Wolf Blood: Lily — The Firstblood Archan's Captive

October in Europe smelled of wet chestnuts, cold coffee from a paper cup, and the illusion of freedom I had spent the last four months stubbornly clawing away from my own last name. Here, in an old university town with its pointed rooftops and narrow cobblestone streets, no one turned around to look at me with reverent horror. No one whispered in corners, “That’s Volkov’s daughter. The one. Don’t go near her if you value your hide.” Here, I was simply Lily—a second-year applied political science student who was perpetually late for international law lectures, wore rough combat boots under light knit dresses, and honestly believed that the thousands of kilometers between Vladivostok and this stone corner of Europe could somehow drown out the heavy, suffocating tread of my father. God, I had been such a naive i***t. The phone in my jacket pocket started vibrating with such persistence that it felt as if the thing was powered not by a battery, but directly by the fury of whoever was calling. One short word appeared on the screen, stamped into my memory in letters a mile high. Father. I drew a deep breath of sharp autumn air and pinned the phone between my ear and shoulder while I paid for a sandwich with sun-dried tomatoes. “Dad, if you’re about to start lecturing me about my grades again, I’m hanging up,” I said instead of hello as I stepped out of the bakery and onto a square glazed with fine rain. “I passed the colloquium. Top marks. Without your connections, without bribing the dean’s office, and without using the family growl.” “Lily.” His voice came through low and rolling, vibrating with that particular kind of steel that still made half of Moscow’s business world clench its jaw. My father didn’t even try to raise his voice. He never needed to. “You changed apartments yesterday.” I rolled my eyes and turned toward campus. “I moved into a normal student co-living place, Dad! Because living in a penthouse with three layers of armored glass and a private elevator in the middle of a student district is, at the very least, ridiculous. People looked at me like I was a drug lord’s daughter!” “You are an Alpha’s daughter,” he cut in, dry and utterly certain. “And patrol routes in your neighborhood have changed three times in the last week. Do you think I don’t see you weaving through alleys to shake your security?” “That isn’t security. It’s a convoy!” My voice cracked sharply enough to make a pair of freshmen passing by look over. I slowed down and forced myself to even out my breathing. The hot blood I had inherited from him stirred in my chest—the same blood that made Ruslan and me want to overturn furniture every time one of our conversations lasted longer than three minutes. “You put three hulking bodyguards on me! They stand outside my lecture halls. They stare through the library windows. Yesterday Pasha almost broke a law student’s arm just because the guy tried to hand me his notes!” “Pasha was following orders.” Paper rustled on his end. In the background, soft and almost too quiet to hear, came Mom’s voice. Father fell silent for a second, obviously distracted by her, but when he spoke again his tone had gone even harder. “You’re moving back into the secured sector. Today.” “No.” I stopped in the middle of the university courtyard, feeling my nails bite into my palm. “No, Dad. Enough. Mom taught you how to loosen the leash, remember? You swore by the bay that Artyom and I wouldn’t become prisoners of your fears. You promised we would get to choose for ourselves.” “Your choices end where threats to your safety begin, Lily,” Ruslan said, each word clipped cleanly, the metal in his voice almost unbearable now. “Artyom has a beast that warns him about danger before the human part of him can. Your wolf is asleep. You don’t sense a threat until it already has a paw around your throat.” The words punched the air out of me. Painfully. Precisely. Straight into a wound that had never really healed. My wolf truly was asleep. My entire family was a living concentration of primal power. My father was an unquestioned leader. My mother was an exceptionally rare Tuning Fork, able to feel other people’s inner rhythms and calm a beast when ordinary words had already stopped working. My brother was a young Alpha with a wolf every bit as strong as our father’s. And I was some strange, half-finished malfunction. Sometimes, when someone nearby was caught in powerful emotions, I sensed something like an internal dissonance—a vague tension, another person’s rhythm slipping out of step. It always vanished before I could understand exactly what I had felt. And it wasn’t even close to Mom’s Tuning Fork. My father’s blood ran through me, but my she-wolf had never made a single sound in twenty years. Not once. Not even the faintest whisper. I couldn’t shift. I was simply human, with slightly faster reflexes and a completely unmanageable temper. And Ruslan used that every chance he got, justifying the glass dome he kept over my life with my supposed “fragility.” “My wolf is asleep because there’s nothing here to protect me from,” I hissed, feeling hot, angry tears sting my eyes. “Pull your men back, Father. Or I’ll quit school, buy a ticket for the first ferry I see, and go to Africa. I swear, you’ll get tired of searching for me across every desert on the continent.” “Liliana…” I ended the call. My fingers were trembling slightly as I shoved the phone back into my pocket. The air around me suddenly felt icy. Autumn in France had never been famous for Siberian cold, but right then a strange, sharp chill prickled across the back of my neck. It was as if some unseen attention had touched the skin between my shoulder blades—heavy, dense, almost oily. Someone was watching me.