His Innocent Wolfless Stray Turned Queen

Azura Montgomery POV:

The bridal chamber was awash in the soft glow of hundreds of crimson candles, the scent of white roses heavy in the air. I stood in the center of the room, my custom lace wedding gown trailing across the Italian marble of my family's penthouse floor. Tonight was supposed to be the beginning of a new era for the Montgomery Pack.

The heavy oak doors clicked open. I turned with a soft smile, expecting my new husband, Baron Guerra. But the smile froze on my lips.

Baron strolled into the room, his tuxedo jacket unbuttoned. Clinging to his arm, wearing a scandalously sheer crimson slip, was Brie Forbes-a low-ranking socialite my family had taken in out of charity. Her hands were roaming freely over my husband's chest.

"What is the meaning of this?" I demanded, my voice trembling as my white wolf bristled beneath my ribs. "Why is she here, Baron?"

Brie let out a melodic, venomous laugh. "Why wouldn't I be here, Azura? It is his wedding night, after all. A true Alpha needs a real woman, not a pampered princess."

"Baron, explain yourself!" I snarled, stepping forward.

Baron's cold gray eyes gleamed with raw, unadulterated greed. He didn't look like a loving groom; he looked like a butcher admiring a carcass. "It was the only way, my dear," he said smoothly. "You Montgomerys are so fiercely loyal. I needed a flawless excuse to gather every single one of your elite vanguard guards in one place. What better occasion than the grand wedding of their beloved Alpha's daughter? Your father stationed them all right outside this wing to protect our 'sacred night.'"

Before I could process the sheer magnitude of his betrayal, a deafening roar of automatic gunfire erupted from the courtyard outside. The screams of my packmates tore through the night air, mingling with the sickening scent of silver and blood.

"No!" I screamed, lunging toward the heavy doors.

Baron moved with blinding speed. His hand clamped around my throat, lifting me off the floor and hurling me violently backward. I crashed into the edge of the mahogany vanity. The impact shattered the mirror, sending shards of glass raining down on my pristine wedding gown. A sharp, agonizing pain pierced my chest as a rib cracked. I gasped for air, coughing up a mouthful of hot, dark blood onto the white lace, and the world faded into blackness.

When I dragged my heavy eyelids open, the sharp stench of iron, burning drywall, and ozone choked my throat.

"Hold her down!" a mercenary shouted.

The heavy combat boot slammed into the small of my back, driving the air straight out of my lungs. My cheek scraped against the cold, blood-slicked Italian marble.

"Get your hands off me!" I snarled, thrashing against the crushing weight of the two mercenaries pinning my shoulders.

Deep inside my chest, my white wolf clawed at my ribs, desperate to break through the surface. She howled in agony, but the bones in my spine refused to snap and reshape. The Shift would not come.

Around both of my wrists, thick cuffs of solid, unrefined silver bit directly into my flesh.

The reaction was immediate. A violent, hissing sound echoed through the smoke as the silver met my skin, sending up acrid plumes of white smoke. It smelled like roasting pork and charred nerves. The agony was blinding, an electric fire running up my forearms, paralyzing the dormant beast inside my DNA. Silver was the one absolute poison to our kind, capable of severing a werewolf from their inner beast forever.

"Still fighting, little pup?"

Heavy leather boots clicked rhythmically across the shattered glass. Through my swollen left eye, I watched Baron Guerra stroll through the burning doorway. He wore an immaculate bespoke Charcoal suit, completely untouched by the massacre he had orchestrated across our seventy floors of corporate glass and steel. As the self-appointed Alpha of the United Metro Pack, he carried himself like an untouchable monarch.

I lifted my heavy head. On the bridal bed, amidst the tangled, ruined silk sheets, Baron and Brie had just finished entangling themselves in a frantic, animalistic rhythm. They hadn't even bothered to close the curtains. As I stirred, Brie locked eyes with me over Baron's shoulder, her face twisted in a euphoric sneer, intentionally amplifying her moans to ensure every sound carved into my soul.

They finally broke apart. He stopped two feet from my face. Slowly, deliberately, he lifted his right foot and set the sole of his designer shoe directly onto my father's chest.

My father lay motionless in a pooling lake of crimson, a gaping crater blown through his ribcage by a black-market silver heavy cannon. His eyes were wide, glassy, and forever fixed on the burning ceiling.

"Take your dirty foot off him!" The scream tore from the depths of my soul, scraping my vocal cords raw. "He was the true Alpha! You are nothing but a back-alley assassin!"

Baron only smiled, pressing his heel down until the splintered ribs beneath his leather sole gave a sickening crunch. "A dead Alpha is just fertilizer, Azura. Now, tell me where the Tears of the Moon sapphire is hidden, and I might just grant you a clean bullet."

"Go to hell!" I spat a mouthful of hot blood directly across the pristine polish of his left shoe. "You will never touch our ancestral stone. Never!"

Baron's calm expression cracked. A vein bulged along his neck.

Before he could speak, the sharp, rhythmic tap of high heels echoed through the burning wreckage. Brie Forbes stepped into the circle of emergency lights, swaying her hips with practiced elegance. Her platinum blonde curls were styled to perfection, contrasting grotesquely with the dead bodies of my packmates scattered across the floor.

Brie knelt beside me, her diamond-encrusted fingers digging brutally into the raw wounds on my jawline.

"Look at you," Brie purred, her voice dripping with venomous satisfaction as she forced my face upward. "The proud princess of the Montgomery clan, groveling like a mangy dog in her own filth."

"You filthy traitor," I whispered through gritted teeth.

Brie sneered and swung her arm back, delivering an open-handed slap that whipped my head sideways. The ring on her index finger tore open my lip, sending a fresh stream of copper down my chin.

"You always looked down on me," Brie hissed, her voice shaking with long-suppressed jealousy. "You and your pureblood lineage. Look who holds the crown now."

"Enough playing with the stray," Baron cut in, his voice dead and emotionless. He reached inside his tailored breast pocket and pulled out a heavy pneumatic syringe made of reinforced glass and surgical steel.

Inside the chamber, a viscous, shimmering liquid churned like melted mercury.

My stomach dropped through the floor. Cold dread washed over me, freezing the blood in my veins.

Liquid pure silver. A concentrated neurotoxin designed by rogue black-market chemists to permanently destroy the werewolf healing factor, dissolve the cellular link to the inner wolf, and induce multi-organ failure.

"No..." I breathed, thrashing wildly. "No, kill me! Just shoot me!"

"Death is far too merciful for a Montgomery," Baron said softly.

The two mercenaries clamped down on my bicep with the force of hydraulic vices. Baron stepped forward, drove his thumb into the hollow of my collarbone to expose my carotid artery, and slammed the thick gauge needle deep into my neck.

He slammed the plunger home.

Fire.

It was not heat; it was an avalanche of freezing, liquid needles tearing through my bloodstream. The liquid silver spread through my jugular like liquid lightning, searing every vein, artery, and nerve ending it touched. My back arched uncontrollably off the floor. A high, ragged scream tore out of my throat, vibrating against the shattering glass windows.

Inside my mind, I heard the faint, dying whimper of my white wolf. Her voice, once a thundering presence of ancient authority, faded into a terrifying, hollow silence. The psychic link snapped like a frayed wire.

My inner beast was gone. Dead.

"Throw her over," Baron ordered, wiping a speck of my blood from his cuff with a silk handkerchief. "Let the street cleaners scrape whatever is left off the pavement. Oh, and broadcast the message to the lower districts: The Montgomery family has been executed for treason, mass murder, and inciting a rebellion against the commoners. I am simply delivering justice."

"My pleasure, Alpha," the larger mercenary grunted.

He grabbed the collar of my torn silk blouse and dragged me across the shattered floorboards. My limp legs trailed behind like dead weight, leaving a smear of dark red across the executive corridor.

The night air hit me with the force of a physical blow as they hauled me out onto the observation terrace. One hundred and twenty stories above Apex Metro, the wind screamed like a chorus of banshees. Far below, the neon lights of the city sprawled like a grid of glowing embers.

"Farewell, little wolfless orphan," Brie laughed from the doorway, wrapping her arms around Baron's waist.

The mercenary hauled me over the reinforced glass railing, dangling me by the front of my shirt above the yawning abyss.

My vision was swimming with black spots. The silver poison had paralyzed my diaphragm, turning every breath into a ragged gasp. But right against my ribs, beneath the inner lining of my reinforced corset, a small, hard object pulsed with a faint, steady warmth.

The Tears of the Moon sapphire.

Baron thought it was in the corporate vault. He didn't know that my father had sewn the ancestral relic into my clothing an hour before the breach. The ancient stone hummed against my freezing skin, pouring a microscopic thread of soothing energy into my failing heart. It was not enough to heal the poison, but it kept the spark of my soul alive.

I had one move left. Just one.

Summoning the final drop of adrenaline left in my shredded muscles, I threw my head backward with everything I had.

Crack.

My skull slammed squarely into the mercenary's nose bridge. Cartilage shattered beneath the impact. The man howled in shock, his grip instinctively slipping for a fraction of a second.

That fraction was all I needed.

Instead of trying to scramble back toward the ledge, I threw my weight backward into the empty air.

The mercenary's fingers ripped through my shirt fabric, catching nothing but wind.

The wind roared in my ears as gravity seized my broken body. The burning tower shrank upward in a flash of smoke and sirens.

As I plunged into the freezing black sky of Apex Metro, my eyes remained locked on the blazing silhouette of the penthouse.

Suddenly, piercing through the sirens and the roaring wind, a frantic shout echoed from the terrace above:

"Alpha! We have a breach! Assassins in the lower-!"

The voice was abruptly cut off.