He Chased Me to Spite His Enemy. So I Left Him at the Altar Chapter 01

He Chased Me to Spite His Enemy. So I Left Him at the Altar Chapter 01

One month before the wedding, Dorian Thorne went missing.

At first I figured he was just handling some Shadowpine territory business. Territorial disputes between werewolf nobles aren’t exactly a joke—sometimes a negotiation can drag on for days on enemy turf. I even packed a few changes of clothes and left them by the door for him, just in case he’d left in a hurry and hadn’t brought enough.

Day one, I texted him: “Message me when you get there.”

No reply.

Day two, I called. It rang twice and then got hung up. I figured he was busy—the Thorne family’s influence in upstate New York isn’t small, and Dorian, as the heir, had to go over piles of territorial proposals and human-world investment reports every month.

Day three, I started to feel like something was off.

I contacted his assistant. The guy said Dorian Thorne had left the office three days ago and hadn’t been seen since. No flight records, no hotel bookings, not even the emergency wolf-smoke signal the Thornes use for internal alerts had been triggered.

Day four, I drove out to Shadowpine territory. The housekeeper told me the young master hadn’t come home, but a jacket he usually wore and some cash were missing from his bedroom. He wasn’t fleeing—he was deliberately disappearing.

Day five, I stood by the Hudson River, staring at the city lights on the opposite bank, my head completely scrambled. I couldn’t think of anywhere Dorian Thorne would go. He’s a werewolf—his sense of smell, hearing, physical strength—all of it is way beyond human. If he wanted to hide, I’d never find him. Werewolves only use tracking on prey or enemies. On someone you love, you never need it.

Day six, I started searching. Place by place.

From downtown Manhattan to the Upper East Side. From Brooklyn’s underground werewolf bars to the human neighborhoods in Queens. I left scent markers everywhere I thought he might go, hoping he’d catch my smell and give me some kind of sign.

Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

Day seven, I got a message.

Not from Dorian Thorne. From a college classmate. She said she’d seen him at a private marina in Los Angeles.

“Evelyn, your fiancé—he’s on a Shadowpine yacht. With a group of people. And it didn’t exactly look like he was doing business.”

I flew there that night.

Werewolves get this restless, antsy feeling around the full moon, but the full moon was still eleven days out. I had no biological excuse for why my heart was pounding so hard. The plane cut across half the country. At thirty thousand feet, I closed my eyes and tried to calm myself down—but my hands kept shaking.

When I was twelve years old, freshly brought back to the Blackwood estate from some little town down south, I saw a werewolf shift under the full moon for the first time. I was so scared I couldn’t stop trembling. Dorian Thorne was standing at the edge of the crowd that night. He took off his own jacket and put it around my shoulders and said one sentence: “Don’t be scared. Shifting wolves don’t bite. Wolves that bite don’t shift.”

That was the first thing he ever said to me.

I found out later that he’d crashed a Silvermoon party on purpose, just to get a look at me from across the room.

On the plane, I kept turning that sentence over in my head, and it felt like something was squeezing my heart, crushing the air out of my lungs.

I landed in Los Angeles at 3 a.m. A werewolf’s sense of smell is sharpest at night. I followed the signature Shadowpine scent—cedar and gunpowder mixed together—all the way to the marina.

The private yacht was docked at the far end of the harbor, its deck blazing with light. I recognized that boat. On Dorian Thorne’s twenty-fifth birthday, the old man of the Thorne family had given it to him as an adult coming-of-age gift. A silver wolf’s head was carved into the hull, faintly glowing in the moonlight.

I stood at the edge of the dock. The water reflected the yacht’s lights and a broken sliver of moon. I knew I should just walk up there, knock, demand to know why he’d been gone for a week, ask him if he had any idea how worried I’d been.

But my feet stopped moving.

Because through the smoke drifting off the deck, I saw the outline of a woman.

She had her back to me, slim figure, ponytail, talking to Dorian Thorne. He was leaning against the railing, a cigarette between his fingers, the smoke curling up from the corners of his slightly raised mouth.

He didn’t look like a man who’d been missing for a week.

He looked relaxed. Easy. Almost content—the kind of content you only feel when you have no stress, no worries, no one waiting for you at home.

I stood in the shadows and watched his profile.

The moonlight hit the bridge of his nose and the curve of his lowered lashes, casting a soft, ambiguous shadow. His lips were slightly parted as he blew out a smoke ring. The wind scattered it and blurred his expression.

And then that woman stood on her tiptoes and kissed him on the cheek.