The moonlight shouldn't have felt like this.
It wasn't just warmth on my skin. It was alive: a current, a pulse, like something ancient had reached down from the sky and decided to touch me. Not gently and not like light. Like a hand pressing through my chest and closing around my heart.
I swayed on my feet. My breath hitched.
The air thickened around me, quieting every sound, until all I could hear was the low, steady beat of my own heart and the rising, humming pressure in my veins.
It felt like something inside me was waking up—not Hyde, not exactly, but something older than him. Something that had been sleeping in my blood since before I was born, coiled tight and patient, waiting for exactly this moment.
And then the tingling began.
It started at the tips of my fingers, a shiver beneath my skin, like tiny sparks dancing along my bones. It moved up my arms, across my shoulders, down my spine, until it pooled in my face, right where my birthmark had always been.
The dark crescent-shaped mark beneath my left eye, the one my family had called an imperfection, the one Dominic had mocked since we were children.
I reached up instinctively, fingertips grazing my cheek, but the skin beneath them felt different. Smooth and warm. Charged with a heat that had nothing to do with temperature and everything to do with something I couldn't name.
Across the circle, I felt Draven's eyes fixed on me, his hold on my hand unyielding, the bones of his fingers pressing hard against mine. But I didn't dare look at him. I couldn't. I was too afraid of what he'd see.
Or not see.
The crowd began to murmur: soft gasps, low voices whispering my name. I looked up, and they weren't staring at my tunic or my position beside their Alpha.
They were staring at me. At my face.
Draven stepped closer, his free hand gently tilting my chin toward him. I watched his gaze trail over me—first with awe, then something like stunned reverence.
His lips parted, and for a moment the most powerful Alpha in the Northern territories looked like a man who had forgotten how to speak.
"Atlas…" he murmured. "You— Look."
I turned toward the polished obsidian basin beside the altar, a ceremonial relic filled with water for the bonding blessing. The surface was still, black as ink, and the reflection that met me wasn't the boy I'd known.
My birthmark, dark and curved like a crescent, was gone.
In its place, glowing faintly just above my left brow, was a small, inverted crescent moon. Pale silver, almost like it had been drawn in light. Ethereal. Unmistakable. It pulsed softly with each beat of my heart, the glow intensifying and dimming in rhythm, as though the mark itself was alive.
And my hair.
Where once it had been silver-white—striking but natural, the color of moonlight caught in mist—it was now white. Pure, blinding white. It shimmered like fresh snow under the full moon, as though it had absorbed the light itself and was radiating it back.
Each strand seemed to carry its own luminescence, and when I turned my head, the glow trailed after me like something from a dream.
I staggered back, nearly losing my footing on the ritual stones.
"What… is happening to me?"
Elder Axel stepped forward, his voice oddly quiet for the usually commanding elder. The lines of his weathered face had deepened, his eyes wide beneath his grey brows.
"By the stars," he whispered. "The mark… the light… the change—this is no ordinary bonding."
I turned to him, chest tight, every muscle in my body coiled with a tension I couldn't release. "What is it?"
He hesitated, then raised his eyes to the sky, as though asking for the Moon's blessing before he dared to answer.
"You've been chosen, Atlas," he said at last. "By the Moon Goddess herself. This is a sign not seen in decades."
"What sign?" I breathed.
He stepped closer, careful, his expression a mixture of awe and disbelief. "The crescent moon mark. The white hair. The resonance with moonlight—these are the traits of an ancient bloodline long thought extinct. The silver wolves of the North."
Gasps broke out around the circle. I could feel the shock ripple through the pack like a physical wave, pressing against the edges of my awareness.
My blood turned to ice.
Silver wolves. I had read about them once, in a crumbling book buried in the back of Midnight Crest's library, in stories I'd assumed were legends told to children.
Wolves said to be born under full moons, their power tied directly to the cycles of the night sky, their connection to the Moon Goddess unmatched by any other bloodline in the history of shifters.
"They were real?" I asked.
"They were the sacred blood," Elder Axel said solemnly. "The Moon's first children. They protected her temples, led entire nations of shifters. Their strength in battle was rivaled only by their grace in healing. Until…"
His voice faltered.
Draven's jaw clenched beside me, the muscle flexing hard beneath the skin. "Until the Rogue King wiped them out."
Elder Axel nodded. "All of them. Every last one. Or so we thought."
"But…" I blinked at him, the weight of it pressing down on my chest like a stone. "That would mean—"
"You are their descendant," Elder Axel said gently. "The mark you thought was an imperfection was the sign of their lineage. Your transformation tonight is the Moon Goddess reawakening the truth inside you."
I stared at my reflection again. The glowing crescent. The impossible white hair. The silver luminescence that clung to my skin like something sacred.
I didn't look like myself. But somehow, I felt more myself than I ever had before.
Hyde, my wolf, was rising, stretching, no longer dimmed or curled in a wounded corner of my soul. He was alive, powerful, radiant, filling every part of me with a strength that felt ancient and vast and entirely mine.
Draven stepped close, his hand curling protectively around the back of my neck, fingers pressing into the muscle there with a steadiness that anchored me when everything else was spinning.
"Atlas," he said, voice low enough that only I could hear. "This is why your wolf came so late. Why your magic never felt right before. You were never broken. You were only waiting."
"For the moon to call me back," I whispered.
And now it has.
"I don't understand," I said, turning to Elder Axel. "If I'm the last of them—why didn't anyone know?"
He shook his head. "Silver wolves have not been seen since long before I was born. The bloodline was believed extinct. Your mark must have been misread… or concealed."