Chapter 1
I didn’t stop running until my lungs burned.
The pack house lights were already gone behind the trees. My boots hit the forest floor hard, roots and uneven ground threatening every step, but I didn’t slow down. The strap of my bag cut into my shoulder. My breath came short and sharp, visible in the cold night air. Each inhale scraped my throat. Each exhale left me emptier. My legs burned. My heart hammered against my ribs hard enough that I could feel it in my teeth. I could still feel the bond pulling under my ribs, a second heartbeat that refused to match mine, and every time it tugged I pushed harder, as if distance alone could make it quiet.
It didn’t.
My chest ached. Not just from the running. From the weeks of waiting. From the way Kael had looked at me across rooms without really seeing me. From Lila’s hand on his arm last week, the way he didn’t move away, the way he only glanced past her, found me watching, and looked away again like the sight of me was something he needed to protect her from. I had stood there with a polite smile fixed on my face while something inside me folded in on itself. I had gone back to my room. I had sat on the edge of the bed and stared at the wall until the hollow place under my sternum felt wide enough to fall into.
So I packed. Two changes of clothes folded small enough to fit in the bag without bulging. The little knife my father gave me years ago and never asked about again. A thin roll of money. Nothing that belonged to the life I was leaving. I didn’t write a note. I didn’t look at the photographs on the wall or the spare boots under the bed. I just walked out while the pack house still glowed with yellow light and the smell of woodsmoke drifted through the open kitchen window, carrying with it the faint trace of Kael’s soap that settled in my throat like something I was no longer allowed to keep.
Now the forest closed around me, cool and damp, thick with the scent of crushed pine needles and wet earth. My legs were starting to shake. My throat was dry. Sweat cooled on the back of my neck. I forced myself to slow to a walk, one hand pressed hard against my sternum as if I could hold the bond in place by force. It still pulled. Steady. Persistent. I hated how much of me still wanted to turn around.
I used to know the sound of his laugh when it was only for me. I used to know the way his shoulders loosened when we were alone in the dark, the way he would press his mouth to the side of my throat and say my name like it was the only word that still mattered. I used to fall asleep with his arm thrown across my waist, heavy and warm and certain. Somewhere between then and now the space between us had grown teeth. He still answered when I spoke. He still looked at me. But the warmth was gone. He looked at me the way a man looks at a door he used to walk through without thinking and now has to remember how to open.
I kept walking. The path narrowed. The trees grew closer together. Moonlight filtered down in broken pieces, turning the undergrowth into a shifting map of silver and shadow. I watched the ground the way Kael had taught me years ago, scanning for roots and uneven ground, but my mind kept drifting back to the pack house, to the quiet expectation that I would simply keep existing in the spaces other people left open for me. I had spent too many nights lying still in the dark, trying to name what was missing. It never had a name. It only had a shape: wide and cold and patient.
Leaving felt like the only way left to find out what it wanted. Or maybe it was just the only way left to stop waiting for someone who had already decided not to choose me.
My breathing had almost evened out when the root caught my boot.
The ground came up hard and fast. My temple struck something solid — rock or root, I never knew — and white pain exploded behind my eyes. For a second that was all there was. Then something else rose with it. Not the pain. Not the mate bond. Something vast and cold and silver, like the moon itself had cracked open and poured straight into my veins. It roared through me without sound, filling every hollow place I had ever carried. My bones felt too narrow for what was moving inside them. My skin felt too thin. For one endless second I was both the girl on the forest floor and something older that had been waiting in the dark for years, patient and furious and awake.
The trees leaned closer. The moonlight turned liquid and bright. I tried to breathe and found only pressure, only light, only the terrible sense that something locked deep inside me had finally begun to turn. I reached for the bond the way a drowning person reaches for the surface. It was still there. But it felt very far away.
Then everything went black.
