Serena POV:
I woke in an immense bed, the morning sun pouring through the vast, uncurtained windows of my new penthouse, a sanctuary in the neutral zone, far from the suffocating hierarchies of any pack.
There was no Alpha to give me orders.
There was no pack hierarchy to crush my spirit.
I stretched my arms and smiled.
It was the soundest sleep I had experienced in three years.
I walked to the kitchen and poured myself a glass of cold water.
Looking at my reflection in the glass, the memories of my past washed over me like a cold tide.
In the werewolf world, every child goes through the Shift at eighteen years of age.
It is a painful process where your bones break and reform into a wolf.
When I turned eighteen, my bones burned, but I did not change.
I failed my Shift.
But that night, something else stirred in my blood—a faint, dormant warmth, like a coal buried deep in ash. It was not a wolf. It was something older. The White Wolf bloodline, the legends said, did not always manifest as a beast. Sometimes it woke first as a healing gift, a quiet pulse of ancient power waiting for the right moment to fully emerge.
My Beta parents were the leaders of a small sub-pack under the Bloodmoon territory.
They had found me in a human orphanage and brought me back just to use me for political marriage.
When I failed to shift, they re-christened me with a new name: Omega. The lowest of the low, a thing to be used and discarded.
My parents threw me into a dusty attic and stopped talking to me.
They gave all their love and resources to Selena, the Beta girl who occupied my closets and aped my mother's way of holding a teacup.
Then, the great Alpha Hunter had his accident.
He was ambushed by Rogues, the violent, packless wolves who wander the forests.
They used weapons coated in silver.
The silver poison sank deep into Hunter's legs.
His Inner Wolf went into a deep coma, and he became paralyzed from the waist down.
Selena was supposed to marry him.
But she refused to be shackled to the man who now required an attendant to help him into his own chair.
She stole a black credit card from the pack's vault and ran away to the Rogue territories across the ocean.
To save their business, my Beta parents dragged me out of the attic.
They forced me to drop out of university.
They told me I had to take Selena's place and marry the paralyzed Alpha.
The Bloodmoon Elder Council was threatening to strip our sub-pack of its lands, and my parents held the only supply of Moon-leaf extract—the rare herb keeping the silver poison from reaching Hunter's heart. They bartered me—my future, my body—for the continued prosperity of their lands.
I actually agreed without fighting them.
Not because I was weak, but because I knew who Hunter was.
During my first year of university, I had read his famous academic paper on ancient wolf runes.
I admired his brilliant mind.
I thought we could find peace together.
I was so foolish.
I remember our first meeting in his dark bedroom.
Hunter was furious about the mate swap.
He sat in his wheelchair, a dark, brooding figure of untamed rage. His hands gripped the leather arms of the chair so tightly his knuckles shone like bone, the nails digging into the hide. A terrible, guttural sound rose in his throat, but he swallowed it back down, his jaw clenched against the roar.
"Get out!" he finally snarled, his voice shaking the walls.
My Beta mother stood behind me and pushed me forward.
"You owe this to the pack, Serena," she whispered in my ear, her grip bruising my arm. "If we lose his protection, the Rogues will slaughter us. Don't be a selfish brat."
The mating ceremony was a nightmare.
Hunter sat in his chair, radiating a freezing Alpha aura that made my knees shake.
When I walked down the aisle, I tripped on my heavy dress.
The high-ranking wolves in the audience pointed at me and laughed loudly.
Hunter did not help me. He just looked away in disgust.
Then came our wedding night.
Hunter was in terrible pain from his legs.
He was already abed, propped against a bulwark of pillows, his frustration a palpable heat in the room. His grip on my arm was rough, careless, pulling me down beside him not with desire, but with a desperate, unfocused anger.
I cried out in fear, feeling completely helpless.
But then, something deep inside my blood woke up.
It was the White Wolf.
The White Wolf is a legend, a rare bloodline blessed by the Moon Goddess herself.
We possess the ultimate power of a Healer.
My hidden gift—the dormant warmth I had felt on my eighteenth birthday—surged to life in that moment. It was not a wolf form, not yet, but it was real. A pulse of ancient energy that flowed from my core into my fingertips.
A strange warmth, soft as new-fallen snow, began to emanate from my palms.
The air around me thickened with the scent of snowmelt and night-blooming flowers.
I pushed Hunter onto his back.
He gasped as my calming aura washed over him, taking away his pain.
We tangled in the dark sheets, driven by instinct.
We completed the mating process, but he never bit my neck.
He never gave me the Mark to claim me as his true mate.
I saved his life that night, but he never knew it.
I set down my water glass in the quiet penthouse.
That chapter of my life was over now.
But the next one would teach me that love could make you blind — and that betrayal often wears a pretty face.
