Three days.
Or maybe three years. Or three minutes.
Time had stopped meaning anything in the Scourge.
Selene woke to the sound of dripping water and the taste of copper on her tongue. Her eyes opened—slowly, reluctantly, like surfacing from a drowning—and she found herself staring at a ceiling she didn't recognize. Glowing fungi pulsed above her, casting the cavern in shades of green and blue and a deep, unsettling violet that made her eyes ache.
She was lying on moss. Soft moss, warm moss, moss that seemed to breathe beneath her like a living thing. Her body ached in places she didn't know she had, but the sharp, stabbing pain from her leg was gone. The throbbing emptiness in her chest was... different.
Full, she realized. The hollow is full.
The Scourge mist still curled around her fingers, lazy as cats, content as lovers. It had stopped trying to enter her. It was already inside her, woven through her veins like a second circulatory system, humming with a dark, patient intelligence.
You're awake, the mist whispered. Not in words—in feelings. In certainties. Good. We have much to show you.
Selene sat up.
Her body moved differently now. Smoother. Stronger. The old limp was gone, replaced by a fluid grace that felt almost wrong, like wearing someone else's skin. She flexed her ankle, rolled her knee, twisted her spine—everything worked. Everything worked.
She touched her neck.
The silver scars were still there, branching across her throat like frozen lightning, but they no longer hurt. They felt like part of her. Like a new kind of marking. Not a mate's claim—something older. Something deeper.
The Scourge claimed you, the mist said. Not as a mate. As a vessel. As a daughter. As a weapon.
Selene looked around the cavern.
The bodies were still there. Dozens of them. Wolves in various states of decay, lying on the glowing moss like offerings on an altar. Some had been dead for centuries, their bones bleached white and scattered. Others looked almost fresh—their fur still had color, their eyes still had wetness.
One of them moved.
Selene's heart—still beating, still hers, despite everything—lurched in her chest.
A wolf lay twenty feet away, curled on his side, his chest rising and falling in shallow, irregular gasps. He was young, maybe nineteen or twenty, with shaggy brown fur and a collar that marked him as a rogue—no pack sigil, just a simple leather band with a single silver charm.
His leg was wrong.
Selene could see it even from here. The bone had snapped clean through, the jagged end pushing against the skin from the inside. Black veins climbed from the wound toward his chest, spreading like tree roots, like fingers, like death.
Sepsis. The infection had already reached his heart. He had maybe six hours. Less, if the Scourge mist decided to finish him off.
But the mist wasn't touching him.
Selene realized it with a start. The Scourge curled around the wolf, brushed against his fur, whispered across his skin—but it didn't enter him. It didn't fill him the way it had filled her.
Why? she asked the mist.
He is not empty, came the answer. He is full. Full of his own soul, his own wolf, his own self. There is no room for us.
But there was room in me.
You were hollow. Your mate tore out your bond, and your wolf retreated to save herself. You were a vessel waiting to be filled. We simply... obliged.
Selene should have been horrified.
She was horrified.
But underneath the horror, underneath the grief and the rage and the impossible strangeness of her new existence, there was something else.
Gratitude.
The Scourge had saved her life. Had saved her child's life. Had given her power she had never dreamed of, strength she had never possessed, a purpose she had never imagined.
She crawled toward the dying wolf.
The moss was soft beneath her hands and knees, springy and warm. The Scourge mist parted before her like a curtain, then closed behind her, leaving a trail of silver footprints that faded after a few seconds.
The wolf's eyes were open.
They were gold—a rich, warm amber—and they were terrified.
"Please," he rasped. His voice was young. Too young. He couldn't have been more than eighteen. "Please, I didn't mean to—I was just trying to cross—I didn't know the mist would—"
"Shh," Selene said.
She knelt beside him. Her hands hovered over his wound, and she felt something new stir inside her. Not the Scourge mist—something deeper. Something that had always been there, waiting for the right moment to wake up.
You can see it, she realized. You can see the rot.
And she could.
The infection in his leg wasn't just an abstract concept anymore. She could see it—a writhing, pulsing mass of black threads, wrapped around his bone, climbing through his veins, reaching toward his heart. She could see how fast it was moving. How much time he had left.
Four hours. Maybe five.
She could also see how to stop it.
The knowledge came from nowhere and everywhere—from the Scourge mist, from the cavern walls, from the bones of the dead wolves who had come before. It settled into her mind like a key turning in a lock, and suddenly she understood things she had never been taught.
The rot is alive. It wants to live. It will consume the host to survive. But rot can be redirected. Can be absorbed. Can be... eaten.
"You're going to live," Selene told the young wolf.
She didn't know why she said it. Didn't know if it was true. But the words felt right in her mouth, felt true in a way that had nothing to do with logic.
She pressed her palm to his wound.
The contact was electric.
The black threads of infection screamed—a high, thin sound that only Selene could hear, a sound like glass breaking underwater, like nails on a chalkboard, like the death of something that had never truly lived. The threads twisted, recoiled, tried to burrow deeper into the wolf's flesh—
And Selene pulled.
She didn't know how she did it. Didn't know what muscles she was using, what magic, what madness. She just willed the rot to leave the wolf's body and enter hers.
And it obeyed.
The black threads flowed up through her fingers like smoke, like water, like life. They curled around her wrists, climbed her arms, disappeared into the silver lines that branched across her skin. She felt them enter her bloodstream, her organs, her soul—
And she felt them settle.
Not hurting her. Not consuming her. Just... staying. Storing themselves inside her like a battery storing charge.
The wolf gasped.
His leg was knitting itself back together. Selene watched, fascinated and horrified, as the bone slid into place, as the flesh sealed itself, as the skin smoothed over pale and new as a baby's. The black veins receded, faded, vanished.
In less than a minute, the wound was gone.
Not healed—unmade. As if it had never existed.
The young wolf stared at his leg. Then at Selene. Then at his leg again.
"What," he said slowly, "are you?"
Selene looked at her hands.
The silver lines were brighter now, pulsing with a faint inner light. She could feel the rot inside her—the infection she had absorbed—waiting patiently for her to do something with it. Release it. Redirect it. Use it.
She had no idea how.
But she had time to learn.
"I'm the monster they made," she said.
---
The young wolf's name was Finn.
He was seventeen years old, a rogue from the Shattered Plains pack, which had been destroyed by a rival Alpha when Finn was twelve. He had spent the last five years running, hiding, stealing, surviving. He had tried to cross the Scourge because he had heard rumors of free lands to the east—lands without Alphas, without packs, without the endless cycle of violence and submission.
"I didn't know the mist would be like this," he said, gesturing at the glowing cavern around them. "I thought it was just... fog. Dangerous fog. But not... alive."
"The Scourge is alive," Selene said. She had learned that much in the past three days. "It's not a curse. It's not a punishment. It's a place. And it has rules."
"What rules?"
Selene didn't have an answer. Not yet. But she could feel the rules in her bones, the same way she could feel the rot inside her. The Scourge was teaching her, slowly, the way a mother teaches a child to walk.
One step at a time, the mist whispered. One lesson at a time. You have centuries to learn.
She didn't have centuries. She had a child growing inside her—a child who would be born in eight months, a child who would need a world to grow up in, a child who deserved better than a cave full of bones and a mother full of mist.
But first, she needed to survive.
"How did you get here?" Selene asked Finn. "The Scourge is supposed to kill anything that enters. But you're still alive. Barely, but alive."
Finn shrugged. "I'm fast. And lucky. And maybe the mist didn't want me."
He's right, the Scourge whispered. We didn't want him. He's too full of himself. Too stubborn. Too alive. He would have died eventually—the rot would have taken him—but we had no interest in claiming him.
Why did you claim me?
Because you asked. Not with words. With your emptiness. Your hollowness called to us across the boundary, and we answered. You are the first in three hundred years who was empty enough to hold us.
Selene pressed her hand to her stomach.
Her child's heartbeat was still there. Stronger now, somehow. As if the Scourge had fed it, nourished it, made it more than it would have been.
Your child is ours now, the mist said. Ours to protect. Ours to keep. Ours to raise, if you fall.
I won't fall.
Good. We would hate to raise another one. Children are so messy.
Selene almost laughed. Almost. The Scourge had a sense of humor—a dark, ancient, deeply unsettling sense of humor. She wasn't sure if that made things better or worse.
"Can you walk?" she asked Finn.
He tested his leg. The newly healed skin stretched and flexed without pain. He stood up slowly, cautiously, as if expecting the leg to collapse beneath him.
It didn't.
"I can walk," he said. Wonder colored his voice. "I can run. How did you—what did you—"
"I took the infection into myself," Selene said. "It's inside me now."
Finn's eyes went wide. "Is that... safe?"
"No," Selene said honestly. "But it's better than you dying."
She stood up. Her body felt different now—lighter, stronger, hungrier. The rot inside her was pressing against her insides, demanding to be released. She needed to get rid of it before it started affecting her.
Outside, the Scourge instructed. There's a dead tree at the cavern's entrance. Touch it. Push the rot into the wood.
Selene walked toward the entrance of the cavern—a narrow passage between two massive stalactites, lined with glowing crystals that hummed softly. Finn followed her, limping slightly but gaining strength with every step.
The passage opened onto a ledge overlooking a vast underground forest.
Selene stopped.
The forest stretched as far as she could see—trees made of crystal and bone, their branches hung with glowing fungi that swayed in a wind she couldn't feel. Rivers of silver liquid wound between the trees, flowing upward toward a ceiling that looked like a starry sky. And everywhere, everywhere, the Scourge mist curled and twisted and lived.
"This is beautiful," Finn whispered.
"It's a prison," Selene said. "We can't leave. No one leaves the Scourge."
Not true, the mist corrected. You can leave. You're part of us now. The Scourge is your body as much as your flesh is. You can go where you want. You just have to learn how.
Selene filed that information away for later.
She found the dead tree—a twisted thing made of black wood, its branches reaching toward the ceiling like frozen screams. She placed her palm against the trunk and pushed.
The rot flowed out of her.
It was a relief unlike anything she had ever felt. The infection left her fingers in a stream of black smoke, sinking into the dead wood, making the tree pulse with dark light. The trunk cracked. The branches trembled. And then—
The tree bloomed.
Black flowers erupted from every branch, their petals edged with silver, their centers glowing with faint green light. They smelled like night-blooming jasmine and old blood and something else—something that made Selene's empty heart ache.
Beautiful, the Scourge murmured. You made something beautiful from death. That is your gift, Selene Nightshade. You take rot and you make it bloom.
She pulled her hand away.
The flowers remained.
Finn stared at her with an expression she couldn't read—fear, wonder, hope, all mixed together. "You're not a monster," he said quietly. "You're a healer."
"I'm whatever I need to be," Selene said. "Right now, I need to be someone who survives. And so do you."
She turned back toward the cavern.
"We have work to do."
---
Six months later.
The Sanctuary was a rumor.
A whisper passed between dying wolves in the dark. A story told around campfires by rogues and outcasts, by exiles and runaways, by the broken and the forgotten.
There's a healer in the Scourge, they said. She wears a silver veil. Her touch cures the incurable. Her price is not gold or blood or favors—her price is a story. The truest, ugliest story you have.
She saved my cousin's life, one rogue claimed. His heart was pierced by a silver arrow. She pulled the rot out with her bare hands and sent him on his way.
She saved my mother, another said. The wasting sickness had eaten her lungs. The healer breathed into her mouth and the sickness came out as smoke.
She's not a wolf anymore, a third whispered. She's something else. Something the Goddess forgot.
Selene heard the rumors, sometimes, from the wolves who found their way to her cavern. She didn't correct them. The truth was stranger than any rumor, and far more dangerous.
The truth was that she had changed.
Her body was no longer entirely human—if it ever had been. The silver lines now covered her arms, her chest, her face, tracing patterns that looked almost like runes. Her eyes had shifted from gray to a pale, luminous green—the color of the Scourge mist. Her hair had grown long and white, bleached by the constant glow of the fungi.
She wore a silver veil now, not to hide her face, but to protect others. The Scourge mist had begun to leak from her eyes when she felt strong emotions—joy, rage, grief—and the mist was dangerous to anyone who wasn't her.
Finn had stayed.
He was her first patient, her first friend, her first follower. He had built a small shelter at the entrance to her cavern, had learned to navigate the Scourge's strange paths, had become her eyes and ears in the world of wolves that existed beyond the mist.
"Someone's coming," Finn said one evening, ducking through the cavern entrance.
Selene looked up from the poultice she was mixing—ground bone, Scourge fungi, a drop of her own blood. The mixture glowed faintly in the dark.
"Who?"
"Don't know yet. A wolf. Female. She's carrying something—a child, I think. She's been walking for days. She's almost dead."
Selene set down the poultice. "Bring her in."
Finn hesitated. "Selene... she's wearing a Crescent Pack sigil."
The words hit Selene like a physical blow.
Crescent Pack. Kael's pack. The pack that had thrown her into the mist. The pack that had killed her wolf, her bond, her life.
She hadn't thought about them in months. Hadn't let herself think about them. The memories were too sharp, too painful, too likely to make the mist leak from her eyes and hurt someone.
But the memories were still there. Buried, but not gone.
Kael's face as he kicked her into the mist.
His tears as he cut her mark.
The way he said "liar" when she told him about their child.
Selene touched her stomach.
Her belly was round now, heavy with the life inside her. The child moved constantly, kicking and rolling and demanding. The Scourge had made the pregnancy strange—the baby glowed faintly, sometimes, and Selene could hear its thoughts in the same way she heard the mist's whispers.
Soon, the child seemed to say. Soon I'll be born. Soon we'll go home.
But the Crescent Pack wasn't home. It had never been home.
"Bring her in," Selene said again, her voice hard. "But take her sigil first. I don't want that symbol in my Sanctuary."
Finn nodded and disappeared into the mist.
---
The wolf's name was Mira.
She was twenty-three years old, a Beta in the Crescent Pack, a soldier in Kael's personal guard. She had been married to a man named Theron, a Gamma who had died in a border skirmish six months ago. His body had never been recovered.
Mira was pregnant.
Seven months along, by her reckoning, though the baby seemed small and still inside her. Too still. Selene could see the rot from across the cavern—a gray, sluggish mass wrapped around the child's heart, slowly strangling it.
"The pack healer said there was nothing she could do," Mira said, her voice raw from crying. "She said the baby was dying. She said I should just... wait. Let nature take its course."
Selene knelt beside the woman.
The Crescent Pack sigil was gone—Finn had stripped it from Mira's cloak and thrown it into the mist. But the scent of the pack still clung to her, pine and rain and the ghost of Kael's presence.
Selene forced herself to focus on the patient, not the memories.
"I can save your child," she said. "But the price is a story. The truest, ugliest story you have."
Mira's eyes widened. "I don't have—I don't know—"
"Everyone has a story," Selene said. "The thing you've never told anyone. The thing that keeps you awake at night. The thing that makes you ashamed."
Mira was silent for a long moment.
Then she began to speak.
"I was there," she said quietly. "The night Alpha Kael rejected his mate."
Selene's hands froze over Mira's stomach.
"I was one of the Betas holding her down," Mira continued, her voice shaking. "I held her shoulders while he cut the mark. I felt her scream. I felt her break. And I did nothing. I told myself it was orders. I told myself she was weak. I told myself she deserved it."
Mira's eyes filled with tears.
"But she didn't deserve it. She was just... in love. And we destroyed her for it. And then Alpha Kael—" Mira's voice cracked. "He's been different since that night. Angrier. Colder. He doesn't sleep. He doesn't eat. He just... trains. Fights. Kills. He's not the same man."
Selene's heart—her cold, empty, Scourge-filled heart—throbbed once, painfully.
He regrets it, Lira whispered. From very far away. From the place where she was hiding, healing, waiting. He regrets what he did to us.
Good, Selene thought. I hope he regrets it forever.
She pressed her palms to Mira's stomach.
The rot around the child's heart was delicate work. Selene had to be careful—too much force would kill the baby. Too little would leave the infection behind.
She closed her eyes and pulled.
The gray mass unwound slowly, reluctantly, like a snake being dragged from its hole. It flowed up through Mira's belly, through Selene's fingers, into her arms, her chest, her soul.
The child's heartbeat grew stronger.
Mira gasped. "I can feel her moving. She's—she's kicking—"
Selene opened her eyes.
The rot was inside her now, settling next to the other infections she had absorbed over the past six months. She would release it later, into a dead tree or a pile of bones. For now, it could wait.
"Your daughter will live," Selene said. "She'll be strong. Healthy. She'll have your eyes and your stubbornness."
Mira burst into tears.
She tried to kneel, to bow, to worship—but Selene caught her arms and held her up.
"Don't," Selene said. "I'm not a goddess. I'm not a saint. I'm just someone who survived."
"What are you?" Mira whispered.
Selene considered the question.
She had asked herself the same thing, every day for the past six months. She had watched the Scourge change her, shape her, make her into something new. She had healed dozens of wolves—rogues and exiles and runaways, the forgotten children of the six packs. She had taken their rot into herself and turned it into flowers.
But she had also taken their stories.
Every patient paid the same price: the truest, ugliest story they had. And Selene kept those stories inside her, alongside the rot, stored in the hollow where her mate bond used to be.
She was becoming something more than a healer.
She was becoming a confession.
"I'm whatever they need me to be," Selene said finally. "Tonight, I was a midwife. Tomorrow, I might be a killer. The Scourge doesn't judge. Neither do I."
Mira looked at her with an expression that was half fear, half worship.
"The pack thinks you're dead," she said. "Alpha Kael declared it officially, three days after you were thrown in. There was a funeral. A memorial stone in the pack cemetery. He spoke at it."
Selene's jaw tightened. "What did he say?"
"He said... he said you were a victim of the Scourge. That you had wandered too close to the border. That he had tried to save you but couldn't. He lied to the entire pack. He lied to everyone."
Of course he did, Selene thought. The truth would destroy him. The truth would destroy everything he built.
"He also said," Mira continued hesitantly, "that if anyone ever spoke your name in his presence again, he would tear out their tongue."
Selene laughed.
It was not a pleasant sound.
It was the laugh of someone who had been broken and rebuilt, who had lost everything and found something darker, who had spent six months learning to turn pain into power.
"Tell me more about the pack," Selene said. "Tell me about Kael. Tell me everything."
And Mira, still weeping with joy over her living child, did.
---
Three months later.
Selene's daughter was born on the night of the Blood Moon.
The labor lasted eighteen hours—longer than any natural birth, shorter than any Selene had expected. The Scourge mist filled the cavern, coiling around her, supporting her, screaming with her as the child pushed its way into the world.
Finn caught the baby.
She was small—too small, Selene thought at first, panicking—but her lungs were strong. Her cry echoed off the cavern walls, startling the glowing fungi, making the Scourge mist recoil.
Then the mist returned.
It flowed toward the baby, curious and hungry, and Selene almost screamed—but the mist didn't hurt her daughter. It greeted her. Wrapped around her tiny fingers. Kissed her closed eyes.
She is ours too, the Scourge whispered. The first child born in the Scourge in three hundred years. She will be powerful. She will be dangerous. She will be beautiful.
Selene held her daughter for the first time.
The baby had silver hair—not white, not gray, but silver, like the Scourge mist given form. Her eyes, when they opened, were the same pale green as Selene's. And on her neck, just above her collarbone, there was a mark.
Not a mating mark.
Something else.
A pattern of silver lines that matched the ones on Selene's skin.
"She's perfect," Selene whispered.
She is, the Scourge agreed. We will protect her. We will teach her. We will make her strong.
No, Selene thought fiercely. I will protect her. I will teach her. I will make her strong. You're just the tool I use to do it.
The Scourge was silent for a moment.
Then, almost amused: As you wish, daughter. For now.
Selene named her daughter Nyra.
It was an old name, from the time before the packs, when wolves ran free and the Goddess walked among them. It meant "light in darkness" or "star born from shadow" or "the one who comes after."
Selene wasn't sure which meaning she preferred.
Maybe all of them.
---
One year later.
The Sanctuary had grown.
Word had spread—through rogues, through exiles, through the desperate and the dying. Wolves came from all six packs, crossing the Scourge's border, risking death for a chance at life.
Selene healed them all.
She took their rot. She took their infections. She took their curses and their cancers and their slow, wasting sicknesses. She stored everything inside herself, in the hollow that never quite closed, and then she released it into dead things—trees, bones, stones, anything that could hold the darkness without breaking.
She never charged gold. She never asked for loyalty or service or blood.
Just stories.
And the stories filled her.
She knew now about the Alpha who beat his Omega wife. About the Beta who had killed his own brother for a promotion. About the Luna who had poisoned her mate's food because he wouldn't stop cheating.
She knew about Kael, too.
Mira had returned to the Crescent Pack, but she came back to the Sanctuary every few months, bringing news, bringing stories, bringing warnings.
Alpha Kael is looking for you, Mira said six months after Nyra's birth. Not openly. But he's been asking questions. Sending scouts to the Scourge's border. He's heard the rumors about the healer. He wants to know if it's you.
Let him look, Selene said. He won't find me unless I want him to.
He's not the only one, Mira added. There's another Alpha asking about you. Darius Black. From the Shadow Fang pack. He's been hunting you for years.
Selene frowned. "I've never met Darius Black."
No, the Scourge whispered. But he's met your reputation. He's been looking for a healer who can break curses. His pack is dying of something—a plague, a blight, a curse from a rival. He thinks you're the only one who can save them.
Let him think that, Selene said. I don't work for Alphas. I work for the broken.
But the Scourge's whisper had an edge to it that made Selene uneasy.
He's persistent, the mist said. And he's powerful. And he's... interesting.
Interesting how?
You'll see.
---
Present day.
Selene sat in her cave-turned-clinic, stitching a wound on a child's arm.
The child—a girl of seven, feral-eyed and missing two fingers—had been bitten by a venomous wyrm three days ago. The poison was already in her liver, spreading slowly, killing her from the inside.
Selene had seen this a hundred times. The wyrm venom was nasty, aggressive, but predictable. She could pull it out in minutes.
"This will feel strange," she murmured through her veil. "Like falling asleep in warm rain. Don't fight it."
She pressed her palm to the girl's side.
The rot inside the small body unwound, curling up through Selene's fingers like smoke. She absorbed it—felt it settle next to the other infections, the other stories, the other deaths she had prevented—and then she released it into the dead tree beside her bed.
The tree bloomed.
Black flowers, edged with silver. They always did.
The girl's mother, a gaunt woman with haunted eyes, fell to her knees. "Thank you. Thank you. What is your price?"
Selene tilted her head. "Tell me why you were banished."
The woman's face crumbled.
"I... I loved the wrong wolf," she said. "My Alpha's son. He was promised to another. When we were caught, he rejected me to save his rank. They threw me out. The child is his."
Selene's chest tightened.
Rejected. The word still tasted like silver. Still made the hollow inside her ache. Still made the Scourge mist leak from her eyes, just a little.
"Your price is paid," Selene said. "Go. There's a passage east. It leads to free lands. Finn will show you the way."
The woman and child vanished into the mist.
Selene sat alone, pressing a hand to her stomach.
The hollow where her bond used to be was full now—full of rot, full of stories, full of the Scourge's dark gift. But there was one thing it would never hold.
Kael.
No matter how many infections she absorbed, no matter how many stories she collected, the space where Kael Bloodmoon had lived remained empty. A negative space. A wound that wouldn't heal.
Good, Lira whispered. She was stronger now, after a year of healing. Not fully recovered—she might never be fully recovered—but present. Aware. Angry.
Good, Selene agreed.
A crash shattered the silence.
Selene spun.
The entrance to her cave—hidden behind a waterfall of acidic mist, guarded by a maze of bone and crystal—had been torn open.
Three wolves staggered inside, bleeding from a dozen wounds. They wore the sigil of the Crescent Pack. Kael's pack.
And in the arms of the largest wolf, limp and gray-faced, was Alpha Kael himself.
His eyes were closed. His skin had the waxy sheen of the near-dead. A black, pulsing wound split his chest—not a claw mark, not a blade. Poison. A poison Selene recognized. One she had created three months ago and sold to a passing rogue for a pouch of silver and a story.
"For the man who ruined you," the rogue had said.
Selene had not asked who bought it.
Now she knew.
"Please," the guard begged. He fell to his knees. "The stories say you can heal anything. Our Alpha was struck by a cursed blade. The pack healers can't stop the rot. We'll pay anything. Anything."
Selene stepped closer.
Her veil caught the green light of the fungi. She looked down at Kael's face—still beautiful, still cruel, still hers in the way a scar is hers.
He was dying.
And she could save him.
Or she could watch him rot from the inside out, the way he had watched her fall into the mist.
"Anything?" she asked.
The guard nodded frantically.
Selene knelt beside Kael. She placed her palm over his poisoned heart. The rot inside him screamed—louder than any she had felt before. It recognized her. It loved her.
She could take it. In three heartbeats, he would be whole.
Or she could leave it. In three hours, he would be dead.
"Wake up, mate," she whispered, just for his ears.
His eyes fluttered open. Clouded. Blind from the poison's spread. He could not see her veil, her changed face, the wolf she had become.
"Who...?" he rasped.
"The woman you left for dead," Selene said. "And I'm going to save your life. But first—"
From the cave's second entrance, a new voice cut through the mist. Deep. Amused. Dangerous.
"First," said Alpha Darius Black, stepping into the light with a scar running from his temple to his jaw and a smirk that promised war, "you're going to explain why you've been hiding from me, little healer."
He held up a crescent-shaped pendant—the mate-finder charm he had stolen from the witches of the Iron Vale. It glowed gold. Fated gold.
"Because the Goddess," Darius said, "has a sick sense of humor. You're my second-chance mate."
Kael, blind and dying, snarled. "What?"
Selene looked from one Alpha to the other.
Her hand still pressed to her ex-mate's poisoned heart.
Her other hand reached for the dagger at her thigh.
Behind her, hidden in the shadows of the cave, one-year-old Nyra giggled—a sound like silver bells and breaking glass.
"This is going to be fun," Selene said.