The Alpha Regrets: She's Now the Lycan Queen

Chapter 4: Running Away

The forest at three in the morning was a different animal.

Sera had lived at the edge of Silver Moon territory her whole life. She'd seen the tree line from her window—well, from her vent—every day for twelve years. But she'd never actually been in the forest at night, because Omegas didn't patrol, Omegas didn't hunt, and Omegas sure as hell didn't leave Pack grounds without permission.

She was doing all three now. Sort of.

The trees closed in fast once she cleared the Pack house grounds. Old growth—massive pines and oaks that had been here before the Pack, before any Pack, probably before whoever first decided that wolves should organize themselves into little militaries with rank structures and designated punching bags. The canopy swallowed the moonlight, and Sera was moving mostly by feel, one arm out in front of her to catch branches before they caught her face.

The potato sack bag bounced against her hip with each step. Her mother's photograph, her three books, the hairbrush with missing teeth. Her whole life, measured by the weight of a burlap sack.

The pendant sat warm against her collarbone. She'd tucked it deep under her shirt, but she could feel it, a small point of heat against her skin. It hadn't cooled since she'd put it on. She didn't know why, and she'd decided not to think about it until she was far enough away that thinking was safe.

Far enough. She didn't know what that meant, either. She'd never been outside Pack territory. She had no money, no ID—Omegas weren't issued Pack identification cards—no phone, and no wolf. She was a nineteen-year-old girl with no supernatural abilities walking through wolf-controlled wilderness in the dark, and her entire plan was "go that way until you can't smell them anymore."

It wasn't a good plan. She knew that. But she'd spent three days in an infirmary being told she was broken, one afternoon being told she was nothing, and nineteen years being told she was less. At a certain point, a bad plan and a pair of legs beat a safe bed and no future.

She walked for two hours.

The forest thinned and thickened and thinned again. Twice she crossed streams—narrow enough to step over, cold enough to make her gasp. The night air was sharp with pine and frost; early spring in the mountains meant the cold hadn't fully let go. Her gray-black dress was useless against it. By the second hour, her fingers were numb and her teeth were chattering so hard she could hear them in her own skull.

But the Pack scent was fading. That thick, collective musk—smoke and sweat and territorial pheromones—that had saturated everything inside the Pack house, that had been the background smell of her entire life, was going thin. Dissolving. Replaced by something cleaner. Just earth and trees and the mineral tang of rock.

She was close to the border. She could feel it—not with any wolf sense, because she didn't have one anymore, but with the simple awareness of a body accustomed to boundaries. The air changed at borders. Got lighter. Got stranger.

She kept walking.

Then the howl went up behind her.

Not a hunting howl. Worse. A tracking howl—that three-note signal the patrol wolves used when they'd picked up a scent. One voice, then two, then a third joining in, the sound bouncing off the mountains and folding back on itself until the whole valley was ringing with it.

They were coming.

Sera ran.

She didn't think about it. Her body made the decision before her brain caught up—legs moving, arms pumping, the burlap sack slamming against her thigh hard enough to bruise. Branches whipped her face and arms, leaving thin lines of fire across her skin. She couldn't see where she was going. She was running blind, guided by nothing but gravity—downhill meant away, and away was the only direction that mattered.

Behind her, the howls sharpened. Closer. They were faster than her, of course they were. They had wolves. They could cover in seconds what took her minutes. Patrol Betas in shifted form could run forty miles an hour through dense forest. She was an injured, wolfless girl in a secondhand dress. The math was brutal.

She ran anyway.

Her lungs burned. Her legs burned. The pendant bounced against her chest with each stride, the metal chain biting into the back of her neck. The trees blurred past, dark shapes in her peripheral vision, root systems erupting from the ground like trip wires. She caught one with her foot and stumbled, caught herself on a tree trunk, kept going. Caught another and went down hard on one knee. Got up. Kept going.

The howls were close now. Not behind her—around her. They'd split up, flanking, coming at her from two sides. Standard pursuit formation. She'd heard the patrol wolves drilling it in the yard behind the Pack house, back when she used to scrub the training facility floors. Three wolves in a triangle, collapsing inward. The prey goes to ground in the center. Every time.

Sera burst through a line of trees and the forest ended.

She skidded to a stop. Dirt and loose rock sprayed from her feet and vanished into blackness.

A cliff.

Not a gentle slope, not a rocky ledge with a manageable drop. A cliff—sheer, clean, the edge crumbling under her shoes, dropping straight down into a gorge so deep the moonlight couldn't reach the bottom. The river down there was invisible; she could only hear it, the low roar of fast water echoing off the rock walls.

Sera stood at the edge and looked down into nothing.

Behind her, the trees crackled. Rustling, low growls, the heavy pad of paws on earth. Three shapes materialized from the darkness—wolves, big ones, their eyes catching the moonlight in flat yellow discs. They spread out in a half-circle, cutting off the tree line. No way back.

The largest one shifted. Bones cracked and reshaped, fur receding, until a man stood where the wolf had been. Garrett. One of Caleb's patrol leaders. Built like a refrigerator, shaved head, the kind of face that had never held a complicated thought.

"The hell do you think you're going, Omega?" He was breathing hard. Not from exertion—from excitement. The hunt was the fun part. "No one authorized you to leave."

Sera didn't turn around. She was looking at the gorge. At the dark.

"Alpha Thorne wants all wolves accounted for," Garrett continued, stepping closer. His bare feet crunched on gravel. "Come back quiet and maybe nobody adds this to your record."

Her record. Like she was a car with too many miles on it.

"I'm not a wolf," Sera said. Her voice was steady. She was surprised by that. "Dr. Harmon confirmed it. No wolf signature. I'm nothing."

"You're Pack property until the Alpha says otherwise."

Pack property. She turned the words over. Found nothing in them that surprised her. Found nothing in them she could argue with, either, because it was true—under Pack law, an Omega without a wolf was classified as a dependent, which was a polite word for possession. She could be reassigned. Relocated. Given to another Pack as a gesture of goodwill. Bred, if someone wanted her for that, though she doubted anyone would.

Garrett took another step. The two wolves behind him followed, the half-circle tightening. Sera could feel the heat of them, smell the wet-dog musk of recently shifted wolves, hear the rumble in the closest one's chest—not a growl, exactly. More like a purr. The sound a predator makes when it knows the chase is over.

Sera looked over her shoulder at them. Three wolves and a cliff. She'd heard this one before—it was a joke the Gammas liked to tell. An Omega walks into a bar and says, "I'm stuck between a wolf and a hard place." The bartender says, "Sounds like you're in the right spot."

She never laughed at that joke. She wasn't laughing now.

She looked back at the gorge. The dark was absolute down there. The river was loud.

"Come on." Garrett's voice had shifted from authoritative to annoyed. He was cold and naked and this was taking too long. "Don't do anything stupid."

Sera thought about the infirmary. The boot-shaped water stain. Dr. Harmon's careful, bloodless words. Victoria's lilies in the trash can. The closet-room with walls she could touch while standing in the center. Damon's back, turning away.

She thought about the pendant, warm against her skin. Keep this. Stay hidden. Words from a dead woman to a daughter she'd never know.

She thought about nothing at all for one long, empty second.

Then she stepped off the edge.

The fall was faster than she expected and slower than she wanted. The cliff face rushed past her in a blur of dark rock and scraped lichen, wind tearing at her hair and dress, the potato sack bag ripping from her shoulder and vanishing into the dark above or below her—she couldn't tell. Gravity had her. The river roar was getting louder. The air was getting colder. She closed her eyes because there was nothing left to see.

Inside her—in the place that had been empty for three days, the hollow room, the stripped-out socket where a wolf used to live—

Something detonated.

Not woke. Not stirred. Detonated, like a charge that had been buried for nineteen years and finally found its fuse. The explosion started in her chest and ripped outward through every nerve, every muscle, every bone in her body. Sera's eyes flew open and the world went silver.

Not white. Silver.

SERA.

Nyx's voice, but not the rusty, faint thing she'd been before. This voice was a thunderclap. An earthquake. A sound so big it filled Sera's skull and spilled out through her teeth and eyes and the pores of her skin.

I'M HERE. I'M HERE. I HAVE ALWAYS BEEN HERE.

Sera's body broke.

Not broke—transformed. But it felt like breaking. Every bone in her body shattered and reformed in the space of a heartbeat, the pain so absolute it went past pain into something she had no word for. Her spine lengthened. Her jaw cracked and extended. Her fingers fused, shortened, tipped with claws that punched through the remnants of her shoes. Her skin split and fur erupted—silver-white fur, bright as moonlight on snow, catching the ambient glow from above and throwing it back in all directions.

She was shifting. For the first time in her life. Midair. Falling.

Nyx surged forward and took control. Sera felt herself pulled backward, consciousness retreating into a passenger seat she didn't know existed, and then Nyx was driving—turning the massive silver body, twisting midair with a grace that shouldn't have been possible for something this big, orienting toward the cliff face, claws out.

They hit the rock wall forty feet above the river. Nyx's claws sank into stone like it was wet clay. The impact jarred through Sera's new body—her body? Nyx's body? Theirs—and they slid, carving four deep furrows in the cliff face, slowing, slowing, until they stopped.

Silence. Just the river below and the wind above and the sound of their own breathing, massive lungs expanding and contracting in a ribcage the size of a barrel.

Sera. Nyx's voice was softer now. Close. Like someone speaking directly into her ear. Look at us.

Sera looked down—or rather, she looked through Nyx's eyes, and she saw paws. Silver-white paws, enormous, each one the size of a dinner plate, tipped with claws that were buried two inches deep in solid granite. The fur on the legs was thick and luminous, catching light that wasn't there—generating its own glow, faint and cold, like foxfire.

We are not an Omega, Nyx said. We were never an Omega.

Above them, at the cliff's edge, she heard Garrett's voice:

"What the fu—"

And then silence. Because a wolfless Omega didn't turn into a wolf the size of a horse midway through a suicide jump. Because wolves didn't have silver fur. Because silver fur meant one thing, and it was a thing that patrol Betas told their children about the way humans told their children about dragons—something old, something royal, something that belonged to a bloodline most wolves believed was extinct.

Nyx pulled their claws from the stone and leaped. Not down—up. A single, impossible bound that carried them from the cliff face to the top of the gorge, over Garrett's head, over the two frozen patrol wolves, and into the forest beyond. They landed on all fours and the earth shook.

Then they ran.

Not the desperate, stumbling sprint of a girl in a secondhand dress. This was something else. The trees blurred. The ground disappeared beneath paws that barely touched it. The wind parted around them like water around a ship's bow. Nyx ran the way lightning travels—straight, fast, and indifferent to whatever was in the way.

Sera, tucked somewhere inside this enormous, luminous animal, felt something she hadn't felt in years. Maybe ever.

Not happiness. Not safety. Something rougher and more honest than either of those.

Freedom, Nyx said, answering the thought she hadn't spoken. That's what it feels like.

Behind them, the howls had stopped. The patrol wolves weren't following.

Nothing in Silver Moon Pack was fast enough to follow them.

They ran north. The trees thinned and the mountains rose and the moon hung overhead like a searchlight, and the silver wolf ran through all of it without slowing down, without looking back, without once considering that the territory ahead was unknown and the territory behind was the only world she'd ever known.

The pendant—somehow still around Nyx's neck, somehow having survived the shift—burned warm against silver fur.

Ahead, in the distance, something was waiting.

Sera didn't know what. Neither did Nyx.

They ran toward it anyway.