There are places men go to fall apart. Riven Nightspire's was a clearing with an oak tree, a dead woman's initials.
Riven Nightspire stood in a moonlit clearing holding a bouquet of roses.
His composure evaporated. His lips parted. His grip on the bouquet tightened, and the stems bent in his fist.
"Seraphine?"
The name came out fractured. The name of a woman he had loved since childhood, spoken aloud in the only place he ever allowed himself to say it, to a white wolf who should not have been standing where she was standing because the woman she belonged to had been dead for six years.
Serena, locked inside her wolf, held perfectly still. Her gold eyes watched him from ten feet away.
Riven approached slowly. His steps were careful, deliberate, the approach of a man who understood that white wolves were sacred and this moment was a knife's edge and one wrong movement would shatter it.
