After I died, Alpha collapsed.

I was a Vampire Princess, mated and married to an Alpha werewolf.

But our child was neither vampire nor werewolf; he was nothing but a scrawny, feral mutt.

In a fit of rage, Kaelen killed him and banished me.

To save my baby, I drained every drop of my magic and died completely.

Five hundred years after my death, Kaelen came seeking my heart to ensure his new Luna could bear an heir.

"Five hundred years... has she learned her lesson? Tell her to offer up her heart, and I might just forgive her this once."

But when he finally learned of my death, he fell to his knees before my grave, weeping and begging for forgiveness.

Chapter 1

Five hundred years ago, I was Elara, a pureblood Vampire Princess.

Today, I was nothing but a phantom, a spirit tethered to the mortal realm.

I had no heartbeat, no body temperature, no physical form.

I had spent centuries watching over the only thing I had left in this world: my son, Lucian.

Due to the trauma of his birth and the ruthless depletion of his magic, Lucian was trapped in the sickly, frail body of a six-year-old boy.

He wandered between two worlds, accepted by neither.

In the eyes of the vampires, he was a filthy half-breed, a walking symbol of the Princess who had defiled her bloodline by mating with a werewolf.

In the eyes of the pack, he was a monster, a hairless, scentless anomaly born of his mother's infidelity.

But to me, he was my everything.

Through the veil of death, I watched his grueling life. I watched the elder vampires kick him into the mud simply because he dared to beg for scraps from the blood kitchens.

In the deepest catacombs of the Sanctuary, resting silently on a slab of magical glacial ice, lay my physical body.

"Mom, I'm here," Lucian whispered, his voice echoing in the hollow silence.

He would climb onto the ice, seemingly immune to the biting chill, and curl his tiny, scrawny body against my withered side.

He closed his eyes and began to chant an incantation.

A faint, silver-blue glow—the ancient magic he inherited from his werewolf bloodline—flared in his palms. He would press his glowing hands against my forehead, pouring his own life essence into my dead veins.

"No! Stop, please!" I screamed, throwing myself over him. "Lucian, you're killing yourself! Stop!"

But my hands passed right through his trembling shoulders. He couldn't hear my voice.

As the magic transferred, my skin would briefly regain a soft, pale hue, and the decay of my flesh would be delayed.

But the cost was devastating. It was the drain of this very magic that kept him forever trapped in a child's shell. He was five hundred years old, yet he sacrificed his own maturity, strength, and future just to keep my corpse from turning to dust.

"I miss you, Mom," he would whimper, burying his face in the crook of my freezing neck. "I can't hold on much longer. Please... wake up. Please take me away from here."

I could only kneel by the ice and weep phantom tears that vanished before they even hit the ground. I was trapped in this purgatory.

But our quiet, agonizing daily routine was about to be shattered.

The Alpha King, Lucian's biological father, was coming. He wanted to take the very last thing I had left.