Chapter 2
Before
Ten-year-old Adea
My father was the Alpha of the Ice Kingdom, and my mother was his Luna. His blood soaked the grass of our territory.
I knew every face in that circle. I’d grown up breathing them in—wood smoke, pine, freedom. A happy pack was a sound too, a low hum at the back of your skull that you didn’t notice until the day it stopped.
The challenge came from a wolf named Davien during my birthday month.
A mountain of a man with cold blue eyes stepped into our circle; his presence carried a finality heavy enough to feel long before the first blow landed.
My dad accepted the challenge. He was fast, but Davien was an unmoving force.
The crunch of Davien’s nose shattering under my father’s fist sent a surge of pride through my chest. I’d fist-pumped the air while my little sister, Ava, copied my movements, her high-pitched cheers echoing mine. We were princesses; we didn’t know crowns could be crushed.
Then the mountain moved.
The shift was instant. Davien didn’t just win; he dismantled my father, peeling away his dignity until the Alpha was forced to crawl. When the words were spoken—the stripping of rank—the pack bond withered, root and all, in an instant.
We found refuge in a human city, a suffocating grid of concrete where the air smelled of exhaust instead of pines.
The silence that came with being unlinked was an ache in my chest, but watching my parents was worse.
My father, who used to run a kingdom, spent his nights hunched over a glowing laptop, staring at construction spreadsheets.
My mother’s brilliant golden eyes grew dull as she forced a polite smile at a local farmers’ market, paying a human vendor for fruit she used to forage.
Their wolves paced beneath their skin, trapped behind drywall and cut off from their community.
Dad told us stories about the construction sites while Mom cooked things we had to pay double the cost for. We ate at a table that didn’t vibrate with the pack bond, in a kitchen that smelled of dish soap instead of home, and we pretended the hum of the refrigerator was enough.
“Just wait until you see this one,” he’d told us, his eyes bright with the excitement of his latest project—an internet cafe he’d built with his own calloused hands.
Even with his sunken features and withered hair, it was a testament to his survival, proof he could build a life even when his biology screamed it was all over.
When others would have gone rabid—he remained solid for us.
We were on our way to his masterpiece when it happened.
My mother’s floral scent curdled. My father’s hands left the wheel as his eyes found mine in the rearview.
The semi-truck didn’t just hit our car; it erased my family.
I remember my mother’s hand reaching back toward us—fingers spread, instinct before thought—and then the world became sound.
Metal and glass and the absence of my sister’s voice, all at once.
I woke up to the steady heartbeat of a hospital monitor, needle in my arm, and a tube lodged down my throat. It tasted of latex and old blood, a sterile invasion that kept the scream trapped in my lungs.
The silence was back. But this time, it was a void and I was the only soul left to inhabit it.
“She’s coming to. Hey, honey?”
The voice was kind, but unfamiliar. I panicked. Everything was too bright, too loud, and my body ached in places I didn’t have names for. When my fingers brushed plastic, I yanked. I spluttered and coughed as the tubes slid up my throat—a raw tearing that tasted like blood and sanitation.
Every breath was a serrated blade in my chest. Tears blurred the world into smears of color, but I didn’t care. Where was my father? Where was Ava?
The nurse was there in a heartbeat, pinning my shaking hands.
“Where’s my mom?” I croaked, the words barely mine.
I saw only pity; she didn’t have to say the words. It was reflected in her eyes.
“Honey… they died on impact. You’re the only one who survived.”
I was too cold for tears. A wolf without a pack, without family.
I reached out with my mind the way I had a thousand times before—for my mother first, then my father, then Ava.
The warmth that should have been there wasn’t.
Not dimmed, not distant. Gone. Nothing to mark that anything had ever burned there at all.
I thrashed. I screamed for people who would never answer, until the prick of a needle sent a heavy peace through my veins.
I slumped back into the cold, crisp sheets of a room that smelled too much of bleach and not enough of the earth.
“The accident happened on Half Moon territory,” she whispered as I drifted. “Alpha Jaxon has taken care of everything.”
“What’s going to happen now?” I asked groggily.
“Alpha Jaxon has informed us you’re to be cared for as a pack member. He’s paid the bill and you’re to go home with him.”
Her eyes fogged over—the white-out of a mind-link.
A private bridge I was no longer allowed to access.
Seeing that telepathic flicker in a stranger made the lump in my throat impossible to swallow.
The worst part wasn’t being locked out. It was knowing how the inside of a pack bond felt.
Not from the outside looking in, but from the center of it, surrounded by it. And having it severed.
Then came the sun.
Mavy burst in, all black hair and silver eyes. She was dimpled and bright, and she spoke to me as if my life wasn’t shattering. I didn’t need to talk. She did all of that. She filled the quiet with details of her big home, Lycan Academy, and the boy named Trent who was “prettier than her.”
I didn’t follow half of what she said. I didn’t need to. Her voice was a window thrown open in a room that had been sealed shut—I just sat in it and breathed. It was the closest I’d been to someone since we lost our pack.
She squeezed my fingers, her dimples flashing with hope. I forced a smile, the muscles of my face aching with the weight of the lie. Her warmth was a mercy.
I looked past her, toward the door. I knew what the nurse wouldn’t say. I felt a flicker of relief that I wasn’t alone, but deep down, beneath the hole in my chest, I knew the truth.
I wasn’t being rescued.