Alanna Crosby POV:
I hovered under the cold, sterile lights of the emergency room, my entire existence focused on the small speaker of the nurse's phone.
"What? Alanna?" My mother's voice crackled through the line, sharp and annoyed over the background noise of clinking glasses and loud music. "What trouble has she gotten into now?"
A phantom pain, sharper than any claw, pierced my soul. No worry. No fear. Just the immediate assumption that I was a problem. The desperate plea that had risen to my throat died there, unspoken. What was the point? No one would hear it anyway.
The nurse kept her voice steady and professional. "Ms. Salinas, your daughter Alanna Crosby has been in a serious attack. She's at Central Hospital, and her condition is critical. We need you to come down—"
"What?" Frida cut her off, her voice rising to a screech. "You want me to come there? Do you have any idea how much a cab costs from here? Who's paying for it? Did she leave any money?"
The nurse was speechless. She glanced at my blood-soaked, inexpensive clothes, then back at the phone. "We didn't find any cash on her person, ma'am."
A cold, ugly laugh echoed from the speaker. "I knew it! That good-for-nothing! Nothing but trouble since the day she was born. Now I have to pay to bury her?"
Good-for-nothing. The words made my spirit tremble. This was my mother. My own mother.
I hovered there, feeling the last thread connecting me to the world snap. Caden rejected me. My mother cursed me.
My parents divorced when I was five. My father remarried quickly—a new wife with a daughter my age, a girl named Bonita. My mother didn't fight for me. She didn't even try. She drowned herself in bottles and casino floors instead. I remember sitting alone in her kitchen, watching her count crumpled bills, muttering about what I cost her. She called me a burden. A drain. She remarried later—a gambler she met at the tables. I became a ghost in my own mother's life, an extra piece. She only called when she needed money. And I always gave it, because I was still stupid enough to hope. Stupid enough to believe that if I paid enough, she might finally forgive me. Accept me. Love me.
I truly was alone.
The nurse's face was a mask of disbelief. "Ma'am, this is a necessary procedure for next of kin—"
"Procedure? I'll give you a procedure!" Frida's voice was pure venom now. "I don't have a daughter! It's better if she's dead, saves her the trouble of dragging me down any further! Throw her out, burn her, I don't care what you do. Just stop bothering me!"
The young nurse was stunned into silence, her mouth slightly open.
Frida wasn't finished. "She's a curse! She killed her father, and now she's trying to ruin me from the grave! I disowned her years ago!"
The line went dead with a sharp click, more final, more hateful than Caden's disconnection.
A heavy silence fell over our corner of the ER. The nurse held the phone, her hand trembling slightly. Her eyes, when they flickered toward the white sheet covering me, were filled with a pity that burned.
The doctor walked over, his expression tired. He saw the look on the nurse's face and asked softly, "What is it?"
She shook her head, her voice a low whisper. "Her family... they both refused to claim her."
He let out a long, weary sigh and glanced at the flat line on the heart monitor. "Record the time of death. Notify Social Services. We'll have to process her as an unclaimed body."
Unclaimed body.
The words branded themselves into my soul. I had a mate. I had a mother. And I was still an unclaimed body.
I watched as they covered my face completely with the white sheet. Then, they pushed the gurney toward a cold, steel door with a sign that read "Morgue."
I didn't follow. I could guess what came next—cremation or burial, whichever they decided for a body no one wanted.
Nowhere in this world was I meant to rest. My soul had no home.
A tearing sensation ripped through my spirit. A violent, agonizing pull. The mate-bond. It was being severed. The pain was excruciating, a spiritual agony that dwarfed the physical pain of my death.
I pushed that pain outward, through the fraying tether that still connected me to him. Up the thread, tracing it back to its source. To Caden. I don't know if it reached him. I don't know if he felt a single echo of what I was suffering. The bond was already too weak. The silence on the other end told me everything I needed to know: my pain had no witness. Not his. Not anyone's. It was mine alone.
Fated mates. What a joke. Caden was the strongest Alpha in the Pack. Any wolf would be drawn to that kind of power—and I was nothing but a lowly, worthless dormant wolf, wired by instinct to be pulled toward a protector. That was instinct. But I had mistaken it for love.
After the wave of pain passed, my spirit felt lighter. Colder.
A powerful, instinctual pull tugged at me, coming from the direction of the Fowler Pack. My home. The place I grew up. The place where Caden was.
Even after everything, my soul was drawn to him. Perhaps it was Lyra, my wolf spirit, demanding an answer.
I could still feel. I could still hear. My wolf spirit and my soul had fused into one—a tether that death itself could not sever. I knew what I was now. A ghost. A remnant. A thing that should not exist. And yet, I burned with something that refused to fade.
Caden didn't love me. Maybe he never had. But that wasn't the question that burned in my chest. The question was why. Why did the Moon Goddess bind us together—only for him to despise me? Why did he believe I killed his mother? Who told him that lie? And why did he swallow it so easily?
I could have drifted away. I could have let the wind scatter me like ash. But I couldn't leave without knowing. I couldn't let myself be erased by a story that wasn't even true.
So I ran. I rushed toward the familiar stone facade of the Alpha's mansion. Not for love. Not for mercy. For answers. For the truth I had never been given the chance to speak.
