passed and he kept no woman close, honoring the bond he’d shared with his late mate as though she were still breathing. His loyalty was absolute, unbending, the kind that made even hardened wolves lower their eyes in respect. She had miscalculated him entirely, mistaking his gentleness for weakness when it had always been something far more difficult to break.

Then, as if the moon itself had intervened, someone appeared. A woman who looked so much like Jeffrey’s lost mate that it stole the breath from anyone who looked twice. She carried the same quiet strength, the same gentle way of moving through a room. Under the old hag’s careful influence, she fell in love with Jeffrey without ever knowing she was being guided there like a piece on a board.

It wasn’t the woman who drugged him. That was the old hag’s doing entirely. She had wanted nothing more than to break the promise Jeffrey had made at his mate’s grave. When Jeffrey woke with his mind clouded and slow, he drew the wrong conclusion and accused the woman of betrayal. She left and never came back, and the old hag watched it all unfold like a story she had written herself. There was no guilt in her eyes as she watched. Only the cold satisfaction of someone who had moved a piece exactly where she intended.

Still, the woman loved him even after she was gone. She didn’t destroy the life growing inside her. She carried the child to term, hoping, always hoping. But fate had already been arranged against her. She died in an accident that was no accident at all, and Jeffrey, heavy with a grief he couldn’t explain, brought her son Lewis into his home. He raised the boy without ever knowing the full weight of what he was carrying, without knowing that the child was a thread the old hag had deliberately left in place, waiting for the right moment to pull.

Every broken thing across the Hale pack, the Sanders, the Blackwells, all of it carried her fingerprints. She had meant to use Jeffrey’s bloodline to carry on her own legacy, but when age stole that from her, she turned other women into instruments, swapping Julian and Silas without anyone ever knowing. The deception had required patience and a complete indifference to the lives she was quietly rearranging like furniture in a room no one else was allowed to enter.

She had saved that particular thread for the perfect moment, saving it to pull when Jeffrey was least prepared, when it would do the most damage. That was why, when Wisteria and Sheila came into the Hale household, neither of them had ever come to end Jeffrey’s life. She wanted him alive. She needed him to stand upright and watch everything he had built crumble at his feet. Death would have been too merciful. What she wanted was for him to feel it.

Her twin brother couldn’t bear the weight of what she had done and what he had witnessed. The torment swallowed him whole, and he chose to leave the world on his own terms. She had not mourned him the way a sister should. She had simply noted his absence and continued.

Knowing her own end was close, she had made one final decision, to drag Jeffrey down with her, all the way to the bottom, so deep he would never surface. But Jeffrey, a man whose will had already been shattered into too many pieces to count, found enough left in him to act first. He killed her before she could finish what she started. Then the poison she had already planted inside him did the rest, and the cycle that had consumed generations finally, quietly, ended. So many lives had been swallowed by her hunger for vengeance. So many people had paid the price for a love she had never been chosen for.

But today, Jeffrey was free.

Two butterflies rose together above the grave site, their wings pale and bright against the sky, stretching toward the sun as though they had been waiting a very long time to fly. He had found his true love at last. They would walk whatever came next side by side.

I watched them grow smaller and smaller until they were just a shimmer at the edge of the horizon. "Farewell," I whispered. "May we meet again in the hereafter."

I turned to leave, and that’s when I spotted them. Amber and Dominic, half-hidden at the far edge of the grounds. Dominic stood in all white, keeping himself in the shadow of a tree as though he had no desire to be seen. His presence was an offering, quiet and deliberate. Years ago, Jeffrey had unknowingly saved his father and spared the Blackwells from ruin, and Dominic had carried that debt like something sacred ever since. It had shaped the way he moved through the world, careful and watchful, a man who understood that some things could never quite be repaid.

But despite how carefully they had tucked themselves away, I noticed them almost immediately.

"We’re here to pay our respects, not steal anything," Amber said, her voice cutting the silence before I could speak. "You don’t have to crouch around like that."

Dominic reached over and ruffled her hair with easy affection. "Relax. We’ll go in once the Hales have cleared out."

Something had shifted between them. Amber’s voice didn’t carry the same sharp edge it once had. She had come to love him a little later than he had come to love her, but she had arrived, and that was what mattered. Life is short enough that when two people finally find each other, the past begins to feel like something better left where it fell.

Dominic’s story wasn’t so different from my own. Loss had shaped him too, carved him into someone who understood what it cost to keep going. There was a steadiness about him now that hadn’t always been there, the kind that only comes after a person has walked through the worst of something and chosen to remain standing.

I walked toward them slowly. "Amber," I said softly. "It’s been a while."

She jumped, startled, and the moment her eyes landed on me her face flushed with pure irritation. "Elena! Are you crazy? Do you enjoy scaring people?"