Mia POV
I was no longer tethered to the floor, but hung in the upper gloom of the room like a forgotten wisp of smoke.
Down below, the girl who had been me lay with her face turned to the side, the dark wound on her neck a stark, lipless mouth. The silver had left a blackened, cauterized rim around the gash, a final brand of her killer's contempt.
I was a shade, my soul snagged on the splintered frame of my own life.
*Death had not brought me peace, but it had brought me clarity. I could see the living world still, but more than that—I could sense the stains on their souls, the guilt they carried like tumors. The Rogue's was a blazing red inferno of grief and madness. And somewhere in the distance, Silas's was a cold, quiet knot—buried so deep he did not yet know it was there. *
There was no more pain. The searing kiss of the silver was a memory, as was the suffocating dampness of the Omega dorm.
But an ache persisted, a hollow echo in the place where my heart had been. It was the resonance of the sundered mate bond.
Why had he despised me so?
The answer was a simple, brutal thing. It was my mother.
I closed my spectral eyes, and the whispers of the old Omegas became a living history.
My mother had not merely been a witch; she had been an Elder of formidable power. Decades ago, when the Blood Moon Pack stood on the precipice of annihilation, its warriors decimated by rival clans, she had summoned her family's mercantile fortune and mercenary allegiances, single-handedly bankrolling the war that saved our lands.
But her aid came with a price.
The surviving Elders, desperate and cornered, leveraged her monumental contribution to force Silas's hand. They bound him with a magical mating contract, compelling him to accept my mother as his Luna.
The Luna was the heart of the pack, destined to rule beside the Alpha.
But Silas's heart was already given to another—a high-ranking Beta named Selene.
The contract forced him to banish Selene, an act that carved a canyon of resentment through his soul.
My mother tried to bridge that chasm. She prepared his meals. She submitted to his cold authority. She sought to awaken the wolf within him, to make him see her not as a jailer, but a mate.
But Silas felt only the weight of the chains, the suffocation of magic and duty. His heart did not simply grow cold; it calcified, turning to stone.
Then, she became pregnant with me—though the child was not his. My mother had been carrying me before the contract ever bound her to Silas, a secret she took to her grave. Some whispered my true father was a witch from her clan, killed in the war that she had helped win. I never knew his name.
During my birth, a hemorrhage stole her life before she could hold me, her final breath a whisper in a room that held no love for her.
*My mother's family—the great witch clan that had saved this pack—had been driven out within a year of her death. Silas had branded them traitors and banished them to the northern wastes. There was no one left to claim me. No one left to care. *
I remember the old Omega, Nana, recounting that day.
"I was polishing the wainscoting outside the Alpha's study," Nana had murmured to me years ago, her voice thin as cobwebs. "When the physician entered and announced that his Luna was gone."
I had looked up at Nana, my child's eyes wide. "Did he weep?"
Nana had averted her gaze, her own eyes clouded with a pity that stung more than any blow. "No, child. He drew a long, slow breath. He looked like a man newly unshackled from a great and terrible weight."
Silas did not mourn.
The very next day, he recalled Selene to the pack. He gave her the keys to the main house. He installed her as its mistress.
And me?
I was a newborn infant, wailing in the nursery, my blood carrying the taint of the witch who had ruined his life.
Silas entered the nursery but once.
He stood over my small crib, pinching the bridge of his nose as if I exuded some foul miasma.
He summoned Nana to the room.
"Take this creature to the Omega dorms," Silas commanded, his Alpha voice a physical force that made Nana's knees buckle. "I will grant you ten times your salary to ensure it remains from my sight. It is an ill omen."
He discarded me as one would discard refuse.
I opened my spectral eyes and looked down upon my blood-soaked body.
I was the product of a forced pact, lived as a walking error, and had now died as a bitter punchline.
The hours crept by, each one a slow, silent turn of a screw. The blood on the floor began to congeal, its edges darkening to the color of rust. The television eventually dissolved into static, its flickering life replaced by a dull, humming grey screen. The silence in the room was a heavy blanket, disturbed only by the rhythmic drip-drip-drip of my own blood from the warped edge of the bedframe.
Suddenly, the very air in the room seemed to thin and stretch.
The phantom mate bond in my chest gave a sharp, violent tug, a strange, invisible reeling-in.
I turned my head toward the wooden door.
It had been hours since my last breath, hours spent watching my own flesh grow cold. But now, I could feel him. He was finally back on pack lands.
Someone was approaching down the hallway. The footfalls were heavy, measured, and charged with irritation.
I knew that sound.
Silas was coming.
*The mate bond pulled taut, thrumming with his nearness. He was only a few steps away from the truth now. Would he smell the blood? Or would he walk past, as he always had, refusing to see what was right in front of him? *
