Soren’s burner phone buzzed on the dashboard just before dawn. It was a single text from my father.
Jace had driven three hours through the dark, hunting me down like an escaped prisoner. He had pounded on my father’s front door, desperate and hollow-eyed.
My father didn’t bother with words. The moment the door opened, he drove a heavy fist straight into Jace’s jaw. He beat him across the porch with his bare hands, splitting skin and cracking bone. And Jace just took it. He didn't raise his hands. He didn't use his Alpha strength. He took every savage blow because some twisted part of him believed that bleeding for me would wipe his slate clean.
When my father finally stopped, his knuckles bloody, he looked down at Jace and gave him one sentence.
"She is gone, and her scent is burned from the earth."
Then my father slammed the door and locked it.
Jace stayed on the porch steps, blood dripping onto his boots, reaching frantically into his chest for his inner wolf. But the mind-link was empty. His wolf didn't answer. It was stone dead in its sleep. He sat on that cold wood until the sun came up, and no one ever opened the door for him again.
Soren tossed the burner phone into a rocky ravine, and we drove on.
By the second night, Soren had to turn back before the Silverveil border patrols caught the Ironclad truck plates. He left me at the edge of the unclaimed ridge with my canvas bag and a canteen of fresh water.
"Three miles east," Soren told me, his voice rough. "Keep moving toward the summit gate. Don't stop for anything."
I nodded, gripping the canvas strap, and stepped into the pitch-black woods.
The cold air stung my cracked ribs, but after an hour, the pain turned into something worse. A sudden, violent heat flared deep in my gut. The wolfsbane residue trapped in my veins began to burn like boiling oil. The memory of the warehouse, the cold chains, the phantom heartbeat of my dead pup—it all converged into a single, agonizing pressure inside my chest.
I stumbled into a small clearing and collapsed to my knees on the frozen moss.
My breath tore from my throat in ragged sobs. I pressed my hands hard against my sternum, trying to keep myself together, but the fabric of my body was already coming undone. Twenty-four years of playing the small, silent Omega. Twenty-four years of burying my own soul so an Alpha could shine.
*Crack.*
The sound echoed through the clearing. It came from my own spine.
I arched backward, choking on a scream. This wasn't the smooth, painless shift of a trained warrior. It was a violent eruption. My ribs tore outward. My shoulder blades cracked and realigned with brutal force. My fingers lengthened, skin tearing as thick, razor-sharp claws burst through the nail beds.
The ground beneath my paws splintered. The dirt cracked open in wide fractures. The pine trees surrounding the clearing shuddered, shedding needles in a sudden, invisible blast of pure kinetic pressure.
A suffocating aura exploded from my body, rolling outward across the mountains like a sonic boom.
And then, right in the center of the blinding agony, a presence rose up from the dark marrow of my soul. Massive. Ancient. Luminous.
*'Hello, Everlee,'* a voice purred in my mind.
It was a voice of pure thunder and starlight. She hadn't been missing. She had been waiting for the cage to break.
I opened my eyes. My vision had sharpened into crystalline silver.
I looked down at my massive forelegs. Pure, snow-white fur gleamed under the moonlight, shimmering with threads of molten silver. I was larger than any warrior wolf I had ever seen in the Ironclad pack. Larger than Jace.
My wolf threw her head back toward the full moon and let out a deafening roar.
It wasn't an Omega's whine. It was the command of a predator that bowed to no one.
Three miles to the east, the blast of my aura hit the Silverveil border outpost like an earthquake.
I pushed forward on four legs, moving through the deep snow with effortless, blinding speed. The wind tore through my fur. The wolfsbane burns still flared in my blood, but my wolf’s raw power burned through the poison, keeping my legs churning over the rocky terrain.
The trees thinned. The iron barricades of the Silverveil eastern gate loomed ahead in the mist.
Floodlights snapped on, blinding and harsh.
Four heavily armored Lycan sentries rushed the perimeter, their rifles raised and their guard wolves snarling at the treeline.
I burst through the pine boughs into the bright clearing.
The moment the light hit my silver-white coat, the sentries froze.
The sheer weight of my aura hit them first. The air in the clearing turned thick and suffocating, vibrating at a frequency so ancient that every wolf in the patrol gasped for breath.
The lead guard dropped his rifle. It clattered against the frozen gravel.
Before he could give an order, his legs gave out beneath him. His body buckled, not by choice, but driven down by the primal biological law hardwired into his wolf's soul.
One by one, the four massive Lycan warriors dropped heavily to their knees in the snow, baring their throats to the dirt.
I took one more step forward. But the wolfsbane was too deep, the physical toll of the awakening too immense. My back legs buckled.
My massive, glowing white wolf crashed onto the icy ground right at the gate's threshold.
The lead sentry, trembling on both knees, raised a shaking hand to the radio pinned to his combat vest. He pressed the emergency relay button, his voice cracking with terror and disbelief into the speaker.
"Eastern gate! Code Crimson! Unknown she-wolf on the line. Alpha bloodline—no, Goddess help us, it's royal Lycan blood!"
