Chapter 17 Rhys
RHYS
For days, the trees were a blur of green and black. My paws shredded the underbrush, trying to outrun the poison in my veins. Couldn’t think. Couldn’t stop. Couldn’t fucking breathe.
The forest twisted around me, branches clawing at my fur, but I welcomed the sting. Let them tear me apart. At least that pain made sense.
The howling between the trees—no, wait, that sound was coming from me. My wolf was screaming at the moon, at the stars, at the cruel bitch who called herself the Shadow Moon Goddess.
Too fast. Too loud. Every sound scraped against my skull. Every scent burned my nose raw. I barreled through a gap between two pines, bark ripping across my shoulders, and the pain was good. Real. At least one thing was real when everything else was falling apart.
Mud under my claws. The copper scent of blood still overwhelming—hers? Mine?
It didn’t matter anymore. Nothing did.
Hours and hours passed, probably days, as I tore through Orion territory and then beyond the safety of my pack’s lands, chasing nothing, running from everything. The man in me was buried deep, curled up and whimpering behind my ribs. My wolf was done playing nice.
The sun rose on another day.
My claws caught roots, and I went down hard, shoulder slamming into a fallen log. Pain exploded up my side, but I just rolled with it, snapping at the air, at shadows, at the ghost of her scent, which still clung to my fur.
I bit down on a root, and it cracked between my teeth. Dirt and dead leaves and the iron taste of my own blood.
You chose this.
The words hit me like a sledgehammer, and I let them. The rejection. The bond. I let it all churn in my gut, broken glass and battery acid.
I ran again.
Stopping meant remembering her face when I’d rejected her. And remembering meant I’d tear my own heart out just to make it stop.
My wolf was running on pure instinct—no plan, no direction, just raw movement to keep from imploding. And I watched from somewhere deep inside, helpless as he charged through the forest like a rabid thing.
He wasn’t protecting me—he was protecting the shell of me. The broken thing. My wolf knew I couldn’t handle what I’d done, so he took over. Simple. Efficient. Brutal.
But he was running blind. Another day was passing.
You don’t know where you’re going, I said.
He growled.
We need to think. Maybe she lied about them being dead.
Another snarl—deeper this time, edged with desperation. A warning to shut the hell up and let him handle this.
I pressed anyway. We can’t run forever.
He didn’t answer, but his next step was slower. Then another. And another.
Until we stopped.
My chest felt like someone had reached inside and scooped out everything that mattered. The bond… even thinking the word sent lightning through my skull, white-hot agony that made my vision fracture.
My wolf collapsed. My legs folded under me. The forest floor was cold and wet, seeping through my fur, but I barely felt it. Darkness pressed in from all sides.
I’d never expected the rejection would be like this. Like dying, but worse—because death at least promised an end. This was an ending that kept going, a fracture that spread with every heartbeat.
I remembered my mother’s stories about the old days, before the Great Separation.
About wolves finding their mates and feeling whole for the first time.
About the strength it gave them, the certainty.
The unbreakable connection that even death merely muted rather than severed.
They were stories of the myth that was fated mates—they were never to become real.
“It is said the royal bloodlines were blessed with the strongest bonds,” she’d recounted to us, running her fingers through my hair while Logan and the twins played nearby. “Orion most of all. The Shadow Moon Goddess favored our line, blessed us with her gifts.”
Now I understood why rejection had never been part of her stories.
This was never meant to happen. The bond wasn’t designed to break.
Stars appeared between the branches overhead. Sparkling, as if they were laughing at the broken thing I’d become.
Stars, like the night my parents died.
I’d been eighteen. Logan twenty. The twins just fourteen with their gangly limbs and laughter.
We’d gone hunting in the northern territory, tracking a stag throughout the day and into twilight.
A family tradition from Father’s own youth that he insisted on us carrying forward. He’d stayed behind with our mother.
We should have been there when it happened.
According to those who survived, the attack came without warning. No scent of approaching enemies, no sounds of battle. Just the eerie quiet of the main house when we returned, drag marks from the door to the garden, and blood. So much blood.
They’d been dead for hours by the time we found them. Their throats torn out. Their bodies surrounded by ash and strange symbols that none of the elders recognized.
No challenge issued. No territory claimed. Just death, swift and silent as winter snow.
It hadn’t been a coup or a rival pack. Whatever it was, it had slipped past our sentries without triggering a single alarm. Something that killed our parents—the alpha and his mate—and left without taking what any enemy would have wanted: power, control, the right to lead Orion.
Logan assumed the role of alpha immediately. At twenty-five, he became the youngest alpha in Orion’s history. I couldn’t be his beta then. I was too angry, too damaged to think clearly. Too haunted by what we’d lost.
Then the twins disappeared.
And now this—a bond I never asked for, shattered by my own rage, bleeding me dry one second at a time.
This is how it ends, I thought. Not defending my pack. Not finding my brothers. Just dying alone in the dark because I couldn’t accept what the Goddess gave me.
My vision started to blur, spots of black creeping in from the edges. My wolf tried to lift his head, but that was too much effort. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t die. I would just lie here and wait for whatever was coming next.
That was when the scent hit me.
Faint at first, threading through the night air underneath the smell of my own misery. But it was there, and it made every hair on my body stand up.
Magic. Old magic. The kind that predated everything we knew about pack law and territory.
And underneath it—death.
My wolf forced his head up, ears swiveling toward the sound of footsteps. Deliberate. Purposeful. Whatever was out there wasn’t just passing through.
It was hunting.
Get up, I thought, even though I was exhausted. We have to move.
A figure emerged from the shadows between the trees. A human form, but moving with a fluid grace that screamed predator. Tall, lean, wrapped in dark fabric that seemed to swallow the moonlight whole.
My wolf tried to growl. All that came out was a pathetic wheeze. We were in no shape for a fight, but every instinct we had left was blaring warnings.
The figure stopped at the edge of the clearing, close enough that I could make out more details. Female. Ancient power radiated from her in a way that made my broken soul want to crawl deeper into the earth.
And her eyes—even in the darkness—they glowed with their own cold light.
“Poor little wolf,” she said, and each word wrapped around my spine like ice. “So broken. So very, very lost.”
She took a step closer, and another layer of her scent hit me. Something that made my blood slow despite the fire burning through my veins.
“You’re far from home, aren’t you?” Another step, slow and measured. “Far from your pack. Far from the little mate who shattered you so beautifully.”
My wolf tried to scramble backward, but my legs wouldn’t cooperate. We could only lie there, helpless, as she approached with the patient confidence of something that had never known fear.
“Don’t worry,” she said, crouching down just out of reach. “I’m not here to hurt you.”
Her hand moved to her throat, fingers closing around something that caught the starlight and threw it back in fragments that hurt to look at. She was familiar, even though I couldn’t make out her face with that fucking pendant reflecting starlight in my eyes.
The pendant pulsed.
“You’re going to come with me,” she said, and her magic reached out like invisible hands. “There are things you need to see, little wolf. Several wrongs that are yet to be made right.”
Her power closed in, pushing visions into my head that put any words Sable had said to shame. I’d thought the agony of the rejection, of unfinished business for my pack, was the worst thing that could happen to me.
I was wrong.