Alpha Damon and his brother, Malric, in all their arrogance, didn’t give up easily. Not after watching the photographs, the memories, and the false promises go up in smoke right before their eyes. They returned like wounded dogs who still believed they owned the leash wrapped around my neck—two broken boys clinging to the illusion of a future they’d already set on fire.
“Come on, Lyra,” Damon murmured, his voice rough with unspoken guilt as he rubbed the back of his neck, like a child caught after a cruel prank. “Let’s go out to dinner. Our treat.”
Malric, for once, didn’t have his usual bite. He nodded, his voice gentler than I had ever heard it, trying to sound like he still had a place in my world. “Yeah. Our favorite restaurant. Let us make it right. Just one dinner. Please.”
I didn’t speak. I didn’t forgive. But I nodded anyway—because I already knew the truth. This wouldn’t be a reunion. This wouldn’t be an apology. This was the last supper, and they were too blind to realize they were already seated at their own funeral feast.
We rode in Alpha Damon’s sleek black car, that predator of a machine that used to feel like power at my fingertips. But tonight, it felt like a hearse. The silence inside the vehicle was thick and unnatural, like the moment before a storm or a shift, like the breath the forest takes before the wolves begin to howl.
Malric’s phone buzzed. I watched him glance down at the glowing screen and saw his face change.
“It’s Nina,” he said, and I could already hear it—the panic in his breath, the leash tightening around his throat.
He answered quickly, his voice a tangled whisper. “Nina? What’s wrong?”
Her shrill voice cracked through the car’s quiet like a whip. “The power’s out! Someone broke into the house. I’m alone, I think it’s a thief—I’m scared. Please! Come quick!”
As expected, Alpha Damon’s jaw quickly tightened like stone, his eyes darting to me and then to his brother, his voice clipped and cold. “Lyra, get out.”
I blinked, stunned. “What?”
“We have to check on her,” he snapped. “You can’t come.”
Before I could demand an explanation, before I could shift and bare my teeth, the passenger door swung open, and they pushed me out into the night without ceremony or care. Rain crashed down in icy sheets, drenching my hair and clothes in seconds, my mascara running in thin black trails down my cheeks like ink bleeding from old wounds.
They didn’t wait. Didn’t look back. The car peeled off into the storm, red taillights smearing across the darkness like blood from a fresh kill.
I stood there on the slick pavement, trembling with cold, but not from the rain. I stood soaked to the soul, mascara bleeding like betrayal, lips curled in something that almost resembled a smile.
A funeral smile.
Because now I understood—this wasn’t reconciliation. This wasn’t forgiveness. This was the end, and they had just buried themselves in the grave they had dug for me.
I kicked off my satin heels three blocks in. They were too slippery, too delicate, not made for rain or rage. I walked barefoot, each step leaving behind a wet imprint on the pavement like a ghost was moving through the storm. My dress clung to my body like a second skin—one I was ready to shed.
No cabs stopped. Not one.
Drivers slowed. Their headlights illuminated the drenched, limping girl with blood-red eyes and tangled hair, and then they sped away, like I was some spirit of vengeance clawing her way out of the underworld.
I didn’t cry. Not yet.
I turned into an alleyway that I thought might lead to the main road—a shortcut I used to take in daylight, before I knew what shadows were really made of. But that shortcut had teeth.
He stepped out from behind a dumpster, face hidden beneath the dripping hood of a soaked sweatshirt, eyes dark, breath sharp with hunger. I saw the glint of metal too late.
A knife.
His words were garbled—something about a wallet, my bag, my phone—but I didn’t care. I fought. I fought like a wolf who hadn’t yet earned her fangs.
I punched. I clawed. I screamed until my throat felt like it was tearing itself apart. But I was still human, still weak, still slow. The blade sank into me with terrifying precision—once, then again, and a third time when I tried to crawl.
The pain was blinding. Then numbing. Then nothing at all.
I fell, my cheek pressing into the cold pavement like a final kiss goodbye. The sky spun above me, blurry with rain and streetlight. And just as the darkness began to pull me under, I saw it—
Headlights.
A car door slammed. Someone shouted my name.
Arms lifted me from the ground—strong, warm, impossible.
I tried to speak. Tried to say I was sorry, tried to say I couldn’t bring the cookies after all. But my lips wouldn’t obey.
And then I saw him.
Him.
The stranger from the sea. The one who had pulled me from the ocean when Damon tried to drown me beneath the moonlight. The one I thought I had imagined—woven from seafoam and delirium.
But he was real.
He was soaked through, rain sliding down his jaw, blood staining his white shirt. His arms cradled me like I was something precious. Like, I was still alive.
“Stay with me, Lyra,” he said, his voice low, rich, and filled with command. “You’re not dying tonight. Not like this.”
I think I whispered, “Who… are you?”
He gave me the ghost of a smile, more wolf than man.
“Ronan.”
And then he vanished again—not in smoke or light, but in the way creatures like him always do. When the nurse called his name, he slipped from the hospital without looking back. No thanks. No trace. Just silence.
**
I stayed there for a week. Tubes in my veins. Stitches in my stomach. Silence in my soul. I told the nurses not to inform my family, not to call my mother. There was no point. I wasn’t ready to face the world above when I still hadn’t emerged from the one beneath.
I needed to lie there and feel it.
The death of the girl they tried to destroy.
And then, on the day of my discharge, when my wounds were closed but not healed, when my name had faded from memory… they arrived.
Nina Frost was wheeled in on a stretcher, wrists wrapped in gauze, blood seeping through white bandages like flowers blooming in the wrong season. Her makeup was smeared, her face contorted into a perfect scream.
Alpha Damon held her hand, whispering sweet, pathetic nothings.
Malric followed like a guard dog, carrying her designer bag like she was royalty.
They passed me in the corridor.
And they froze.
Alpha Damon stared like he’d seen a ghost. Malric’s jaw dropped, his breath catching.
“Lyra?” Damon croaked.
I looked at him. Then at Malric. Then down at the hospital, the bracelet was still tight around my wrist.
“You were here?” Malric asked, hollow.
“You were in the hospital?” Alpha Damon stepped forward, a hand half-raised, but I stepped back.
I laughed. Soft. Shattered. “I was here for a week,” I said, my voice flat, dead. “Bleeding. Stitched. Alone. And none of you even noticed I was gone.”
Their mouths moved, lips parting as if to form apologies or explanations or maybe just hollow echoes of disbelief—but no sound emerged, no syllables were brave enough to fill the widening silence that stretched between us like a chasm carved by every betrayal they had ever handed me.
And then—behind them—she screamed again.
Nina’s voice sliced through the sterile white corridor like a siren meant to summon all attention, all sympathy, all power back to her bleeding wrists and mascara-streaked lies. The sound rose to a pitch so shrill, so practiced, that even the walls seemed to tremble, as though the building itself recognized her manipulation and still cowered before it.
And of course… of course, they turned.
Like they always did.
Drawn to her pain—manufactured or not—like moths to a flame, like hounds to the call of a false Alpha. They turned without hesitation, without a second glance in my direction, as if I were nothing more than a phantom lingering in their peripheral vision, a shadow they had long since chosen to forget.
And once again, I walked away.
But this time, my steps were slower, heavier, not with sorrow, but with resolve, my bare feet padding softly against the cold tiled floor like the quiet approach of something wild—something no longer willing to beg for scraps of love at a table where loyalty had never been served.
This time, there were no tears trailing down my cheeks, only the burn of salt from wounds that had begun to seal themselves shut with something stronger than stitches—vengeance, perhaps, or the first stirrings of the beast I had kept chained too long inside me.
This time, though I bled on the inside, it wasn’t the kind of bleeding that begged for help—it was the kind that promised war.
This time, I wasn’t just walking away.
This time, I was reclaiming everything they tried to strip from me.
And I was doing it barefoot.
This time bleeding inside. This time, free.
