Betrayal Under The Blood Moon

Chapter Four

SADIE

Fire.

Not the clean burn of fever but something alive, cognizant, eating me from marrow out. I exist in fragments—throat torn open, blood pooling, friends screaming. Then darkness. Then this.

"Drink."

A voice like smoke and centuries. Something presses against my lips, copper-hot and wrong. I try to turn away but hands hold me steady, tilting liquid fire down my throat. It tastes like lightning strikes and deep forest, like predator musk and rain on stone.

"All of it, child. Your wolf is starving."

Wolf. The word means nothing. Means everything. I swallow because the alternative is drowning, and the fire spreads from throat to chest to extremities. Not healing. Changing.

My eyes snap open to a ceiling of herbs and shadows. Everything smells too much—sage and blood and something wild underneath that makes my hindbrain scream warnings. Or promises. Hard to tell the difference when your skin is trying to crawl off your bones.

"There she is." The old woman leans into view, and I understand blind before I process the rest. Milk-white eyes that see everything, face carved by decades into something between crone and oracle. "Welcome back to the living, white wolf."

"I'm not—"

The words die as memory crashes back. Rogues. Claws. My throat opening like a second mouth. I should be dead. My hand flies to my neck, finding smooth skin where gore should be.

"He gave you his blood." She turns away, moving through her cottage with eerie precision. "Alpha blood, old and strong. Enough to pull you back from the Mother's embrace. Though she wasn't ready to take you yet."

"Who—"

But I smell him before she answers. Pine and storm clouds and alpha musk so thick it makes my thighs clench. He's everywhere in this space, in my lungs, under my skin. When I turn my head, he's there. Watching from the shadows like something out of my most private dreams.

Dante Byrne. Alpha of the Portland Pack.

I've watched him destroy senators with words for three years. Memorized the way he moves through space like he owns it, how his voice drops to whispers that carry more weight than shouts. Julie calls it my "problematic crush on the enemy." Except he's never been the enemy. Just untouchable. A face on C-SPAN who quotes poetry while discussing fishing rights.

Now he's here, shirtless and blood-covered—my blood—watching me like I might bolt. Or attack. Both feel equally possible as something writhes under my skin, testing boundaries that have held for twenty-six years.

"You saved me."

"You were dying in my territory." His voice hits different in person. Deeper. Rougher. "Couldn't have that."

"Territorial dispute. How romantic."

He almost smiles. "You should be dead. That much blood loss, that many suppressants in your system. But you're not just any wolf."

"I'm not a wolf at all. I'm—" What am I? Korean-American Senate staffer with a mysterious illness. Adopted daughter who never quite fit. Randall's fiancée who can't stand his touch. "I don't know what I am."

"You're white wolf." The old woman—Morgana, my brain supplies from nowhere—sets something on the table. "Rarest of our kind. The blessed ones who channel moon and healing. And someone's been poisoning you since infancy."

"My medication—"

"Suppressants. Specifically designed to cage your wolf." She lists compounds I don't recognize, chemicals that sound like warfare. "Whoever did this knew exactly what you were. What they were hiding."

The fire under my skin spikes, and I curl forward, clutching my stomach. Not pain exactly. Need. Want so pure it whites out thought. My thighs are slick with it, body preparing for something my mind can't process.

"First heat." Morgana sounds almost sympathetic. "Twenty-six years delayed. It'll be... intense."

Intense. Like calling a hurricane "breezy." Every nerve ending screams for contact, for pressure, for the alpha whose scent makes my mouth water. I've never wanted s*x. Thought maybe I was broken that way, forcing enthusiasm with Randall that never reached below skin.

This isn't want. This is compulsion. Biological imperative wrapped in fever dreams.

"Make it stop."

"Can't stop nature, child. Can only ride it out." She pauses at her herb wall. "Though first, you need to meet yourself properly."

"I don't understand."

"Your wolf. She's been caged so long she's forgotten how to be. The blood woke her, but she needs to stretch." Those blind eyes turn unerringly to Dante. "Outside. The first time shouldn't be witnessed by walls."

He moves toward me and my body responds like a tuning fork struck. Everything clenches, reaches, needs. When he offers his hand, I take it without thinking. His skin burns hotter than mine, calluses rough against my palm.

The cottage door opens onto night forest. How long was I unconscious? The moon hangs fat and silver between branches, almost full. The light hits my skin like physical weight, like hands pressing down, like coming home to a place I've never been.

"Let her out." His voice carries command that makes me want to bare my throat. Or bite his. "Don't think. Just feel."

"I don't know how—"

The first bone breaks mid-sentence.

Not breaks. Reshapes. My spine bows backward, vertebrae popping like firecrackers. I try to scream but my jaw is wrong, elongating, teeth erupting where human molars sat. The suppressants held this back for decades. Now it comes all at once, twenty-six years of transformation compressed into minutes.

I drop to hands that aren't hands anymore. Fingers shortening, nails becoming claws, digging furrows in earth. My skin splits along my spine and I feel fur pushing through, white as moonlight, white as the static between channels. Every muscle tears and rebuilds. Every organ shifts. My human body becomes a chrysalis, dissolving to birth something else.

The pain is exquisite. Pure. Cleaner than any medication, any carefully managed injection. This is what they stole from me. This moment of becoming, of meeting the other half of my soul.

When it ends—seconds, hours, I can't tell—I stand on four legs that know how to hold me. The world explodes into scent and sound. Mice heartbeats under leaves. Owl wings cutting air. The stream I couldn't see from the cottage, running silver-sweet a hundred yards east.

And him.

He's shifted too, black wolf to my white, circling careful. He's huge, built for war where I'm built for—what? I don't know my own shape yet. But when I catch my reflection in his eyes, I see myself impossible. White fur that glows faint silver, like moonlight made flesh. Blue eyes that burn with inner light.

Beautiful. Terrible. Mine.

Can you hear me?

His voice in my head, wolf-speech that bypasses ears. I startle, jumping sideways, still clumsy on new legs.

I hear you.

Good. Pack bonds carry thought. He moves closer, and size difference becomes apparent. He could swallow me whole. Instead, he drops to his belly, showing submission no Alpha gives lightly. Run with me.

I don't know how.

Your wolf knows. Trust her.

Her. The other half. The caged thing that beat against pharmaceutical bars for decades. I feel her now, distinct from human-me but inseparable. She wants to run. Wants to hunt. Wants to roll in his scent until we smell like pack, like home, like his.

I run.

Clumsy at first, legs tangling, but wolf-brain takes over. This body knows what human-me forgot. How to flow between trees like water. How to leap streams without thought. How to read wind for information—prey here, predator there, pack everywhere.

He runs beside me, black shadow to my white. When I stumble, he steadies. When I flag, he nudges. When the human screams this is insane, impossible, the wolf sings freedom.

We run until my new muscles burn, until the heat under my skin focuses to specific points. The cottage appears between trees and I shift without thinking, fur to flesh in a cascade of sensation. I hit the ground hard, naked and steaming in night air.

"Fuck."

"Eloquent." Dante shifts beside me, all that muscle wrapped in moon-touched skin. "How do you feel?"

Like I'm dying. Like I'm being born. Like everything I knew was a lie and this truth might kill me. "Hungry."

Not for food. For him. The heat spikes, worse after running, and I press my thighs together against the ache. But also actually starving, like I haven't eaten in years.

"Inside." He helps me stand, and I hate how my body curves toward his. "Morgana will have food."

The cottage smells different now. Layer after layer of scent—generations of wolves seeking healing, herbs picked under specific moons, blood and birth and death soaked into the walls. Morgana waits at the table, a platter steaming despite the lack of visible cooking.

Meat. Raw. Still bloody.

My human brain recoils. My wolf lunges.

I'm on it before shame can stop me, tearing with teeth too sharp for the face I wear. The taste explodes—iron and life and satisfaction deeper than any meal I've choked down at political dinners. I eat like the animal I am, blood running down my chin, growls bubbling up when Dante moves too close to my food.

"Twenty-six years of starvation." Morgana's voice carries sorrow. "Your wolf is making up for lost time."

I finish the platter—two pounds? Three?—before human thought resurfaces. Then horror. I just ate raw meat like a beast. In front of the man I've fantasized about. While naked.

"I need clothes."

"You need answers." Dante pulls a blanket from somewhere, wraps it around me. "But clothes first."

His scent wraps around me with the fabric. I pull it tighter, trying not to inhale like a addict. "What am I?"

"Otherkind. Wolf shifter. White wolf, specifically." He sits across from me while Morgana busies herself at the stove. "Someone hid that from you. Fed you poison to keep your wolf caged."

"My parents—" The word sticks. "The Westbrooks. They said I was sick."

"They lied."

Simple. Devastating. Twenty-six years of injections, specialists, careful management of a condition that never existed. Or existed only because they created it.

"Why?"

"White wolves are valuable." Morgana sets tea in front of me, the scent making my wolf whine. Sedative properties. "Hunted for our blood, our power, our potential. Someone wanted to own you without dealing with what you are."

"Senator Westbrook found you somehow." Dante's voice goes thoughtful. "Adopted a Korean infant who happened to be the rarest type of shifter. That's not coincidence."

"I was stolen." The certainty hits like a physical blow. "Wasn't I? From my real parents."

Neither answers, but their silence confirms. Stolen. Raised by the people who took me. Fed poison while they smiled and called it love. The fury that rises burns hotter than heat, and the cottage windows rattle.

"Control." Morgana's voice cracks like a whip. "Power without focus brings nothing but ash."

"You'd know."

The words slip out before I can stop them. She goes still, and I smell old grief, old choices. Dante tenses, but she waves him down.

"I would know." Agreement, nothing more. "Save your rage for those who earned it."

"Everyone earned it." The blanket tears under my claws—when did those come back? "Every doctor who never questioned. Every specialist who signed off. My parents who—" A sob catches me sideways. "They tucked me in. Read bedtime stories. Held my hair when the injections made me sick. How do you reconcile that with—"

"You don't." Dante's hand covers mine. "You survive it. You get stronger. You make them pay."

"Is that what you'd do?"

"If someone stole twenty-six years of my life? I'd paint the walls with them."

The violence in his tone makes heat pool low. This is wrong. Everything is wrong. I should be planning my wedding, managing Senator Patterson's schedule, taking my weekly injection like a good girl.

Instead I'm naked in a witch's cottage, covered in my own blood and someone else's, trying not to climb into the lap of a man I've never actually met.

"I can't go back."

"No."

"My job, my apartment, Randall—"

"Are human concerns." His thumb traces my knuckles. "You're not human."

"I was yesterday."

"No. You were caged yesterday. Difference."

The heat spikes again, worse this time. I clench around nothing, body demanding what it's never wanted before. The smell of my arousal floods the cottage, making Dante's eyes flash gold.

"We should get you to the compound." His voice comes out strangled. "You'll be safe there while—"

"While I'm in heat." The words taste strange. Wrong. Real. "While my body tries to tear itself apart wanting something I don't understand."

"Three days. Maybe four. Then your mind clears and you can decide—"

"Decide what? Whether to press charges for kidnapping and attempted murder? Whether to go back to a life built on lies? Whether to marry a man who'd vomit if he knew what I was?"

"Decide if you want to stay."

The offer hangs between us. Stay. With the pack. With him.

I think of twenty-six years of being almost-right. Never quite fitting with the Westbrooks' blonde perfection. Never quite Korean enough for the heritage I was stolen from. Never quite sick enough for a real diagnosis, never quite well enough to stop treatment.

"I've never belonged anywhere."

"You belong here." Certainty in his tone. "Your wolf knows it. Your blood knows it. You just need to decide if your mind agrees."

"And if it doesn't?"

"Then I keep you safe until your heat passes and you leave." Pain in the words, quickly hidden. "Your choice. Always your choice."

Choice. What a concept. Twenty-six years of being managed, medicated, molded into the perfect political daughter. Now I have claws and fangs and a body that screams for a man who should be a stranger but feels like home.

"The heat—how bad will it get?"

Morgana and Dante exchange looks.

"Bad." She admits. "Without a mate to ease it, without understanding your own body... it'll be the hardest thing you've endure."

"Harder than finding out my entire life is a lie?"

"Different. The heat is physical. What you're processing..." She touches her blind eyes, brief gesture. "That pain lives in deeper places."

I stand, blanket clutched tight. "Then I guess we should go. Before I—"

Before I do something stupid. Like beg. Like crawl. Like offer myself to an Alpha I've watched through screens but never touched.

"Sadie." My name on his tongue makes everything clench. "Whatever you need. Whatever helps. The pack will provide."

"And if what I need is you?"

The words hang crystalline in herb-scented air. His control visibly frays, hands clenching to fists.

"Then we'll address that when you can consent without biology driving."

Noble. Honorable. Everything Randall pretends to be but isn't. Which makes me want him more, makes the heat burn hotter, makes my wolf howl for what we can't have.

"I should thank you." I move toward the door, needing space between us. "For saving me."

"Thank me by surviving." He follows, always close but never touching. "Thank me by becoming what you were meant to be."

"A white wolf."

"Free."

The word breaks something in me. Twenty-six years of cages, chemical and social and emotional. Now I'm free, and I have no idea what that means. Only that it starts here, in Oregon forest that smells like home. With a man who gave me his blood. With a wolf who waited decades to run.

With a choice that's finally, truly mine.