Chapter 3: The Tax
1553 Words
The next morning arrived like a slap of ice, matching the cold numbness spreading through Sera’s chest. She forced herself to walk across the pack grounds, chin held high, pretending she had somewhere to be.
The alternative was suffocating in her empty bedroom while the walls closed in.
But the pack grounds felt like a minefield today. The air was suffocatingly tense. As she neared the south hall, conversations abruptly died. Omegas practically scrambled in the opposite direction to avoid her gaze. Two younger warriors from Alpha Caius’s elite guard stared at her pass, their eyes filled with raw pity and thinly veiled disgust. One whispered a vicious word to the other. Sera swallowed the lump in her throat and kept her eyes locked ahead, filing their faces away.
Then came Pell Unger.
He was a pathetic, mid-ranking Beta who survived supply rotation by kissing the boots of whoever held power. Yesterday, when Sera was the future potential Luna, Pell wouldn't have dared look her in the eye. Today, knowing she had been brutally rejected, he stood by the eastern path with his cronies, a cruel, mocking smirk plastered across his face.
"Morning, Sera," Pell called out, his voice dripping with malice. “Oh, wait! Is it still morning? It's so hard to keep track of time when you've been stripped of your rank and aren't really pack anymore."
His friends snickered loudly on cue.
Sera stopped dead in her tracks. The humiliation burned like acid in her veins, but she refused to let them see her flinch. She turned her gaze to Pell, staring at him with a cold, piercing intensity that made his smile falter. She noted the torn pocket of his brown jacket that had been sewn badly, the cowardly twitch in his jaw. He wanted a scene. He wanted her to beg, to sob, to break down over the rejection so he could run back and report it to the high council.
"Pell," Sera said, her voice dropping to a dangerous, icy whisper.
He blinked, visibly flinching under her glare. "What?"
"Nothing," she said smoothly.
She didn't wait for a reply. She turned on her heel and walked away. The silence stretching out behind her was thick and uncomfortable. She hadn't given him the satisfaction of seeing her break.
*****
Twenty minutes later, Mira found her at the far edge of the grounds, hidden behind the old wooden equipment shed where no one came unless they had to.
Mira was breathing hard, her hands gripping her own forearms to keep from spiralling. Her expression said everything before she even opened her mouth.
"They moved the date," Mira gasped out, her voice trembling.
Sera kept her voice dead level. "How far?”
"Seventy-two hours." Mira's jaw was tight with fury. "Not the end of the week. Three days, Sera. I saw the revised order in the courier routing tray this morning like it was a piece of trash. The banishment paperwork is already being routed to Thornfield."
Seventy-two hours.
Sera calculated the numbers without moving a single muscle in her face. Three days to pack her two bags of carefully curated nothing and walk out of the only home she’d ever known. The initial timeline had been a death sentence. Now, it was a rapid countdown to execution.
"Who pushed it through?” Sera asked.
"Alpha Caius's mother, Luna Isadora," Mira whispered, looking around to ensure they weren't overheard. "And your father co-signed it without hesitation. They are terrified of you staying here, Sera. Someone wants you gone fast. Not just exiled, but erased before anyone can ask questions."
"I know," Sera said quietly.
Mira stared at her, deeply unsettled. "You're too calm. It’s frightening."
"I know that too," Sera replied, her hand subtly drifting to her chest. Deep within her soul, the ancient silver spark thrummed, a steady, dangerous heartbeat. She wasn't panicked because she knew she wasn't helpless anymore.
*****
On her way towards the eastern gate at midday, she heard Caius before she saw him. It was the only reason she allowed herself to register his presence at all, because she wasn't ready to look into the eyes of the man who had shattered her fated bond.
His voice thundered from the corridor outside the grand council hall, raised in a way she had never heard before. It wasn’t his usual commanding, aristocratic tone. It was jagged, unhinged, like his legendary composure was violently slipping.
“ — a massive discrepancy in the border patrols! You're telling me no one caught this? Not a single one of you?!" Caius roared.
She couldn't hear the council's terrified response.
Two senior Betas suddenly rushed past her on the path, fleeing the direction of the hall. One glanced over his shoulder at Sera, while the other wore an expression of pure panic.
Their flawless Alpha was unravelling. The rejection was already clawing at his sanity. Sera filed the information away. She had seventy-two hours left in this pack; she could afford to let his slow descent into madness unfold without her intervention. For now.
*****
A sudden roar of powerful engines broke the tension. A heavily armoured convoy of three black SUVs thundered through the eastern gate. Each vehicle bore a terrifying, ancient sigil etched into the metal: a savage wolf's head.
The Ironveil Pack.
Sera stood by the tree line, watching. She knew the name Dante Ashford by reputation alone. He was the young, ruthless Alpha of Ironveil, famous for dominating territorial negotiations and crushing alpha bloodlines that crossed him. He was here for high-level pack politics. Not for an Omega outcast like her.
But as the second vehicle in the convoy passed the eastern path, it abruptly slammed on its brakes.
The door flew open.
A man stepped out, and the air instantly grew heavy with a suffocating, dark dominance that rivalled Caius's aura. He was toweringly tall, with midnight-black hair and sharp, piercing eyes that seemed to cut right through the grey morning fog. He wore a tactical leather jacket that looked like it had seen real warfare.
His eyes scanned the grounds and locked onto Sera. Directly. Without the half-second scan-and-dismiss look she was used to.
Dante Ashford didn't look away. Instead, he walked towards her with an unhurried, predatory grace.
"You look like you're mapping exit routes," Dante said, his deep baritone voice sending a strange, electric jolt straight to her silver spark.
Sera blinked, momentarily caught off guard by a foreign Alpha speaking to her. "I'm just familiar with the grounds."
"That's not what I asked." Dante stopped a few feet away. His eyes were incredibly sharp, but they weren't calculating. They held an intense, burning curiosity. He tilted his head, his gaze dropping to her throat, where the faint, phantom scar of her broken bond still pulsed. "Are you alright, little wolf?"
Nobody had asked her that. Not a single person in the Ashborne pack had looked at her like a human being today. Dante was a lethal stranger, yet his question landed somewhere inconveniencing soft against her armour.
"I'm fine," she said, lifting her chin defiantly.
Dante stared at her for a long moment, a ghost of a smirk playing on his lips, as if he could see right through her walls but respected the fight in her.
"Dante Ashford," he murmured. "Ironveil."
"I know who you are, Alpha."
"And who are you?"
Sera met his piercing gaze dead-on. "Nobody, apparently."
Something powerful shifted in Dante’s expression. It wasn't pity: Sera would have ripped his throat out if it were, or so she imagined. It was a dark, dangerous flash of recognition. Like he knew the exact weight of her pain, and he found it fascinating.
"Alright," Dante said softly. He gave her a single, respectful nod, turned on his heel, and walked back to his vehicle.
Sera watched the convoy drive away, her heart racing for an entirely new reason.
Stop it, she scolded herself. You have seventy-two hours, a survival list, and not a single second to waste on a rival Alpha.
*****
Mira rushed up the south hall steps a few minutes later, her face flushed with panic.
“Sera, I just heard from the residential staff," Mira whispered breathlessly. "Luna Isadora handled the housing arrangements for the Ironveil visit personally. She bypassed the hospitality council."
Sera froze. "What did she do?"
"She put Alpha Dante Ashford in the executive residential wing," Mira said, her eyes wide with dread. "In the exact same private corridor as Caius."
Sera went completely still. An icy chill settled into her bones.
Isadora — the woman who had engineered her public humiliation and signed her exile papers — had just moved a dangerous, volatile rival Alpha into her son's immediate personal space during a high-stakes negotiation. It wasn't hospitality. It was a calculated, deadly chess move.
Seventy-two hours left.
Her father’s betrayal.
The Alpha going mad in the council hall.
And Dante Ashford stopping his convoy just to look at her.
Sera didn't have all the pieces of the puzzle yet, but she realized the game being played around her was much bigger, and much deadlier, than she had ever imagined.
She turned to Mira, her silver eyes flashing in the shadows.
"Don't go anywhere tonight," Sera commanded. "The storm is already here."
- Writer
