Page 2

It was suffocating. That pack, that house, that future. The weight of what I was supposed to become pressed down on me every time I breathed. My wolf scratched at my insides, not from the call of heat—but the desperate need to run.

So I did.

I waited until the night of the blood moon, when the alphas were deep in ritual and the air stank of smoke and sweat. I stole a horse. I didn’t even take food. Just a waterskin and a knife. I rode until the beast collapsed beneath me—then I walked.

When I finally reached the southern port, filthy and half-starved, I thought I was safe. But the second I let my guard down, humans robbed me blind. Everything I owned—gone in minutes. No one helped. No one even looked twice.

I worked at the docks. In the freezing rain, under blistering sun. I hauled crates twice my size, tied ropes until my palms bled raw. Ate scraps. Slept in shadows. Spoke to no one. I laboured for a year before I had enough coin to buy passage north.

When the ship docked on this frozen edge of the world, I stepped onto the shore with nothing but calloused hands and a name I never used.

The village reeked of fish, smoke, and human rot—so badly even passing wolves wouldn’t catch my scent. Perfect.

I told the locals I was a widow. Wore black. Kept my head down. They didn’t ask questions. And when I finally found the witch, she didn’t ask either. Just took my coin, carved my silence into my flesh, and told me what I’d pay to keep my freedom.

It was her who told me about the boy.

Not fate. Not mercy. A name whispered from cracked lips as payment for pain. A child left behind after a fever, screaming in an empty house no one dared enter. I found him curled beside his mother’s body, covered in dirt and grief.

I picked him up off the floor. Held him close and told him I wasn’t going to leave. I didn't want to belong anywhere again. Belonging meant chains—meant pain. But somehow… his small hands clutching my clothes, his wide eyes trusting me not to vanish, he made me stay.

Fortunately, the Crescent Moon pack never sniffed me out.I'd seen their shadows slinking through the mist, sensed their predatory presence brushing my senses in the dead of night. But the witch’s runes held. Her dark magic came at a brutal price, but it worked.

As we made our way toward the docks, Dain skipped ahead, oblivious and cheerful. I breathed carefully through my mouth, swallowing back bile. The reek of fish, salt, and rot burned my throat and stung my eyes—but it kept me hidden.

And for now, that was all I needed.

CHAPTER 2

Lexa

I screamed until my throat went raw.

The witch didn’t flinch. Her hands, steady as stone, moved with the slow, precise rhythm of a ritual practised a thousand times. Her blade—a thin sliver of iron etched with runes older than our gods—bit into my back, again and again, dragging fire through my flesh.

“Keep still,” she muttered, her voice like gravel soaked in honey. “You want this done or not?”

I couldn’t answer. My mouth was open, soundless now, my fingers twisted into the fraying edge of the table beneath me. The wood was stained black from years of blood and magic. The scent of both filled the air, thick and metallic, laced with the sharp burn of herbs I couldn’t name.

The witch’s hut was half-sunken into the marsh, its roof swallowed by creeping moss and the bones of birds strung fromevery beam. A hundred glass jars lined her shelves, some filled with liquid and shadow, others with things that blinked or twitched when I looked too closely. Candles burned low, their flames guttering blue.

She was a tall woman, lean as a blade, with golden hair streaked in gray and cold, ocean-blue eyes that saw too much. Her name wasn’t one she gave lightly. I never asked it. She preferred it that way.

“You didn’t bring full payment,” she reminded me, voice flat, impassive. “So I do half the work. Enough to hold until next moon, if you’re careful.”

The blade bit into my back, sharp and merciless. I bit down on a sob, grinding my teeth so hard my jaw ached. The pain wasn’t new, but it never dulled. Not really. She traced the old scars with practised precision, cutting along familiar paths as if refreshing a map drawn in blood.

I’d been coming to her for years. Since the first winter after I arrived on the coast. Word of her had passed in whispers through the human markets—the witch who worked with wolves, if the price was high and the secrets dark. I found her in the marshlands, beyond the last bend of the river, where the fog never lifted and the trees leaned too close.

Each time I came, she jacked up the price. A few coins more. A trade for herbs I had to risk stealing. A lock of hair. Blood. One year, she took my only coat and left me walking home in sleet with just rags and a fever. She always reminded me, like it was a curse etched into the air between us—dark magic has its cost.

My blood was dark on the stone floor, thick and sluggish, soaking into the circle of rune-salt she’d poured beneath me. It hissed where it touched, steam rising, the magic greedy as ever.

“You’re lucky I like you, wolf girl,” she said casually, rinsing the blade in something that steamed and stank of metal and rot. “Otherwise I’d let the beast take you. Let itripout of you. Just tosee what’s left.”

I wasn’t lucky. I was desperate. And desperation, like pain, was something I knew far too well. It lived in my bones, in the hollow space behind my ribs where others kept faith and fire. I didn’t believe in salvation. I believed in survival.

The blade withdrew.