Her expression remained cold and imperious, but the voice inside her mind was howling:
Beg me!
All you have to do is kneel. Crawl to me and press your throat to the ground!
Admit in front of the whole pack that you can't survive without me, and I'll let you go!
Do it now! Stop being so stubborn!
If that Moonblood Spine is truly gone, you'll be nothing but a broken wolf. And then the only place you'll have left is by my side!
She had already woven her net, every thread accounted for.
She believed that as long as I drew breath, I would forever be a thing she held in the palm of her hand.
Too bad.
She miscalculated one thing.
I didn't intend to live.
I straightened slowly, shrugging free of the pack enforcers pinning me down.
I didn't look at the Supreme Alpha on her throne.
Instead, I let my gaze sweep across the place I had called home for twenty years.
Every stone path, every ancient tree. I had bled to protect all of it.
Now, looking again.
Filthy.
"You won't need to do it yourselves."
My voice was quiet, but the wind carried it to every wolf in the square.
The next second.
I raised my right hand.
Two fingers pressed together like a blade, the last flicker of lunar essence I'd burned my life force to gather condensing at their tips.
Squelch.
The wet sound of a blade entering flesh.
My hand drove backward, plunging into my own spine.
Blood erupted in a torrent.
It soaked through the white prisoner's pelts, pooled across the pale stone beneath my feet.
"You've lost your mind!"
Seraphina shot to her feet, every shred of composure ripped from her face in an instant.
Under the stupefied, horror-stricken stares of every soul present, I clenched my teeth and hooked my fingers around the vertebrae.
And wrenched.
"Ngh!"
The pain tore through me like my soul was being split in two, and a strangled groan escaped my throat.
But I didn't stop.
Inch by inch, I dragged the Moonblood Spine out of my own body, crystalline and gleaming with cold light. The marrow pulsed once, twice, a pale luminescence that made every wolf in the square flinch as if the Moon Goddess herself had opened an eye.
Flesh came with it. Sinew snapped and trailed behind.
The wet, grinding sound of tearing tissue turned the entire square deathly silent. Not a single wolf breathed. Somewhere in the crowd, someone's inner wolf began to keen, and the sound spread like a contagion, a low collective whine that no one could stop.
I stood drenched in my own blood, the still-dripping Moonblood Spine clutched in my fist.
My body swayed, barely upright. Deep inside me, my wolf, silent for years, stirred for the first and last time. Not a howl. Not a whimper. Just a slow exhale, like an animal finally allowed to close its eyes.
"The Moonblood Spine you wanted."
I looked at Seraphina. Looked at her face, white as a corpse.
Her inner voice was nothing but shrieking panic now: No! Stop! Stop it! I won't go through with it! I don't want it anymore!
I smiled.
Smiled until tears ran down my face.
"Alpha, this bloodline power, this bone and blood. Today I return every last bit of it to you."
My fingers closed like a vice.
Crack.
The Moonblood Spine shattered in my bare hand, reduced to a cloud of glittering dust.
Crystalline powder mingled with a mist of blood, drifting down over the entire pack territory like a rain of crimson snow. Where the dust touched the ground, the earth hissed faintly, as though the land itself recoiled from the waste.
I owe you nothing.
"I wish you both a lifetime of happiness. In life or death... may we never meet again."
The Severance Countdown hit zero.
[Host extraction successful.]
My body grew weightless.
In the suffocating silence, my flesh began to break apart.
Like the last embers of a dying fire, I dissolved into motes of light.
Seraphina let out a scream so raw it cracked her voice:
"NO!!"
She lunged from the dais like a woman possessed, her Alpha aura erupting outward in a shockwave that buckled the knees of every wolf within fifty paces, but her hands closed on nothing but drifting sparks.
I scattered on the wind.
Not a wisp of my soul remained.
