The Mate He Threw Away

Awakening Pain

The nightmare started the way it always did lately, with fire that wasn't there.

I woke gasping, drenched in sweat despite the cold seeping through the cottage walls, certain for one disorienting heartbeat that the room was burning. It wasn't. The hearth was cold and dark, exactly as I'd left it. But the smell of smoke clung to my skin anyway, and when I looked down at my hands, a faint silver light was still fading from my fingertips like the last embers of something I hadn't meant to light.

I'd been having the dream every night since Marcus's visit. Always the same shape, fire spreading from my own hands, faster than I could stop it, while a voice I couldn't place screamed a name that wasn't mine. Solene. Solene. I always woke before I learned whether I burned everything down or somehow held it back.

Tonight felt different. Tonight, the smoke smell hadn't faded with the dream.

I sat up fully and that's when I saw it, a scorch mark, fresh and black, scarring the wooden floor beside my bed in the rough shape of an open palm. My palm. I hadn't moved from the bed in my sleep; the placement made no sense unless somehow, asleep, the power inside me had reached out and touched the world directly.

My heart slammed against my ribs. I pressed both hands flat against my thighs, willing them still, willing whatever lived under my skin to stay quiet.

It didn't listen.

The silver light flared again, brighter this time, racing up my forearms like veins of liquid moonlight. I gasped and scrambled back against the headboard, more frightened of myself at that moment than I'd ever been of anything in the woods at night. The cottage's old wooden walls groaned, and for one terrifying second I swore I felt the entire structure lean toward me, like the wood itself wanted to answer something it heard humming beneath my skin.

"Stop," I whispered, useless and small in the dark room. "Please, just, stop."

It didn't stop. If anything, naming my fear out loud seemed to feed it. The light spread further, climbing past my elbows now, and underneath the fear something else stirred too, something that didn't want to stop, something that had been buried and silent for so long it had forgotten how to be careful.

I thought of the fire dream. I thought of burning the only home I had left on the ground in my sleep, with no memory of doing it, the same way I had no memory of where the scorch mark beside my bed had actually come from.

The thought cracked something loose. The light surged.

I don't remember deciding to run. I remember being outside suddenly, barefoot on frozen grass, my own breath tearing out of me in ragged white clouds, putting as much distance as I could between myself and the cottage before, whatever this was, reached a point I couldn't contain.

The silver light had crawled all the way to my shoulders now, pulsing in time with my racing heart, and somewhere distant and disconnected from my own panic, I understood with absolute clarity that I was no longer fully in control of my own body.

I don't know how long I ran. Long enough that the cottage disappeared behind me, swallowed by trees I didn't recognize in the dark. Long enough that my lungs burned, and my bare feet had gone numb against frost-hardened ground. I only stopped when my knees gave out entirely, and I collapsed into wet leaves and unfamiliar earth, gasping, the light finally, mercifully beginning to fade from my skin like a tide pulling back out to sea.

I lay there a long time before I trusted myself to move. When I finally did, what I found stopped my breath entirely.

I wasn't anywhere near the cottage. I wasn't even certain I was still on pack territory, the trees here grew differently, older and wilder, with a strange quality to the silence that pack land never had. I had no memory of crossing this far, no memory of the hours it must have taken to get here on foot.

And in the soft mud beside where I'd collapsed, pressed deep and unmistakable, were wolf prints. Not mine. Not any registered wolves, if Marcus's earlier report was anything to judge by.

Prints almost too large to belong to any wolf at all.

I crouched beside them, heart hammering, and realized with a slow, creeping horror that they led directly toward me, approaching, not retreating. Something had been here while I lay unconscious. Something had stood over me, watched me, and left.

I had no memory of it. None.

For the first time since the rejection ceremony, fear of my own power gave way to something colder: the understanding that whatever was happening to me wasn't happening in isolation. Someone, something was watching it happen too. And whatever it was, they had gotten close enough to stand over my unconscious body without me ever knowing they were there at all.

I didn't sleep again that night. I sat in the cold mud beside those prints until dawn broke gray and uncertain through the canopy, trying to remember even one second of however many hours I'd lost, and finding nothing there at all, just silence. The silver light still hums faint and patient beneath my skin, waiting for the next time I let my guard down.