She offered us sweetbread laced with golden nectar. I hesitated. Ayla didn’t. Her little hands clutched the bread, her teeth sank in like it was salvation.
Seconds later, her body jerked in my arms.
“Mommy—” she whimpered, her voice fragile. Her little wolf howling faintly.Then it was all convulsions and stillness and cold.
I screamed her name until my throat tore. I crushed her to my chest. I begged, pleaded, clawed at the earth like I could force the poison out of her.
And then I felt it.
Bitter and slow, sliding over my own tongue. The taste of betrayal.
My limbs turned to stone. Darkness folded over me like a cloak.
But before it took me, Elara leaned in.
“You should’ve stayed hidden,” she whispered, breath brushing my bloodied ear. “Damien marked me the moment he realized you were no longer his class. I wear his crown now. And for that to remain true… you must vanish.”
They didn’t even give us a burial.
They wrapped us in bloodstained cloth and hurled our bodies into Ravencall Gorge, the same pit where they threw disobedient rogues and disgraced omega mothers.
And Damien?
He didn’t look back. He stood at the cliff’s edge, arms wrapped around Elara like she was the center of his world.
“She’s gone,” he said. “Even if she lived, I would’ve cast her aside. That runt and her mother were never mine.”
The bond we made under the Blood Moon, sealed in sacred rites and soul-fire, meant nothing to him.
I died choking on grief. My last breath a whisper of my daughter’s name.
But death did not keep me.
When I opened my eyes, I was clutching herbs—wild nettle and thistle root—the same ones I’d gathered on the morning Damien was offered the Alpha title.
Ayla lay beside me, cheeks flushed, chest rising.
Alive.
A second chance.
I burned the herbs in a copper dish and sold the den to a tinkerwolf for coin. And I didn’t look back.
This time, I did not crawl toward the memory of love.
I ran in the other direction—toward power,towards home.
We crossed frozen plains and haunted woods, took passage in caravans that didn’t ask questions, survived long enough to reach the gates of Stormveil.
It rose from the earth like something carved from legend—stone towers rimmed with frost, banners whipping in the wind. The guards at the gate moved to stop me, spears raised.