Inside the shack, the world had shrunk to the size of a dusty, forgotten corner. I lay there, huddled into a tight ball, trying to find some semblance of warmth within my own shivering frame. But there was no warmth to be found. I could feel that parasitic venom crawling through my veins—a cold, viscous sludge that seemed to freeze my blood from the inside out. My human side, fragile and ill-equipped for such supernatural brutality, was screaming in silent agony.
Every breath that filtered into my lungs felt like a jagged shard of glass, tearing at the delicate tissue. As the fever scorched my skin, the peeling wallpaper and the rotting floorboards began to warp and dance. The world was dissolving into a sickening, feverish blur.
When I finally plummeted into the heavy, suffocating well of unconsciousness, my mind desperately fled the pain. It sought refuge in the only sanctuary I had ever known—the mint-scented, porcelain safety of Kael's presence. In the chaotic theater of my fever dreams, I was back in the pack house, the sun streaming through the windows.
I reached out, my fingers clawing for the phantom warmth of Rhea's hands, my voice a broken instrument as I called for the one person who always stood between me and the dark.
"Jax... Rhea..." I wheezed into the void of my own mind. Each syllable felt like it was being ripped from a throat lined with sandpaper. "It's so cold... please... don't leave me here. Take me home."
In the midst of the darkness, a vision of Chloe flickered to life. It was so vivid I could almost smell the flour on her apron. Her long, wavy brown hair cascaded down to her waist, messy and unkept as she bent over a bubbling pot. She was clumsily attempting to follow a recipe she'd scavenged from some obscure corner of the internet—a "healing soup" for the girl who could never shift. I watched her golden-brown eyes squint at the screen of her phone, her brow furrowed in intense concentration.
Large, grotesque chunks of unpeeled potato and slimy, pale chicken skins floated in a broth that looked more like murky river water than food. In reality, it would have tasted like wet cardboard and disappointment. But here, in this frozen hell, if even a drop of that soup touched my lips, I would have hailed it as the most divine elixir on earth.
"Chloe…" I rasped, my hand twitching against the cold floor.
Suddenly, the air in the room shifted. A suffocating, searing heat began to radiate through the shack—the unmistakable, predatory aura of a High Alpha. Varg had moved. Perhaps it was a flicker of twisted mercy, or perhaps it was the cold calculation of a man who realized his "key" was on the verge of shattering before he could even fit it into the lock.
He took a step toward me, his shadow looming like a mountain of coal. But then, the names spilled from my lips.
Those names—Jax, Kael, Chloe—slashed through his gunpowder-scented silence like a barbed whip. The air grew heavy with his sudden, violent shift in mood. To hear that his "prophesied mate," the woman tied to his very soul by a fate he despised, was seeking refuge in the memories of a rival pack... it turned the dark hunger within him into a lethal, concentrated hatred.
He didn't kneel. He didn't offer a hand. He jolted me awake with a shove that sent a fresh wave of agony through my ribs. I looked up at him through a haze of searing fire, my vision swimming.
"Move!" he bellowed.
The sheer force of his Alpha command rattled the very timber of the shack, vibrating in my chest like a physical blow.
"We're done here. This place reeks of your weakness."
He didn't wait for me to regain my senses or find my footing. My eyes felt as though they were fused shut with heavy lead; it was as if someone had chained massive weights to the tips of my lashes. I was effectively blind, my silver-flecked eyes rendered useless by the fever. My skin was a furnace, yet I was shivering so hard my teeth clicked together like dice. When I tried to stand, my knees moved with the pathetic, wobbling frailty of a newborn fawn. I collapsed twice before I could even find my balance, my fingers digging into the rotting wood for purchase.
Outside, the grey dawn was a cruel, blinding mistress.
I dragged myself through the knee-deep snow like a dying animal, my trail marked by the erratic grooves of my knees and elbows. That predatory cough—the one that felt like it was trying to eject my very soul—tore from my lungs, forcing me down into the freezing white powder with every agonizing step. Every snowflake that struck my feverish skin felt like a white-hot needle piercing a raw nerve.
Varg didn't slow down. He marched ahead, his boots crunching rhythmically, leaving a path I was expected to follow or perish. He looked back at my wretched, crawling state and curled his lip in utter, bone-deep disgust.
"You've lived among wolves since the day you were born," he spat, the words hitting me with more force than the wind.
"You've watched the change, felt the power. If you weren't such a pathetic, hollow failure who can't even summon her own wolf, you'd be in a warm bed right now, wrapped in your own fur. You'd be a creature of the wild, not this... broken thing. Don't make your wretched incompetence my problem."
I stopped. I didn't have the strength to stand but I found the strength to hate. As I struggled to drag myself upright one more time, the metallic, copper tang of warm blood coated my tongue. I spat it into the snow, a red stain on a white world, and glared at his broad, unforgiving back.
"I would rather rot into the soil of this forest... I would rather let the crows pick my bones clean... than take a single step toward a home with you," I whispered.
My voice was barely a ghost of a sound, a rasping thread of air, but it was drenched in pure, unadulterated venom.
"My home is back there. My heart is with Kael's pack. You can chain me, Varg. You can drag me across every border in this world. but you can't change where I belong. To you, I am a captive. I will never be your mate. I will never be yours."
Varg stopped dead in his tracks. The silence that followed was more terrifying than his roar. I watched those massive, scarred shoulders lock. I saw his breath hang in the air like frozen smoke, thick and jagged. When he slowly turned to face me, the High Alpha glow in his eyes—that amber fire—had been swallowed by a void of pure, abyssal malice.He loomed over me, his massive frame blotting out the rising sun, his shadow crushing me into the snow like a tombstone. He leaned down, his face inches from mine, and the sheer pressure of his presence made it hard to breathe.
"You will never be the Luna in my heart, Vespera," he hissed.
The sound was like a serrated blade scraping against bone, cold and clinical.
"You will be nothing more than a stain on my throne, a ghost haunting my halls until the day you finally wither away. You think you're a martyr? You aren't the only one whose world has been burned to ashes, you freak. I didn't ask for this prophecy. I didn't ask for a broken mate. I have already been sacrificed; my blood is dry, my soul is stone. Your pain? Your longing for another man? It means less than nothing to me."
He reached out and slammed his hand against my burning forehead. He didn't check my temperature; he pinned me there, his grip so violent I thought he might actually crush my skull against the frozen earth.
"If I have to burn in this life because of your flawed, miserable existence, then this isn't a gift from the heavens—it's a death sentence from the gods," he growled, leaning so close the suffocating stench of gunpowder and old blood choked me.
"And since we're trapped in this hell together, since fate decided to bind me to a defect... then I'll make sure the hell is yours alone to suffer. I will not carry you. I will not pity you."
He released me with a shove that sent my head snapping back.
"Now get up and walk," he commanded, his voice devoid of all humanity. "If you're going to die, Vespera, you'll do it on my soil, under my laws. Not a second sooner."