Chapter 13
ROWAN
Freedom tastes like frost and blood. The moment the cold night air kisses my face, Wolf lunges forward from inside me—impatient, wild, and desperate to run. I don’t fight her. I can’t. The instincts I’ve been without for weeks are shattering like glass.
Shift, she growls. Now.
The first crack of bone steals my breath.
I forgot what this was like…
It punches through me like lightning, splintering wood—sharp, burning, and unforgiving. My spine arches violently, bowing under the force as vertebrae grind and realign in jagged, merciless bursts. Each pop echoes up my back like gunfire.
A raw scream tears from my throat.
This is worse than my first shift and a far cry from the ease I’d begun to settle into before Malrik took Wolf from me. This is messy and violent. A body remembering how to become something it almost forgot.
Pain lashes down my arms as the bones inside them shudder, elongate, and twist into new angles. My fingers curl, spasm, then fuse into paws—tendons snapping like taut wire before knitting themselves back together in molten waves.
My ribs cinch tight around my lungs, squeezing until I can’t breathe. Then they expand—too fast and wide—like someone inside me is remodeling. Each expansion sends a burst of heat flooding through my chest, a furnace igniting beneath my sternum.
Muscle tears away from bone.
Then reforms thicker. Denser.
More me.
A second crack ruptures down my legs. I collapse to my knees, palms—no, paws—digging into the snow as my thighs tremble and shorten, joints rearranging with brutal efficiency. Every nerve ending screams. Every breath is a gasp of fire and winter.
The world blurs. Colors smear at the edges of my vision. My human skin crawls like it’s trying to rip itself away from me, and I think it does. Bright silver and white fur bursts through my pores, racing across my body in a cascade of shimmering heat.
My jaw breaks next.
It splinters and reforms in a blink, a muzzle lengthening as teeth sharpen into fangs that I can feel, heavy and lethal in my mouth.
But underneath the pain—beneath the agony, the panic, the raw violent reprogramming of my own bones—there’s something else.
Relief.
Wolf surges up from within me, fierce and triumphant, howling into the fractures of my mind until we knit together again.
We’re back, she breathes, a mix of pride and hunger and home.
My vision snaps into crystalline clarity.
The snow around us glows under the moon. The cold no longer bites. Every scent splits into a thousand threads. Every sound whispers like a pulse in the air.
When the transformation settles, Wolf stretches our limbs, shaking out the stiffness, her paws sinking into the snow with a thump. The freedom is intoxicating.
But we’re not safe yet.
Malrik could find us at any moment. We have to move, but the very instant Wolf tries to pick a direction, confusion slams into us like a wall of poisonous fog. The world tilts sideways, the horizon blurring, the wind spinning us in circles.
Nothing looks familiar.
Nothing feels right.
Where are we? I demand.
It’s one of his spells, Wolf growls, irritation rippling through her. It’s how he keeps people from finding him. Plenty know this place exists—they just can’t reach it.
Then how the hell are we supposed to get away from it?! Panic spikes through me. There was a reason I didn’t try to run sooner. I knew it wouldn’t be easy. I knew Malrik wouldn’t leave the front door unlocked.
The same way we got out of The Keep. Wolf’s tone goes dry, almost mocking. Do what you were made to do.
Oh.
Right.
I can destroy this spell just like the other.
Wolf huffs. Not destroy. Unmake. There’s a difference.
She’s right, but I don’t waste time telling her so.
I lower us into the snow, pressing a paw against the ground the same way I did my hand against The Keep’s walls.
I couldn’t control my power before in wolf form, not during the battle at NightShade, but now, it comes to the surface with ease.
The earth trembles beneath us, the magic threaded through it like a net—tight, cold, and suffocating.
More of Malrik’s work.
A whole lattice of disorientation woven through the terrain, through the air, and through every sense of direction. It’s not meant to directly kill anyone.
It’s merely meant to keep them lost until they freeze to death. Far harsher than a swift ending, and I do my best to pretend that my loved ones aren’t adrift somewhere out here, suffering that same fate.
Or that I’m too late to do anything about it if they are.
With a renewed urgency, I press deeper with my magic, forcing my way through the snow, the frozen soil, and into the veins of power knotted underneath.
The spell writhes, resisting me—sharp edges scraping at my senses like broken glass. Dark, twisting energy tries to sink claws into my mind, to turn up into down, north into south, hope into helplessness.
Wolf snarls, bracing us. Push back.
Oh, I do.
The tether unfurls from my core, weaving outward, bright and pure and warm. It threads through Malrik’s spell like sunlight invading shadow. Piece by piece, I unravel it—pulling threads, snapping knots, peeling back layers of magic that have sat here for much too long.
The world shudders, and the fog in my mind cracks like ice.
A rush of cold air floods my senses, and suddenly, everything snaps into place.
The mountains take shape around us. The wind has a direction. The trees have edges again, but more than that…
I’m not alone.
There’s a presence. Another shifter. Male.
Wolf stiffens, ears pricking sharply. Someone’s close.
Then run the other way, I urge, dread curling in my gut. The last thing I need is another enemy. Another captor. Another problem.
Or, Wolf muses, far too casually, we could see if they’re an ally. If they’re not, we kill them.
Fantastic, I deadpan. We’re thirty seconds out of captivity, and you’re already planning homicide.
Please, she snorts. It’s not like you haven’t done it before.
Why did I miss her again?
I don’t get the chance to retort because the presence steps closer.
A low, warning rumble thrums through our chest. I feel it too—an unfamiliar presence brushing the edges of our awareness. Not Malrik. Not Cade or anyone else we know. Something older. Warmer. Closer.
Wolf inhales deeply, then stills. I know this scent, at least pieces of it, but I can’t identify it.
Well, that doesn’t make me feel any better.
The woods fall silent. Even the wind stops.
Then, from the darkness ahead, a voice cracks the air.
“Joce? … Jocelyn, baby. Is that really you?”
Wolf freezes mid-step.
A stranger moves between the trees—tall, broad-shouldered, wrapped in the scent of snow, pine sap, and worn leather with a large bag on his back.
His hair is dark except for streaks of silver at the temples, his beard short, his posture tense like a man who’s been walking through hell and doesn’t trust the path out.
But it’s his eyes that snare me.
A honey brown that shouldn’t be familiar yet tugs at my soul on a level I can’t explain.
And he called out my mother’s name.
Is he… What the hell is happening here?
He stares at us—at Wolf—with an intensity so raw it feels like it’s slicing through my ribs.
Wolf lowers her head, ears forward, inquisitive—dangerously so—but I don’t urge her to attack or run again. I can’t. Curiosity has me in a chokehold.
“Joce,” the man whispers once more, stepping closer.
“I—I knew you were here. They said you were… But I couldn’t believe it.
I wouldn’t accept that I’d lost you for good.
” His voice breaks like something old and bleeding.
“But you’re here, and you’re…” His expression hardens in an instant when it seems my wolf finally registers with him.
“How is this possible? How are you in this form?”
Every muscle in my wolf form locks.
This man thinks I’m my mother, and suddenly, based on the growl echoing from deep within his chest, he’s not happy about her being a wolf.
We need to go, I urge, panic flaring. Now.
Wolf takes another step forward, ignoring me like she’s so fond of doing.
But before I can argue further, the man inhales sharply, shaking his head as his voice drops to a whisper.
“No, it’s the spell out here,” he mutters. “I know I’ve been confused for days, but…Rowan? My sweet girl, is that really you? Is it you I’ve been tracking?”
Wolf stops dead.
My heart expands and teeters on the brink of shattering.
He takes another slow step forward, hands raised as if approaching something sacred, fragile, and impossible.
“You’re not Jocelyn,” he says with more certainty now. The words are firm, but also a little heartbroken. “You’re… gods.” His breath catches. “You’re her. You’re my daughter.”
The world teeters again.
He knows my name. My mother.
He knows me.
And when his eyes meet mine again, recognition slams into my chest with all the force of a shift.
Not memory.
Not scent.
Not logic.
Blood.
My throat closes, and my paws sink deeper into the snow.
And the man—Marius, as Iris called him, and a stranger who I thought I might never meet—falls to his knees like he’s praying.
“I found you,” he chokes out, voice breaking. “My Rowan.”
Conflicting emotions swirl through me, and I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with this moment.
I’ve dreamed of it a million times since I was a little girl, but never once did I imagine I’d be in the middle of nowhere, a psycho likely still hunting me, and also being in wolf form, unable to speak.
I want to say so much—to demand answers, scream at him, hug him, something, anything—but all I can do is stand here, claws dug into the earth, breath fogging in the moonlight.
There’s no way in hell I’m shifting back.
Even if I didn’t mind being naked in front of a stranger, I’m pretty sure I’d flash-freeze on the spot.