'I'm not trying. It's just what it looks like when I'm trying to be nice.''That's even worse,' Ran said drily. An unusually serious expression came over him. His eyes glowed blue again for a moment. Static crackled ominously between them.'Have you heard about bonded mates?'.She took another sip to distract herself from the change in atmosphere, but her cup was empty.'It was a thing in the past. Sort of like werewolf soulmates.'Caph nodded. His eyes turned green as he turned to explain, 'Yeah. Our ancestors used to only marry their bonded mates. But we don't do it anymore. Because there's too many werewolves, too many packs now.'Where was he going with this?Was he implying that he was looking for his bonded mate?Was that why he accepted her proposal of a fake arrangement?'Yes,' he answered her thoughts. His green eyes pulling her in like quicksand.He was flirting with her again! There's no way to make him have a serious conversation with her.Ran brought her empty cup to her

One evening, Caph found Ran in the study surrounded by a pile of books on the floor, frantically flipping through pages in search for something.He was late tonight, which would usually make her snappy, but today she was too preoccupied to even notice his presence in the room.She flipped to the end of her book without finding what she was looking for, grumbling to herself in annoyance. Then, she dumped it unceremoniously on a wobbling tower of books behind her and repeated the process with the next book on the shelf.'What are you doing?' he asked. Usually, she handled the books in her father's study like they were ancient relics.Ran slammed the book in her hands shut and growled.It was banished to the top of the highest stack.'Searching.' She pulled out another book and began leafing through the pages at a rapid rate, crinkling the yellowed pages as she went.Caph crouched next to her, taking in her flustered and bristling profile. 'For your father's collection of erotic books?' H

Dingo was once a member of the Eridanus pack.And when Ran was ten, she declared that she would marry him.After the rogue attack, Dingo vanished. He was an orphan. His mother died at childbirth and his father had long been banished from the pack, so the previous Alpha raised Dingo alongside Ran.He had been the one everybody thought would become the next Alpha.Ran also liked him very much.They were inseparable—until the attack.The pack mourned him just like they mourned her parents.Yet here he was, alive and well, in the arms of another woman.Ran frowned. Surely she was mistaken. Maybe she was still asleep.She had not seen Dingo for ten years. How could she be sure the man before her was her childhood sweetheart?He might be some other werewolf named Dingo.But the woman clearly called Ran his first love.And his chocolate brown eyes were the same as the ones in her memory.Uh well...in the memory she boxed up, locked three times and threw into the furthest depths of her brain t

'God cursed the most perverted and bloodthirsty city of man and handed them over to their feral desires.' This was how the first werewolves came to be. They were banished from human civilisation and made slaves to violence and deception.But once every four years, God gave them a chance to learn humanity. When the moon was stained red with his blood, they lost the urge to fight and made peace with one another.Slowly but surely, the Red Moon Truce was how the feral werewolves recovered their humanity and they were able to shift back into human form at will. It was also how they built this orderly and domesticated pack system for themselves.What Ran tried to do—holding Dingo down by the collar on the floor of the ballroom, one hand raised to strike— threatened to undo a millennium's worth of effort spent unravelling the curse.The hand she had lifted to slap Dingo never struck his face. Rage roared in her ears but her hand hovered in midair, held back by an invisible force. The clamour

Acamar raised himself to his full height, his black eyes glowing with dominance. 'Our Beta has spoken,' he declared. 'Leave and do not return.'Dingo took a one step back, then another, his gaze fixed on the current Alpha of Eridanus. The Alpha who had taken his place as soon as he left and rebuilt his old pack into the powerhouse it was today.He regretted his betrayal.He regretted leaving Ran and becoming Alpha of Leo when he saw her again at the Summit.She had grown up well.She was hot.That was the reason he came after her. He wanted to make amends, rebuild ties with his old pack and possibly elevate the status of Leo by becoming close allies with Eridanus.But Ran saw through him in a flash. She humiliated him in front of her pack—retribution for what he had done yesterday. There was no emotion in her black eyes when she called him a traitor. The traces of fury, of betrayal in her eyes at the Summit had vanished.If he could not pander to Ran's emotions, then convincing Acamar