Stolen By The Alpha's Dangerous Brother

“For ten years, I played the safe, "wolfless" emotional support animal for my werewolf best friend, Finn, secretly loving him while he chased his toxic ex. When she got engaged to a rival Alpha, he dragged me across the country to crash the mating ceremony, only to abandon me at the airport. His terrifying older brother, Alpha Knox, picked me up instead and shattered my world with one sentence: Finn had always known how I felt, and he intentionally weaponized my devotion. To prove how little I meant to him, Knox orchestrated a cruel test at a seedy Rogue club. While I sat right next to Finn in a sticky booth, Knox sent over a stripper. "You don't mind, right, Sloane? It's just a gift," Finn slurred. Without hesitating, he let the stripper straddle him right in front of me, burying his face in her neck to chase away the pain of his ex. A decade of my blind loyalty turned to ash in that smoke-filled room. I hated my defective, wolfless biology, but I hated him more for treating me like a stray dog begging for scraps. Why did I waste my entire youth protecting a male who didn't even see me as a woman? Suffocating on shame and fury, I fled to the cramped club bathroom to hide. *Click.* The deadbolt slid into place, and the intoxicating scent of a violent thunderstorm and spent gunpowder swallowed me whole. Alpha Knox Crawford stood against the locked door, his merciless eyes pinning me to the sink.”