After I Left, the Powerful Alpha Gave Up Everything To Win Me Back - Chapter 17

Chapter 18 The day of the marking rite, the whole Thornwood pack was alive with it. | stood on the high platform of the Moon Goddess grounds in a snow-white rite-gown. Rowan stood at my side, so nervous his ears had gone red, sneaking his hand toward mine, and this time, | didn't push it away. The whole hall was smiling. This was a true celebration. No one had forced me, no one had tricked me. | had come here of my own will, step by step. The fire-basins were lit one by one. The elder was about to speak. Outside the gates came Iron Claw's banner-call. The laughter in the hall died down.

Rowan tensed all at once and moved in front of me, the whole of Thornwood's wolves bristling. Cain walked into the Moon Goddess grounds alone, his Iron Claw elites all halted outside the field, not one stepping in. He came to the foot of the platform, stopped, and lifted his eyes to me. There was no more obsession in them, the kind I'd seen in the wind and snow. Only something sunk all the way to the bottom. "| won't make a scene," he said, his voice carrying across the whole field.

"I only want, before the Moon Goddess and all the packs, to ask you one last time." The grounds went dead silent. "These three years are a debt | owe you. The one who rejected you in public was me. The one who cast you aside was me. The one who failed to protect you, who let you suffer all of that, was me too." He spaced each word, and for the first time in his life, this proud Alpha bowed his head in public. "I don't ask you to forget any of it. | only ask you to give me a chance, to spend the rest of my life paying it back, a little at a time." He drew out a ring and went down on one knee.

The grounds erupted in shock. The Iron Claw Alpha, kneeling in public before a Luna of another pack, one already about to be marked. "Come back to me," he said. "Elara, please. Forgive me. Be my Luna. This time, in front of every wolf here." This was the scene I'd dreamed of three years ago. But now, watching him kneel there, all | felt was a desolate calm. "Cain," | said. "Do you know where you're cruelest?" He looked up. "It isn't that you rejected me back then," | said. "It's that now, kneeling here, you let me see that you could do this. That you could always do this.

You just wouldn't do it for me back then." "This late kneeling of yours isn't winning me back. It's telling me that the wolf | once loved could have treated me this way three years sooner." "He just didn't." | turned to Rowan beside me and laid my hand in his palm. "Go on," | said to the elder. "Rowan's and my marking rite." Cain stayed kneeling where he was, not rising. He held the pendant and looked at me, as if he'd finally understood something. Some things, once broken, are broken, and no amount of kneeling can take them back. | thought that was the end of it.