“I’m fine,” I said, brushing off her concern and heading toward my bathroom.

I wanted to avoid this woman who made me feel things I didn’t want to think about.

Naturally, Eleanor didn’t let it go.

She moved, her hand reaching out to mine.

“But you’re?—”

Her rich, decadent scent hit me again, but this time, I didn’t have my usual control.

Before I was fully aware of what I was doing, my uninjured hand slipped to the back of her neck and tugged her closer.

A small sound left Eleanor’s lips, and I felt an inexplicable urge to capture that sound with my lips—to taste her defiance and her surrender.

As though she could hear my thoughts, Eleanor’s lips parted slightly, the pulse on her neck racing beneath my thumb.

Holding her this close, I could almost forget all the reasons I couldn’t want her.

Almost.

“How many times do I have to tell you I don’t want you around before you get it?” I growled. “Or are you so desperate for any attention that you simply don’t care?”

Eleanor sucked in a sharp breath, pain glittering in her emerald-green eyes as she shoved me away, breaking my hold on her.

“Every time I want to believe I have the wrong idea about you, you prove you’re just an insensitive, conceited jerk,” she bit out before walking away from me and slamming the door behind her.

Eleanor and I still weren’t speaking when Dylan’s coronation ceremony arrived a few days later.

The full moon was high in the sky, its light almost as bright as the sconces that lined the path to the clearing.

Dylan and Micah knelt in front of the entire pack as the pack priestess stood between them and carried out the ordainment.

Eleanor stood several feet away with her arms around Seraphina, whose eyes were red-rimmed and full of shadows.

This was the first time in days that she wasn’t openly sobbing. By the time she’d gotten to Alpha Maximus, he’d lost his ability to speak, and Seraphina had been inconsolable.

I’d tried to speak with her, but the only person she tolerated right now was Eleanor.

“With this mantle, you carry the weight of the future of the Nightshade Pack.” The pack’s priestess addressed Dylan, her solemn voice carrying with the night wind across the clearing. “Wear it with pride, carry it with humility…”

“Are you certain you want to give Dylan this much power over you?” Anastasia’s voice was barely above a whisper, and her familiar presence was a welcome balm.

Anastasia and I had been friends since childhood, and while we’d been something more years ago, we were better off as friends.

We’d fought many battles together and she’d seen me at my worst. She might be the only person who truly understood me.

“It doesn’t matter anymore.” I shrugged. “My thirtieth birthday is six months away.”

Anastasia stiffened.

“Of course.” The levity in her voice sounded forced as her gray gaze flicked to mine. “But the situation has changed now that you’re mated, hasn’t it?”

No, it hadn’t. Not if I could help it.

“Not now, Anastasia,” I said tightly.

I wasn’t in the mood for an argument, not that anything she said would change my stance.