Chapter 3
1479 Words
Her name was Sable.
She talked fast, like I asked. Omega rank. Three years in the packhouse — same as me. She had been standing at the back of the crowd during the ceremony and had followed me into the forest when the others turned away.
"Why?" I asked.
"Because no one else did," she said simply.
I did not have an answer for that. So I lowered the pipe the rest of the way.
She had a place — an old maintenance tunnel beneath the east packhouse wall. Dry. Hidden. Stocked with supplies she had been building for months.
"You built this for someone," I said when I saw it.
"I built it for a reason to leave." She unwrapped my shoulder binding without asking. "You are the reason."
Something about that hit me somewhere I was not prepared for. I had spent three years being no one's reason for anything.
I did not say that out loud. I just let her work.
While she dressed the wound properly, I told her about the System. All of it. The thirty-day countdown. The progression path. The first quest I had already completed.
She listened without interrupting. When I finished, she was quiet for a moment.
"How do the abilities work?" she asked.
"I do not know yet. The first one unlocks at dawn."
She tied off the bandage. "Then we wait for dawn."
We. Not you. I noticed that.
---
Dawn came grey and cold through the tunnel entrance.
The System flared the moment the first light hit.
[FIRST FANG ABILITY — UNLOCKING NOW]
[COMBAT PROFILE REVIEWED: 1 ROGUE KILL — EVASIVE STYLE]
[ABILITY ASSIGNED: SHADOW STEP — RANK: OMEGA]
[BLINK UP TO 3 METRES IN ANY DIRECTION. COST: 20 STAMINA.]
[SCENT SUPPRESSED WHILE ACTIVE.]
I focused on the ability the way it wanted — not with words, but with intent. I picked a point three metres to Sable's left and thought: there.
I vanished.
Reappeared.
Sable spun, hands up, eyes wide. She swept the space where I had been and found nothing. Then found me, three metres away, and went very still.
"What," she said. Not a question. Just the word.
"Shadow Step," I said. I checked the stamina readout. Eighty of a hundred. The cost was real. "The System assigned it based on how I fight."
She stared at me for a long moment. Something shifted in her expression — not fear. Something closer to resolve.
"All right," she said. "Show me the plan."
---
The plan was the vault.
The System had flagged a quest the moment the ability unlocked — infiltrate the Shadowfang eastern vault, retrieve harvest documentation. It had named my mother specifically.
Elena Venn.
Sable knew the packhouse better than anyone. She drew the patrol routes from memory — guard rotations, blind spots, a twelve-minute window between the first and second patrols on the east corridor.
I went in alone at midday. Sable's idea. Two sets of footsteps double the risk.
I did not argue.
Shadow Step past the guard station. Through the archivist's doorway. Down to the vault.
The combination lock was changed three months ago. I pressed my palm to the dial and felt the residual heat of the last hand that had turned it. The hybrid pulse — the thing I had spent my whole life dismissing as anxiety — read the contact pattern like a fingerprint.
Two minutes. I had it open.
The restricted drawer at the back was labeled: HARVEST FILES — ALPHA BLOODLINE ONLY.
I opened it.
My mother's file was second from the front.
I read it standing. I did not let myself sit down.
She had not been banished. She had not run. She had come here voluntarily — as a delegate, under a peace treaty, believing the pack wanted to negotiate. They had put her on the altar within forty-eight hours. Had drained her four times over ten years. Had let her die on the fourth.
And at the bottom of the file, a physician's note about her offspring.
About me.
Keep as low-rank labour. May be useful when bloodline activates.
I had not been kept out of pity. I had been kept as a backup supply.
I replaced the file exactly as I had found it, relocked the vault, and walked out.
---
I told Sable everything when I returned.
She listened. Did not perform shock. Just absorbed it with the particular stillness of someone taking something seriously.
"There is a name," I said. "Harlow Voss. She countersigned the harvest order."
Sable went very still. "Harlow Voss is Rina Voss's mother."
"Who is Rina Voss?"
"The current female Beta. She was passed over for Lucas's heir position last month." Sable paused. "She is not someone you want as an enemy."
"Good," I said. "Because I am not planning to make her one."
The System pulsed with new intelligence before I could say anything else.
[NEW INTEL: LUCAS STORM — BLOODLINE CURSE — ACTIVE]
[DETERIORATION RATE: ACCELERATING — ESTIMATED 7.5 MONTHS REMAINING]
[SUPPRESSION REQUIRES: HYBRID ESSENCE — PERIODICALLY ADMINISTERED]
[TRANSLATION: HE NEEDS YOU ALIVE. YOU WERE NEVER MEANT TO RUN.]
I read that last line twice.
Lucas had beaten me at the ceremony not out of contempt. Out of calculation. I was not someone he had rejected.
I was something he intended to collect.
The anger that had been building since the alley compressed into something colder and more permanent.
He was going to find out what it cost to treat a person like a resource.
He just did not know it yet.
- Writer
