Some wolves were born loud.
Beatrice Fairmoor was born quiet—
but quiet things were often the ones that endured.
As a child, she learned the art of remaining unseen with the same fluency other pups learned to shift. Silence was her shelter, her armor, her only reliable friend.
Her mother had told her once:
"Shadows remember more than the light ever will, little moon."
Marla Fairmoor had been an herbologist—one of the best, though no one said so aloud. Respect was not something omegas were freely given, even when they saved lives. Whispers trailed after her mother like smoke:
witch-blood.
moon-touched.
not right.
not safe.
But Beatrice had never feared her mother's hands.
Not when they taught her how to brew remedies that smelled of thyme and power.
Not when they traced ancient runes across her brow in lulling songs.
Not when they trembled the night Beatrice found her cold and still at the edge of the sacred spring.
Her throat slit.
Her palms burned.
Her tools missing.
The pack wrote it off as misfortune.
Beatrice buried her mother's tools behind the healer's den and learned another lesson:
Silence was safer than truth.
For years after, she folded herself small.
Small enough not to provoke.
Small enough not to attract the wrong eyes.
Small enough to live.
And for a long time, the strategy worked.
Until he noticed her.
Ronan Stormfang didn't need to speak to be loud.
He walked with the swagger of an heir raised on sharpened expectations—the kind of predator who never questioned whether the world would open beneath his feet.
He was all angles and shadowed strength, half arrogance, half prophecy.
Wolves bowed when he passed. Warriors straightened. Even the elders watched him like they were weighing their own legacy against the boy he was becoming.
Beatrice tried not to look at him.
But she did.
Everyone did.
And sometimes—
when his gaze slid across her like a shadow—
she felt the strange spark in her blood flare.
She didn't have a word for it then.
Didn't dare wonder why her heart stuttered when his boots sank into the dirt outside the healer's den, or why her breath caught when he stopped just a second longer than necessary.
She told herself it meant nothing.
But she remembered the first time he came to her alone.
He stumbled into the herb tent just after dusk, bleeding from a rogue trap that had torn into his leg. No escort. No healer. No fanfare.
He gritted out, "Don't make this a thing," as if the words cost him something.
She didn't speak.
Didn't ask why the heir was unguarded, or why he trusted her hands over the pack's appointed healer.
She simply worked.
Ronan watched her the entire time—
a gaze too intense, too hungry, too conflicted.
She felt his breath on her neck as she wrapped his thigh with moonwort strips, smelled the raw scent of pine and lightning that clung to him, saw the way his jaw clenched when her fingers brushed his skin.
When she finished, he didn't thank her.
He just stared.
Like he was memorizing the shape of her.
He did that twice more—once with cracked ribs, once with a poison-thorn puncture.
He never said her name.
But something shifted in his expression each time he left the tent.
Something he refused to name.
Beatrice carried those moments like smuggled embers.
Quiet.
Hidden.
Dangerous.
After the slaughter—
after the pack fell and Ronan vanished—
those embers turned to ash.
The first night she hid in a cave with only a cloak and her mother's whispered songs, she clutched Ronan's blood-crusted pendant and cried until her lungs burned.
The second night, she stopped crying.
By the third, she wasn't Beatrice the Invisible anymore.
The dreams came—
visions dripping with moonfire, shadows speaking in tongues older than wolves.
And in every vision: Ronan
Chained. Bleeding. Alive.
She followed them because she had nothing else left.
The Deadlands were a boundary no wolf crossed willingly.
A cursed space saturated with ancient magic and fear.
But something inside her responded to the land—like two parts of a long-buried secret calling to each other.
The deeper she walked, the louder the bond thrummed.
Raw.
Undeniable.
Alive.
Her mother's lullaby returned to her as she crossed the threshold:
"Some wolves are born of the moon's light.
Others are born of her shadow."
Beatrice had always believed she was the former.
But as she stepped into the place that breathed like a sleeping beast, she wondered if she had been wrong all along.
Something growled deep within her.
Not her wolf—she had never shifted.
Something older.
Something that recognized this cursed ground as home.
She pressed Ronan's pendant to her lips.
Whether he wanted her or not—
whether he blamed her, hated her, cursed her—
she was coming.
For him.
For answers.
For herself.
Behind her, the forest sighed—leaves curling, branches shivering, roots recoiling as if recognizing an ancient power stirring inside her blood.
Ahead, the Deadlands waited.
Beatrice Fairmoor—
the girl who had grown too quiet,
the omega taught to stay small—
walked forward without looking back.
The shadows welcomed her.
And she did not fear them anymore.