Hello readers!
Welcome to Selene's story.
⚠️ This book contains:
- EXPLICIT smut scenes (every 8-10 ch)
- Reverse harem (she keeps ALL of them)
- Dark themes & past trauma
- Knotting/heat cycles/marking
- Group claiming scenes
- Blood-play (Draven arc)
- Breeding content
- Obsessive possessive alphas
- Violence & pack politics
If any of these are triggers,
please read safely!
Daily updates. Cliffhangers every
chapter. You've been warned. 😈
Drop a comment. I read every one.
I'd been taking the pills for three years, and for three years they'd done exactly what they promised.
They suppressed my scent. Killed the heat before it could start. Kept the hybrid blood in my veins quiet enough that the wolves around me smelled nothing but ordinary rogue—unremarkable, unmemorable, beneath notice. That was the point. That was survival.
So when I woke up on the morning of my twenty-first birthday with my skin on fire and the pills nowhere near strong enough, I knew three years of careful, quiet invisibility were about to end very badly.
The heat wasn't supposed to come yet. I'd taken a double dose the night before, just like every night leading up to this week, because I knew what was coming and I'd been managing it long enough to have a system. A routine. A careful, practiced way of keeping myself safe in a world that would destroy me the moment it understood what I was.
But my body, apparently, had decided it was done being managed.
I pressed my face into my pillow and breathed through my teeth, trying to count the ceiling cracks the way I always did when things got bad. There were seven. I'd memorized them in the first week after I'd moved into this cabin at the edge of the Ironwood Rogue settlement—seven cracks, three water stains, and one suspicious dark patch in the corner that I'd decided, for the sake of my sanity, was just mold.
Outside, the settlement was already waking up. I could hear boots on gravel, low voices, the distant clang of someone working the outdoor kitchen. Ordinary morning sounds that I'd spent three years learning to find comfort in.
Today they made my skin crawl.
My senses were sharpening in a way they had no business doing this fast—I could smell the coffee brewing forty feet away, could hear the specific cadence of Marta's arthritic knees as she crossed the yard, could feel the cold morning air pressing against the window like it had weight. Everything was too much and too sharp and too close, and underneath all of it was the heat itself, building in my bloodstream like something that had been patient long enough and was done waiting.
The worst part wasn't the physical discomfort, though that was bad enough.
The worst part was the scent.
I could smell myself, and what I smelled was nothing like the dull, neutral nothing the pills usually created. What I smelled was hybrid—deep and dark and layered in a way that no suppression pill on the black market was going to touch now that my body had decided to fully come online. It was my wolf underneath, earthy and wild and impossibly warm. It was the vampire blood my mother had passed down like a curse, cool and strange and metallic at the edges. Together they created something I had no name for, something I'd never smelled on another person because there was no other person quite like me.
Something that any wolf within half a mile was going to register as profoundly, dangerously interesting.
I needed to leave. Now. Before Marta finished her morning rounds. Before Garrett, the settlement's self-appointed alpha, came to collect his weekly tribute and got close enough to realize why the air around my cabin suddenly smelled like a Category Five disaster wrapped in something he couldn't quite identify but desperately wanted to.
I threw back the blankets and immediately regretted it. The cool air hit my overheated skin and did absolutely nothing helpful—if anything, the contrast made the heat flare worse, made my nerve endings sing with an urgency that had nothing to do with temperature and everything to do with biology I'd spent twenty-one years pretending I didn't have.
My hands were shaking when I pulled on my clothes. I noticed that the way you notice weather—just a fact, something happening in the background while the more important thoughts ran louder. I had maybe thirty minutes before the settlement fully woke. I had a bag already packed under the floorboard because I'd always known this day was coming, had been packed and ready for two years just in case, because the one thing three years on the run teaches you is that the moment you stop preparing for the worst is the moment it arrives.
The bag had cash, a fake ID, three burner phones still in their packaging, and a month's supply of the pills that clearly weren't going to do me any good anymore. I grabbed it anyway.
I didn't let myself look around the cabin before I left. There was nothing in it worth grieving—I'd made sure of that, same as every place before it. No photographs, no keepsakes, nothing that would make leaving harder than it needed to be.
The door creaked when I opened it. Of course it did.
I stepped out into the cold morning air and immediately felt the settlement's attention shift.
Not overtly. Not obviously. Just the slight pause in Marta's shuffling footsteps. The way the man splitting wood across the yard went still for a half-second before resuming. The distant sound of conversation dropping a register as noses lifted, almost unconsciously, catching something on the wind that the lizard-brain part of every wolf recognized before the thinking part had time to analyze it.
They were smelling me.
I kept my eyes forward and my pace even, the way you walk when you're not running but you're absolutely thinking about it, and I made it to the tree line in under two minutes.
I was twenty feet into the forest when I heard Garrett's voice behind me.
"Selene."
I didn't stop.
"Selene." Closer now. And something in his voice had changed—dropped into that lower register that meant his wolf was paying attention, that the animal underneath the man had caught whatever I was putting into the air and decided it was relevant. "What are you—"
"Morning, Garrett," I called back, still walking. "Early start today."
"Stop walking."
I stopped walking. Not because I wanted to. Because he was an alpha and I was a rogue in his territory and stopping was the only thing standing between a conversation and a situation, and I needed this to be a conversation.
I turned around.
He was closer than I'd realized—twenty feet back, standing at the tree line with the morning light behind him and his eyes already showing the faintest ring of gold around the iris. He was a large man, broad through the shoulders, with the kind of face that had learned to be intimidating early and never stopped practicing. I'd lived in his settlement for eight months. In that time, he'd never looked at me like this.
Like I was something he wanted to put his hands on.
"You smell different," he said slowly, like he was working something out.
"New soap," I said.
"That's not soap." He took a step toward me. Then another. His nostrils flared with the particular focus of a predator cataloguing something new and interesting. "What are you, Selene? Because you've been here eight months and I thought I knew, but right now you don't smell like any rogue I've ever—"
"I need to go," I said.
"I don't think you do." Another step. His voice had gone soft in a way that was somehow worse than loud. "I think you need to stay right here and explain to me what you are and why you've been hiding it in my settlement for eight months, because whatever you're putting into the air right now is—"
He stopped talking when the howl split the morning open.
It came from the eastern border—high and urgent, the specific pitch that meant strangers, that meant wolves who didn't belong, that meant everyone in the settlement needed to pay attention right now. Garrett's head snapped toward it, the alpha in him responding before the rest of him caught up, and in the two seconds that his attention broke, I turned around and ran.
I ran hard and I ran quiet and I didn't look back.
Behind me, I heard shouting. Heard Garrett bark orders. Heard the settlement mobilizing for whatever was coming through the eastern border.
It took me longer than it should have to understand that whatever was coming through the eastern border was probably coming for me.
My twenty-first birthday, and the world had finally noticed I existed.
# KNOTS OF THE HYBRID QUEEN: CLAIMED BY FOUR ALPHAS
## By Golden Swizz
---
## CHAPTER 1: The Scent I Shouldn't Have
I'd been taking the pills for three years, and for three years they'd done exactly what they promised.
They suppressed my scent. Killed the heat before it could start. Kept the hybrid blood in my veins quiet enough that the wolves around me smelled nothing but ordinary rogue—unremarkable, unmemorable, beneath notice. That was the point. That was survival.
So when I woke up on the morning of my twenty-first birthday with my skin on fire and the pills nowhere near strong enough, I knew three years of careful, quiet invisibility were about to end very badly.
The heat wasn't supposed to come yet. I'd taken a double dose the night before, just like every night leading up to this week, because I knew what was coming and I'd been managing it long enough to have a system. A routine. A careful, practiced way of keeping myself safe in a world that would destroy me the moment it understood what I was.
But my body, apparently, had decided it was done being managed.
I pressed my face into my pillow and breathed through my teeth, trying to count the ceiling cracks the way I always did when things got bad. There were seven. I'd memorized them in the first week after I'd moved into this cabin at the edge of the Ironwood Rogue settlement—seven cracks, three water stains, and one suspicious dark patch in the corner that I'd decided, for the sake of my sanity, was just mold.
Outside, the settlement was already waking up. I could hear boots on gravel, low voices, the distant clang of someone working the outdoor kitchen. Ordinary morning sounds that I'd spent three years learning to find comfort in.
Today they made my skin crawl.
My senses were sharpening in a way they had no business doing this fast—I could smell the coffee brewing forty feet away, could hear the specific cadence of Marta's arthritic knees as she crossed the yard, could feel the cold morning air pressing against the window like it had weight. Everything was too much and too sharp and too close, and underneath all of it was the heat itself, building in my bloodstream like something that had been patient long enough and was done waiting.
The worst part wasn't the physical discomfort, though that was bad enough.
The worst part was the scent.
I could smell myself, and what I smelled was nothing like the dull, neutral nothing the pills usually created. What I smelled was hybrid—deep and dark and layered in a way that no suppression pill on the black market was going to touch now that my body had decided to fully come online. It was my wolf underneath, earthy and wild and impossibly warm. It was the vampire blood my mother had passed down like a curse, cool and strange and metallic at the edges. Together they created something I had no name for, something I'd never smelled on another person because there was no other person quite like me.
Something that any wolf within half a mile was going to register as profoundly, dangerously interesting.
I needed to leave. Now. Before Marta finished her morning rounds. Before Garrett, the settlement's self-appointed alpha, came to collect his weekly tribute and got close enough to realize why the air around my cabin suddenly smelled like a Category Five disaster wrapped in something he couldn't quite identify but desperately wanted to.
I threw back the blankets and immediately regretted it. The cool air hit my overheated skin and did absolutely nothing helpful—if anything, the contrast made the heat flare worse, made my nerve endings sing with an urgency that had nothing to do with temperature and everything to do with biology I'd spent twenty-one years pretending I didn't have.
My hands were shaking when I pulled on my clothes. I noticed that the way you notice weather—just a fact, something happening in the background while the more important thoughts ran louder. I had maybe thirty minutes before the settlement fully woke. I had a bag already packed under the floorboard because I'd always known this day was coming, had been packed and ready for two years just in case, because the one thing three years on the run teaches you is that the moment you stop preparing for the worst is the moment it arrives.
The bag had cash, a fake ID, three burner phones still in their packaging, and a month's supply of the pills that clearly weren't going to do me any good anymore. I grabbed it anyway.
I didn't let myself look around the cabin before I left. There was nothing in it worth grieving—I'd made sure of that, same as every place before it. No photographs, no keepsakes, nothing that would make leaving harder than it needed to be.
The door creaked when I opened it. Of course it did.
I stepped out into the cold morning air and immediately felt the settlement's attention shift.
Not overtly. Not obviously. Just the slight pause in Marta's shuffling footsteps. The way the man splitting wood across the yard went still for a half-second before resuming. The distant sound of conversation dropping a register as noses lifted, almost unconsciously, catching something on the wind that the lizard-brain part of every wolf recognized before the thinking part had time to analyze it.
They were smelling me.
I kept my eyes forward and my pace even, the way you walk when you're not running but you're absolutely thinking about it, and I made it to the tree line in under two minutes.
I was twenty feet into the forest when I heard Garrett's voice behind me.
"Selene."
I didn't stop.
"Selene." Closer now. And something in his voice had changed—dropped into that lower register that meant his wolf was paying attention, that the animal underneath the man had caught whatever I was putting into the air and decided it was relevant. "What are you—"
"Morning, Garrett," I called back, still walking. "Early start today."
"Stop walking."
I stopped walking. Not because I wanted to. Because he was an alpha and I was a rogue in his territory and stopping was the only thing standing between a conversation and a situation, and I needed this to be a conversation.
I turned around.
He was closer than I'd realized—twenty feet back, standing at the tree line with the morning light behind him and his eyes already showing the faintest ring of gold around the iris. He was a large man, broad through the shoulders, with the kind of face that had learned to be intimidating early and never stopped practicing. I'd lived in his settlement for eight months. In that time, he'd never looked at me like this.
Like I was something he wanted to put his hands on.
"You smell different," he said slowly, like he was working something out.
"New soap," I said.
"That's not soap." He took a step toward me. Then another. His nostrils flared with the particular focus of a predator cataloguing something new and interesting. "What are you, Selene? Because you've been here eight months and I thought I knew, but right now you don't smell like any rogue I've ever—"
"I need to go," I said.
"I don't think you do." Another step. His voice had gone soft in a way that was somehow worse than loud. "I think you need to stay right here and explain to me what you are and why you've been hiding it in my settlement for eight months, because whatever you're putting into the air right now is—"
He stopped talking when the howl split the morning open.
It came from the eastern border—high and urgent, the specific pitch that meant strangers, that meant wolves who didn't belong, that meant everyone in the settlement needed to pay attention right now. Garrett's head snapped toward it, the alpha in him responding before the rest of him caught up, and in the two seconds that his attention broke, I turned around and ran.
I ran hard and I ran quiet and I didn't look back.
Behind me, I heard shouting. Heard Garrett bark orders. Heard the settlement mobilizing for whatever was coming through the eastern border.
It took me longer than it should have to understand that whatever was coming through the eastern border was probably coming for me.
My twenty-first birthday, and the world had finally noticed I existed.
I ran faster.