The outpost cabin sat where I remembered it — half-swallowed by pines, tin roof rusted at the corners, one shutter hanging loose the way it had for years because Nadia had never seen the point of fixing something she could still see through.
I parked my truck at the tree line and walked the rest of the way. My boots crunched on pine needles. I wanted her to hear me coming. I didn't want to spook a woman who slept with knives.
The door was open a crack. Through it, I saw her.
She sat on a wooden stool by the cold hearth, one of her silver daggers across her knee, a whetstone in her hand. The slow scrape of stone on metal was the only sound. Her grey-streaked hair was pulled back tight. There were new scars on her forearms since the last time I'd let myself look at her properly. Old ones, too. The kind you get when nobody has your back.
She looked up before I knocked.
The whetstone froze mid-stroke. Her whole body went still — that dangerous kind of still a warrior gets when they're deciding whether to run or bite.
"Anastasia." Her voice was flat. Careful. "You shouldn't be here."
"I know." I stepped inside. "I'm here anyway."
She stood up slow. The dagger stayed in her hand, not raised, not lowered. Her eyes went to my throat — to the smooth, unmarked skin where Collin's bite used to sit — and I watched something crack open in her face.
"You did it," she whispered.
"I did it."
"When."
"An hour ago."
She set the dagger down on the mantel with a hand that wasn't quite steady. She kept her back to me for a long second. When she turned around, her eyes were wet, and she looked furious about it.
"You should've done it years ago," she said.
"You told me to. You told me to over and over, and I called you cruel for it, and you walked away because you couldn't stand to watch him kill me by inches." I took a breath. "You were right. About all of it. I'm sorry, Nadia. I'm so damn sorry I made you carry that alone."
Her jaw worked. "I left you."
"You saved yourself. I don't blame you for that. I never should have."
"I should've dragged you out."
"I wouldn't have gone." I took another step toward her. "I know that now. You knew it then. That's why you left. Because you loved me too much to watch what was coming."
She closed the distance in two strides and grabbed me — hard, both arms, the way she used to when we were fifteen and stupid and covered in mud from the training pit. She smelled like gun oil and pine sap and home.
"You came back," she said into my shoulder. "You actually came back."
"I'm building a pack," I said quietly. "Silvercrest. On the land I took from him. I don't want to do it without you."
She pulled back. Wiped her face with the back of one wrist, unembarrassed now.
"What are you offering me?"
"Beta."
Her eyes flashed. "Say it properly."
I almost laughed. "Nadia Green. Take the Beta oath with me. Be my second. Help me build something that doesn't rot from the inside."
She gripped my forearm — thumb pressed hard against the pulse, four fingers locked around the bone. The old warrior's grip. I closed mine around hers the same way.
"My fangs are yours," she said.
"And mine are yours."
She didn't let go for a long moment. When she did, she picked her dagger back up, sheathed it at her hip, and grabbed her jacket off the chair like she'd been waiting six years for me to walk through that door.
"Where are we going?" she asked.
"To make it official. Tonight. Under the moon."
---
By nightfall, forty-three warriors stood in the clearing with us. Some I'd known my whole life. Some had come the second the mind-link severance rippled through the region and word got out that a rejected Luna had taken half of Ironveil and needed hands. Nadia had vouched for every face.
The moon was full and low, sitting fat and white above the treeline. I stepped into the center of the ring.
"I am Anastasia Morgan," I said, and my voice carried further than I expected. "On this land, under this moon, I found the Silvercrest Pack. I claim it as sovereign. I claim it as mine."
I tilted my head back and howled.
I don't know how to describe what happened next. Something inside my chest — something I hadn't felt in six years, something I'd been told was small and quiet and better left buried — cracked wide open. Heat poured out of it. Not fire. Something older. Something that had been waiting.
My bones rearranged before I'd finished the thought to shift. My clothes tore. I hit the ground on four paws and kept rising.
And rising.
I was bigger than I had ever been. Bigger than Collin, I realized, with a clarity that stopped my breath. My fur came in white — not pale grey, not silver — pure moonlit white, thick and long, catching the light like snowfall. I looked down and my paws were the size of dinner plates.
Something burned behind my eyes. I could feel it. Gold, my wolf whispered — her voice, finally, after years of silence. *Amber and gold. Alpha blood. Ours. Always ours.*
The aura that rolled off me was not something I chose to release. It just came. Like weather.
Every wolf in the clearing dropped.
Nadia went down on one knee, head bowed, a fierce grin splitting her face. The warriors followed, forty-three throats bared, forty-three sets of eyes on the dirt. Somewhere in the trees, an owl went silent. A deer bolted. Even the wind seemed to hold its breath.
I stood over my pack, white fur blazing, and I understood, finally, what he had made me hide.
By morning, the story would be moving through every pack in the region. *A white Alpha. Golden eyes. Bigger than any wolf they'd seen.*
By nightfall the next day, it would reach Collin.
Good.
