Dakota's entire body tensed at the sound of her sister's name. Her laughter cut off abruptly, replaced by something that looked almost like pain mixed with rage mixed with grief so profound it had no single name.
"Maya," Dakota repeated, the name emerging thick with emotions she couldn't sort through or identify. "Maya... Maya... It's always Maya."
Her voice broke on the repetition, each instance of her sister's name carrying a different weight, a different meaning. Maya is the perfect daughter. Maya is the appropriate choice. Maya was the one who followed rules and met expectations. Maya who was marrying Dakota's mate and raising Dakota's son and living the life that should have belonged to someone else.
"It's just Maya," Dakota finished, her voice dropping back to that hollow whisper, and she couldn't even begin to articulate the kind of feelings she was experiencing, the complicated tangle of love and resentment and jealousy and guilt that came from hating her sister for something that wasn't entirely her fault while simultaneously recognizing that none of this was Maya's doing.
Dakota didn't care that this stranger somehow knew her sister's name, didn't question why his mouth was also speaking Maya's name like he had some familiarity with the situation. She was too far gone in her own emotional spiral to process those kinds of logical inconsistencies, too broken to wonder how he knew things he shouldn't know.
Maya was her kind and understanding sister. They had never done anything to deliberately harm each other throughout their entire lives and had been close in the way sisters often were, despite their personality differences. But now—right now in this moment—Dakota was experiencing overwhelming feelings of jealousy so intense and consuming that it threatened to drown out everything else, including the love she'd always felt for her sister.
"Ooh," Kade murmured, and there was understanding in that single sound, recognition of what she wasn't saying directly. He could tell she didn't actually want to kill Maya, could hear beneath the bitter words the jealousy and pain driving them, could sense the complicated web of emotions that made her both love and resent her sister simultaneously.
"Has she taken your man?" Kade asked, his voice carrying careful neutrality that suggested he was gathering information rather than making judgments. "You said it yourself, death is nothing to you right now, you don't care about consequences. You could kill her if that's what you truly wanted. I could even help you kill her if that's what you're asking for."
The offer hung in the air between them, terrible and tempting and completely genuine based on the calm way he'd spoken the words. He was offering to help her commit murder against her own sister, offering it like he was discussing something as mundane as helping her move furniture or fix a broken appliance.
Dakota stared at him, her mind struggling to process whether he was serious or testing her somehow, whether this was a genuine offer or some kind of trap to see how far gone she really was.
"Hehe... Why should I kill her when it's my fault?" Dakota's laugh was bitter and broken, the sound carrying self-loathing that was almost painful to witness. "Yes, it has been all my fault from the very beginning."
Her voice dropped lower, taking on that hollow quality that suggested she was spiraling somewhere dark and self-destructive. If she hadn't gotten involved with that man in the first place, things couldn't have turned around like this. None of this would have happened, no secret pregnancy, no dead daughter, no abandoned son, no three years of lost memories, no watching her sister plan a future with the man who should have been hers.
She had always been the wild one, the extrovert who pushed boundaries and tested limits. While Maya stayed close to home learning how to be the perfect alpha's daughter, Dakota had been studying at a university far away from Silver Ridge territory, spending most of her time either holed up in her apartment working on her studies or traveling to places their father would have disapproved of if he'd known the full extent of her wandering.
Fewer people in their pack actually knew her compared to Maya. Her sister was always at home, always visible, always handling family responsibilities and the pack's social obligations with the grace and dedication their father expected.