POV Abby
The trail narrows to a goat path carved into shale, and I realize—too late—that we’re not going to a sacred cave.
Sera stops. Turns. Her dark hair whips in the mountain wind, and her smile is no longer the wry, abrasive expression I’ve grown used to. It’s empty. Sharp as a scalpel.
"This is far enough," she says.
The three wolves step from the rock formations behind us, blocking the path back down. I don’t recognize them—gray fur, scarred muzzles, eyes that reflect the snow-light with predatory focus. Mercenaries. Killers.
My hand goes to my knife. "Sera?"
"Kade will be Alpha when Thorne dies," she says, stripping off her coat, shifting in a fluid ripple of muscle and fur.
Her claws extend, curved and black.
"Not some human abomination confusing instinct with power. My mate. My dynasty."
She circles me, jasmine perfume turning rancid mixing with wet fur.
"And you, little sacrifice, are the complication that needs deleting."
She moves faster than I can track.
Pain—white-hot, obscene—explodes across my abdomen. Her claws open me from hip to hip, wet and devastating. I scream, the sound tearing my throat, and collapse onto cold stone that leaches the heat from my body instantly.
Blood spreads beneath me in a warm pool that steams in the freezing air, smelling like copper and the end of everything.
Sera stands over me, shaking blood from her fingertips.
Tap. Tap.Tap.
The sound of it dripping onto the shale is maddeningly loud.
"You actually trusted me," she marvels, her voice guttural through the half-shift. "You really ar pathetic."
The bonds in my chest scream—Theron’s golden terror, Grogan’s silver desperation, Rhett’s crushing grief, Jarek’s cold fury, Hrollok’s berserk rage.
They’re racing toward me. I feel them distantly, like stars trying to reach Earth. Theron’s golden terror. Grogan’s silver desperation. Rhett’s crushing grief. Jarek’s cold fury. Hrollok’s berserk rage.
They’re too far.
The blood is leaving too fast, taking my heat, my thoughts, my self. I’m dissolving into the stone, becoming part of the mountain, and beneath the pain there’s a terrible relief.
I’ve always known I’d die young.
But they’ll die too.
The realization cuts sharper than Sera’s claws. The death-tether. The circular feedback loops Jarek described. If I slip away, the cascade drags all five of them down with me.
My beautiful, broken wolves.
My mates.
My heart, divided and multiplied.
No. Please. Not them.
I reach inward one final time. Not for myself—I’m already gone, leaking out onto the rocks—but for them. They deserve to live even if I don’t. They deserve the future I stole from them by bonding them to a hollow girl.
The door in my mind—the iron bars, the rusted lock—materializes before me. I don’t claw at it gently. I don’t beg. I throw my entire dying self against it with a scream that has no sound.
The door doesn’t open.
It shatters.
Power floods through my broken body like napalm poured into veins.
Bones crack and reform, muscles tear and regenerate with wet, meaty sounds that should be horrifying but feel like finally.
The shift happens without my permission—agony and ecstasy twisted together, orgasmic and annihilating, as my wolf finally, finally emerges.
‘About time you let me out,’ a voice purrs in my mind.
It’s not me. Not exactly. It’s older. Wilder. Furious and ancient and amused.
Her.
My wolf.
‘We have much to discuss, you and I,’ she purrs, stretching into my limbs, filling spaces I didn’t know were empty. ‘But first—survival.’
The wounds close.
I feel them knitting—flesh sealing, vessels cauterizing, muscle weaving together with tactile efficiency.
The bleeding stops.
Cold stone becomes solid ground, and I rise, but I’m rising on four paws instead of two, fur bristling against the wind, the world suddenly sharp and vivid and alive.
Colors I have no names for. Scents layered like palimpsests—Sera’s terror-sweat, my own blood drying, the distant thunder of my mates approaching, pine resin snapping in the cold.
Sera’s face contorts with shock. She stumbles backward, claws still dripping my blood, her perfect composure shattered.
"That’s impossible—you’re human—"
‘She hurt us,’ the wolf growls, and the sound rumbles from my chest like an earthquake. ‘She opened our belly. She dies now.’
Rage—pure, uncomplicated, righteous—floods my synapses. The urge to lunge, to tear, to feel her throat open beneath my teeth is overwhelming.
Sera’s heartbeat flutters against my enhanced hearing—rabbit-fast, panicked—and the wolf savors it.
But I hesitate.
Through the bond, I feel them closing in—fur and fury and desperation, tearing up the mountain to reach me. Through the wolf’s senses, I smell their rage on the wind: Theron’s golden fear, Hrollok’s green murder, all of them converging.
Wait, I tell the wolf. There’s something else.
She huffs, irritated, but settles back, sharing senses, sharing knowledge that crashes through my consciousness with devastating weight.
Inside me—deep in the cradle of my hips, nested in warmth—something pulses. Not a heartbeat—not yet, not distinct—but a scent. A newness. Sacred and subtle, buried beneath my own blood-smell but undeniable.
Budding life. A spark where yesterday there was only void.
‘We carry new life,’ the wolf says, her voice reverent, nostrils flaring to catalog the scent—fresh, fragile, defiantly alive. ‘The future Alpha is growing.’
Pregnant.
I’m pregnant.