Beatrice Fairmoor had always known her place—
lowborn, omega, invisible.
The forest did not.
Here, the ranks that muzzled her life fell away like shed fur.
Here, the wind didn't whisper omega like a curse. It whispered her name—softly, curiously—as if trying to understand what she was becoming.
Beatrice knelt among the moss and roots, fingers stained green from crushed leaves and sap, the air thick with the perfume of wet earth. The twilight sky filtered through silver canopies above her, painting her skin in shifting pale-blue shadows.
Her fingers brushed the glowing stalk of fire root, warm even through her callused touch. The herb wasn't meant to bloom this brightly outside a lunar shift. And yet it pulsed in her hand like a heartbeat.
Everything is too alive today, she thought.
Or maybe I am.
Fire root calmed rages. Sealed wounds.
Masked scents.
Useful for healing.
Or hiding.
She rose slowly, brushing stray leaves from her cloak. A breeze rolled through the clearing—cool, sweet, threaded with wild roses… and something darker.
Metallic.
Wrong.
Blood.
And not the distant scent of prey—
this was older, heavier, clotted with fear and ash.
Her skin prickled.
The fine, nearly invisible down along the back of her arms threatened to rise—her dormant wolf stirring under her flesh like a creature waking from a long sleep.
It had been happening all day.
Ever since dawn bled over the horizon on her eighteenth name day, the world had tilted. Colors too bright. Sounds too sharp. Dreams too vivid.
She'd woken gasping with moonfire in her throat.
Her mother had always whispered that omegas changed slowly. Softly.
Nothing about today was soft.
The trees hummed. The herbs sang.
And her dreams…
Her dreams had held moonlight and shadow, a voice made of gravel calling her name like a vow or a threat.
She didn't know what any of it meant.
Only that something ancient was shaking loose inside her.
Then the second scent hit.
Smoke.
Thick. Acrid. Burning wrong.
Her heart lurched into a sprint. She shoved the fire root into her satchel and ran toward the tree line, boots thudding against the moss.
Branches snagged her cloak, but she barely felt them. The closer she got to the village, the more the world warped—tilting, bending, the air growing hotter with every desperate step.
She broke through the last line of trees—
And froze.
Her home was gone.
The Redfang village lay in ruin, the center of the camp cratered by fire and claws. Tents were shredded, their hides dangling like flayed skin. Blood spattered the ground in violent strokes. Smoke coiled through the evening air like a dying serpent.
Beatrice's stomach heaved.
Bodies lay twisted in ways no wolf—shifted or not—should ever bend. Some were burned beyond recognition. Others torn open by something far stronger than rogue wolves.
She moved through the camp in a daze.
She recognized no faces.
Only shapes. Only absence.
But even then—
even as she stepped over the broken spears and shattered bowls and the shredded remains of lives she had known—
she felt one absence like a missing limb.
Ronan Stormfang.
The Alpha's heir.
The golden wolf.
The weapon forged to rule.
Arrogant. Proud. Untouchable.
And yet…
every time his gaze brushed hers across the training yards or the healer's den, something crackled beneath her ribs. Something dangerous. Something forbidden.
He'd never spoken a word to her unless wounded.
Never spared her more than a glance.
And still—
Her fingers curled at her sides.
Not him. Please not him.
She forced her shaking legs toward the altar stone at the north end of the clearing.
It shouldn't have been glowing.
But it was.
She pushed aside broken debris—and saw it.
A silver-and-moonstone pendant, Ronan's bloodline sigil carved into its center. The crack across the gemstone was fresh, smeared with blood too dark to be fresh but too warm to be old.
Her breath broke.
This wasn't a sign of escape.
This was a sign of ritual.
A warning.
A message.
A cry for help buried in stone and blood.
Her vision blurred as she stumbled back.
By the time the pack remnants found her—those who survived, those who arrived late—they needed a villain.
And she was small. Quiet. Strange.
She had survived when others hadn't.
So the whispers grew teeth.
Traitor.
Witch.
Whore.
Omega curse.
Beatrice fled before they decided to carve those words into her skin.
But she did not flee blindly.
She followed the dreams.
Followed the pull in her bones.
Followed the bond she had never wanted, never asked for—
but now could no longer deny.
Because somewhere in the wild beyond the borders, beyond even the stories told around firepits, she felt him.
Bruised, furious, barely alive.
Ronan.
And something inside her—something older than her name, older than her mother's blood—answered.
I'm coming.
The forest swallowed her, and the moon rose full behind her, casting the path ahead in silver fire.
The girl she had been died with the village.
What remained was something else.
Something the world wasn't ready for.
Something no longer willing to be invisible.
Something with teeth.