Your stepmother is your doom
1349 Words
Ravyn's POV
I played round the woods, hopping from one tree to another, my joy knowing no bound.
"I've a wolf," A silver wolf!" I screamed, this couldn’t be happening.
“Ravyn.” His voice snapped me out of it, I turned sharply to him.
Rowan stood a few feet away, watching me like I might explode. He looked different now. Less wild.
Still dangerous, still huge, but his eyes weren’t glazed anymore. They were focused. Clear.
“You need to take a breath,” he said, slowly, like he was talking to something that might run away.
I stared at him, chest heaving. “What did you do to me?”
He flinched.
“I didn’t mean to bite you,” he said immediately. “I swear. I lost control, I—” He cut himself off, dragging a hand through his blood-matted hair. “You should be dead.”
The words hit harder than I expected.
“I was,” I whispered. “I think I was.”
He looked at me then. Really looked. His gaze moved over me, my fur, my eyes. Something dark and shaken crossed his face.
“You’re silver,” he said.
I didn’t know what that meant, but the way he said it made my stomach sink.
“So are you,” I shot back, my voice sharp despite myself.
His jaw tightened. “That’s not possible either.”
Silence fell again, thick and uncomfortable.
My body started to ache in strange ways. Not pain, exactly. More like… awareness. Every part of me felt awake, buzzing, like I’d been asleep my whole life and someone had dumped cold water on me.
I swallowed. “I need to shift back.”
“You don’t know how,” he said, the truth of that landed heavily. I didn’t, I'd never shifted my whole life.
Panic crept back in, slow and cold. “Then help me.”
He hesitated, yhat hesitation hurt more than it should have.
“I don’t know how to teach someone their first shift,” he said finally. “I was born like this.”
Of course he was.
I squeezed my eyes shut, fighting the sudden sting behind them. “I can’t go back like this. They’ll see me.”
“They already will,” he said quietly.
I opened my eyes. “What?”
“You shifted on pack land,” he said. “They’ll feel it. Elders, witches, anyone sensitive enough.” His gaze softened, just slightly. “You can’t hide this.”
The weight of it crushed down on me all at once.
Kyra’s face flashed in my mind. My stepmother’s. My father’s.
The mating ceremony. The laughter. Kali’s voice, cold and dismissive.
Something sharp twisted in my chest.
Good, let them see.
“I don’t want to hide,” I said, my voice steady in a way it hadn’t been all night. “I want them to know.”
Rowan studied me for a long moment.
“You don’t know what being silver means,” he said.
“I know what being nothing meant,” I replied. “And I’m done with that.”
A muscle in his jaw jumped.
“Then you’re in danger,” he said. “Silver wolves don’t get left alone.”
“Neither do feral Alphas,” I shot back.
That earned me a short, surprised burst of laughter. It faded quickly.
“You healed me,” he said, quieter now. “When I bit you… something changed. The noise in my head stopped.”
“What noise?”
He tapped his head. “The pull, the rage the need to tear things apart just to breathe.”
I stared at him. “I didn’t do anything.”
“You did,” he said firmly. “You exist,"
Something about the way he said it sent a strange, uncomfortable warmth through me.
I shifted then, without meaning to.
The wolf receded like a tide pulling back, bones reshaping, fur melting away. Pain flared briefly, then I collapsed forward, catching myself on shaking hands.
Rowan moved instantly, shrugging out of his coat and wrapping it around me before I could protest.
I was human again. Naked under the coat. Exhausted. My body felt like it had run miles without my permission.
I hugged the fabric around myself, suddenly cold.
Rowan crouched in front of me. “We need to move. Guards will be searching.”
“For you,” I said.
“For us,” he corrected.
As he helped me up, my legs wobbled, but I didn’t fall. I leaned into him without thinking, the solid warmth of his body grounding me.
I glanced up at his face. “They tried to kill me.”
His expression darkened instantly.
“Who?”
“My stepmother,” I said. Saying it out loud made something inside me harden. “And Kyra.”
The forest seemed to go very quiet.
“They hired rogues,” I continued, my voice flat. “They thought I’d bleed out before anyone found me.”
Rowan’s hands curled into fists. “They won’t touch you again,” he said.
I looked at him, anger bubbling inside of me.
“I don’t want protection,” I said. “I want revenge.”
Something dangerous flickered in his eyes.
“Then,” he said slowly, “we want the same thing.”
"Why would we want the same thing, who do you want to..."
The sounds of the pack guards reached me. Rowan dragged me back behind a tree, draping the pieces of my clothes on my body.
"Don't come out until I say so," He said and turned away, marching towards the guards who were armed.
"I'll give you just a chance to leave, go back to—"
"Your stepmother sent us, what use is a feral wolf in a pack," The head guard hissed, firing a gun towards him.
I watched him still for a moment, obviously taken aback at the guards words, of his step mother ordering them to assassinate him.
Rowan dodged it just in time, throwing a heavy punch into his face.
"It's not possible, she cannot—"
"Yes she can, what do you think? That because she's the only one who could bring you back to sanity meant she was a good one?" The head guard taunted.
"You're going to die soon enough, so I'll just tell you, she's the sole cause of every one of your feral madness, black forbidden magic," He added, firing another bullet at Rowan.
Rowan shifted halfway, pouncing heavily on him, his silver claws tearing at his face.
"You know I could kill you right now, but I want you to feel every inch of pain I felt, and I want you to go back in there and tell her that your attempt failed.
Another guards shot again at his chest, but this time, he left the head guard, throwing the other hard against a tree.
A scream tore through the guards lips, and the scream cut off abruptly.
My breath caught painfully in my throat as the guard hit the ground with a sickening thud. I flinched, instinctively curling in on myself behind the tree, clutching my clothes tighter around my body.
Rowan moved like something unleashed, not feral, not wild, controlled and oozing with power.
That somehow made it worse.
He caught the next guard by the collar before the man could fire again, lifted him clean off the ground like he weighed nothing, and slammed him into the tree trunk. I heard a bone crack. The guard screamed, hands scrabbling uselessly at Rowan’s arms.
“Please—” the man choked.
Rowan leaned in close, his voice low enough that I almost didn’t hear it.
“You don’t get to beg,” he said. “Not tonight.”
He dropped the guard to the floor, collapsed in a heap, gasping, not dead but clearly wishing he was.
The remaining guards hesitated, staring at the head guard who was still writhing in pain.
- Writer
