Mate's VENGEANCE

The cemetery was empty except for the ghosts.

Sera Blackwood knelt before the fresh grave, her fingers tracing the carved letters of Marcus Ashford's name. Six months. It had been six months since they'd laid him in the cold earth, and the pain still felt like claws ripping through her chest with every breath.

The autumn wind cut through her black coat, scattering dead leaves across the grave like nature's own funeral confetti. She barely felt the cold. She barely felt anything anymore.

"I found out who did it," she whispered, her voice barely audible over the rustling trees. "I know who killed you, Marcus."

Inside her mind, there was only silence. Her wolf her beautiful silver-grey wolf who had once been so vibrant, so alive had retreated so deep after Marcus's death that sometimes Sera wondered if she'd ever surface again. The mate bond had snapped like a severed spine the moment Marcus took his last breath, and something fundamental had broken in both halves of her soul.

Where her wolf should have been prowling, snarling, demanding vengeance, there was just... nothing. A hollow void where instinct and connection used to live. Other wolves talked about their animals like separate beings, partners in their consciousness. Sera's wolf had gone silent as a tomb.

Maybe that was fitting. Maybe they were both dead now, just walking corpses pretending to be alive.

She pulled a crumpled manila envelope from her jacket pocket, the edges soft from being handled too many times. It had arrived three weeks ago, slipped under her apartment door in the middle of the night. No return address. No signature. Just evidence.

Photographs. Documents. A single typed note.

Sera's hands trembled as she unfolded the note again, though she'd memorized every word weeks ago:

Your mate discovered something he shouldn't have. The order came from Alpha Kael Stormridge of the Silvermoon Pack. Marcus was asking too many questions about their border operations. I'm sorry I can't come forward-they'd kill me too. But you deserve to know the truth. He didn't die in a rogue attack. He was assassinated. On the Alpha's orders.

The photographs spilled into her lap. Marcus, her beautiful Marcus, lying in that alley in a pool of his own blood. The coroner had called it a rogue attack quick, brutal, the kind of violence that happened sometimes when lone wolves went feral. Random. Meaningless.

But these photos told a different story. The positioning of the wounds. The precision of the kill. The way the scene had been staged to look like animal violence when it was clearly execution.

And there, in one photo, barely visible in the background a figure walking away. Too blurry to identify clearly, but the accompanying document had enhanced it, analyzed it, broken it down with cold, clinical efficiency.

Six foot two. Approximate weight 210 pounds. Gait pattern consistent with Alpha-dominant werewolf. Scent markers detected at scene match Silvermoon Pack territory markers. Method of kill consistent with professional pack enforcers.

"Alpha