"The Moon Goddess has finally blessed me," Colt’s voice echoed through the speakers, filling the grand hall.

His voice sounded different now. The Alpha tone that usually made my chest warm with pride and submission now felt like a physical blow to my ribs.

He pulled Camille flush against his side. She looked up at him through thick, dark lashes, a picture of perfect devotion.

"She revealed my true fated mate to me," Colt declared, his eyes scanning the cheering crowd before settling back on Camille. "My future Luna."

He leaned down and pressed a lingering kiss to her temple.

As he did, a wave of scent rolled off the stage and hit the front rows. It traveled fast, suffocating the delicate, natural smell of the white peonies I had arranged just hours ago. It was floral. Overwhelmingly, aggressively floral. It smelled like jasmine and crushed roses, but there was a sharp, chemical edge to it. It didn't smell like a wolf's natural aura. It smelled like a department store perfume counter.

It smelled exactly like the natural scent Colt had ordered me to suppress.

*Tone it down, Nyomi. It's distracting.*

My stomach violently twisted. He hadn't hated my scent. He just hadn't wanted it from me. Now he was breathing in Camille’s cheap, synthetic imitation like a starving man, burying his nose deeply into her dark hair.

The hall erupted. Men howled. Women cheered and clapped, stomping their feet against the wooden floorboards. The noise was a physical weight pressing down on my shoulders, pinning my feet to the ground.

I couldn't move. I couldn't breathe. Three years. Three years of waking up at dawn to manage his house. Three years of swallowing my pride, taking unscented showers, and silencing my inner wolf so I wouldn't be a nuisance to his Alpha sensibilities. All of it collapsed in the space of a single heartbeat.

I was a placeholder. I had always been a placeholder.

"Move out of the way, Omega."

The sharp whisper cut through the ringing in my ears. I blinked, my vision slowly coming back into focus.

Sasha Vance, Camille’s right-hand Delta, was walking straight toward me. She was flanked by three other elite females from their clique. They didn't alter their path to go around me. They marched forward like I was nothing but a minor obstacle in their way.

Sasha held a crystal goblet filled to the brim with dark red wine. As she brushed past my shoulder, she didn't even pretend to stumble. She simply tilted her wrist.

The cold liquid splashed directly onto the bodice of my deep green dress. It soaked through the fabric instantly, a freezing, sticky shock against my skin. It dripped down my stomach and pooled at the hem.

I gasped, taking a clumsy step back.

Sasha stopped and looked at me. Her lips curved into a cruel, jagged smile. "Oops," she said, her voice dripping with fake sympathy. "So sorry, Nyomi. But really, you should know better than to stand so close to the spotlight. It makes you look desperate."

One of the girls behind her snickered. "Omegas really need to learn their place. Did she actually think she was getting the Luna title tonight?"

"With that cheap metal on her finger?" Sasha scoffed, eyeing my left hand. "Please. He practically bought that out of a vending machine."

They laughed, the sound sharp and ugly, before shoving past me to get closer to the stage. One of them bumped my shoulder hard enough that my heel caught on the floorboards. I barely caught my balance.

Nobody helped me. Nobody even looked at me. Three hundred wolves in this room, and I was entirely, utterly alone.

I looked down at the dark, spreading stain on my dress. It looked like a bleeding wound.

I didn't cry. My eyes were dry, burning with a strange, hollow heat. The shock had burned away the tears before they could even form.

I turned my back on the stage. I didn't look at Colt. I didn't look at Camille. I just put one foot in front of the other, slipping through the heavy side doors and out into the dimly lit corridor.

The heavy oak doors clicked shut behind me, muting the wild cheers of the pack. The sudden quiet of the hallway was almost deafening. The air out here was cool, smelling of floor wax and old wood, totally free of Camille's suffocating perfume.

I stopped walking and leaned against the wall, sliding down until I hit the floor.

My hands were shaking. I lifted my left hand and stared at it.

The titanium ring caught the flickering light of a nearby wall sconce. It was thick, dull, and heavy. It didn't sparkle. It didn't catch the light the way a diamond would. It was just a solid, unbreakable band of industrial metal.

*It doesn't come off,* Colt had said, laughing when the jeweler couldn't scratch it.

I pressed my thumb against the cold metal, twisting it. It was tight. It had always been a little too tight, restricting the blood flow just enough to remind me it was there.

It wasn't a promise. A promise was given freely. A promise was meant to be beautiful.

This was a collar. It was a tag on a stray dog. He had chained me down with a piece of unbreakable metal so I would sit quietly in the corner and wait, keeping his bed warm and his house clean until his real prize came along.

I closed my eyes and reached inward, searching the deep, dark spaces of my mind for my inner wolf. I needed her. I needed her anger, her strength, her fangs. I needed her to howl and tear down the walls of this pack house.

*Please,* I whispered to her in my mind. *Please wake up.*

Nothing.

There was no answering growl. No comforting warmth. Just a vast, dead silence. I had shoved her down into the dark for so long, starving her of our natural scent, silencing her instincts to make Colt comfortable. Now, when I needed her most, she was gone. She was either too deeply buried to hear me, or she was simply dead from a broken heart.

I opened my eyes. A single drop of red wine fell from the hem of my ruined dress and hit the polished floorboards.

*Plop.*

It looked exactly like a drop of blood.

I stared at it for a long time. The cheers from the banquet hall rumbled through the walls, vibrating against my spine. They were celebrating their new Luna. They were celebrating the Alpha who had just shattered me into a thousand pieces.

I gripped the titanium ring, pulling at it with my right hand. It didn't budge. It dug painfully into my skin, scraping over my knuckle, refusing to let go.

I let my hand drop to my lap. The coldness of the wine was seeping into my bones, but beneath it, a tiny, unfamiliar spark of absolute clarity began to take root.

I didn't sleep that night.

I sat on the floor of the corridor until the banquet noise died down, until the last drunk Delta stumbled past me without a glance, until the pack house went dark and silent. Then I peeled myself off the floor, walked to the room I'd shared with Colt for three years, and sat on the edge of the bed.

I didn't pack. I didn't cry. I just sat there, staring at the wine stain on my dress, waiting for something that I couldn't name.

It came at seven in the morning.

A knock. Sharp, businesslike. I opened the door to find Marcus Webb, Colt's Beta, standing in the hallway with a cardboard box and an expression that was carefully, professionally blank.

"Nyomi." He didn't meet my eyes. "Alpha Colt has requested that you relocate to the Omega quarters by noon. Your personal belongings have been sorted. Anything that belongs to the Alpha suite stays."

I looked at the box in his hands. It was small. The kind you'd use for a pair of shoes.

"That's everything?" I asked.

Marcus shifted his weight. For a brief second, something flickered across his face — discomfort, maybe guilt — but it vanished before I could name it. "That's everything that's yours."

Three years. Three years of living in this room, sleeping in that bed, folding his shirts, arranging his books on the shelf by the window. And everything that was mine fit in a shoe box.

I took it from him. It was light. Painfully light.

"The ring stays on," Marcus added quietly, already turning to leave. "Alpha's orders."

I looked down at my left hand. The titanium band sat there, dull and immovable, like it had grown into my bone.

Of course. He didn't want me, but he wouldn't release me either. I was still his property. Still tagged.

The Omega quarters were in the basement of the pack house — a long, windowless hallway with six narrow rooms, each containing a single cot, a metal shelf, and a bare bulb hanging from the ceiling. The walls were unpainted cinder block. The air smelled like mildew and industrial cleaner.

I set my box on the cot. Inside: a hairbrush, a photo of my mother who died when I was four, a worn copy of a novel I'd read six times, and Barnaby's spare leash. That was it. That was my entire life, reduced to objects that could fit in my lap.

I sat down. The cot springs groaned.

Above me, through the thin ceiling, I could hear footsteps. Laughter. The sound of furniture being moved. Camille was settling into the Alpha suite. My suite. The sheets I had changed yesterday morning were probably already stripped and replaced with something red and silk.

I pressed my palms flat against my knees and breathed.

---

By two o'clock, Camille found her rhythm.

A young Omega girl appeared at my door, eyes wide and apologetic. "Miss Camille says you're to report to the training yard. There's mud from last night's rain. She wants it scrubbed before the evening session."

I stared at her. "Scrubbed."

"Yes, ma'am. On hands and knees. She said — she said to use the small brush."

The training yard was a massive, open-air rectangle behind the pack house, bordered by packed earth and lined with wooden sparring posts. Last night's storm had turned the ground into a churned mess of brown sludge. It would take hours. It was also completely pointless — the warriors would destroy it again within minutes of their next session.

That was the point.

I took the small brush. I walked outside.

The October air hit my face, cold and damp. The yard stretched out in front of me, a sea of thick, wet mud dotted with boot prints and claw marks. A bucket of soapy water sat at the edge, along with a scrub brush the size of my palm.

I got on my knees.

The mud soaked through my jeans immediately, cold and gritty against my skin. I dipped the brush and started scrubbing. The bristles barely made a difference. I was essentially pushing mud from one spot to another, leaving faint, clean streaks that filled back in within seconds.

It didn't matter. I kept going.

Within twenty minutes, the first audience arrived.

Three warriors — men I had once served dinner to, men who had nodded politely at me when I stood beside Colt — leaned against the fence posts with their arms crossed. They didn't say anything at first. They just watched. One of them smirked. Another elbowed his friend and tilted his chin toward me.

Then Sasha appeared.

She walked up to the fence with her phone already raised, the camera pointed directly at me. She didn't try to hide it. She held it up like a tourist filming a street performer.

"Smile, Nyomi," she called out. Her voice was bright, cheerful, dripping with amusement. "The pack network needs some entertainment today. Everyone's been asking what happened to the Alpha's little pet."

I didn't look up. I kept scrubbing.

"Oh come on," Sasha laughed. "At least give us a reaction. You're so boring when you're quiet." She turned to the warriors. "Isn't she boring?"

One of them chuckled. "Always was."

Sasha panned her phone slowly across the yard — my muddy knees, my raw hands, the pathetic little brush, the endless expanse of dirt. "Caption ideas?" she asked her phone. "'From Luna dreams to mud queen'? Or maybe 'Know your place'?"

She posted it. I heard the notification chime.

My hands kept moving. Scrub. Dip. Scrub. The repetition was the only thing keeping me from shattering. If I stopped, if I looked up, if I acknowledged any of it, I would break in a way that couldn't be fixed.

So I scrubbed.

The mud was endless. My back ached. My knees were raw. The sun moved across the sky and I didn't stop.

---

I was still covered in dried mud when the summons came for the pack run.

Mandatory. No exceptions. Every wolf in Silverfang, from Alpha to Omega, ran together under the full moon. It was tradition. It was law.

I stood at the tree line with the other Omegas, shivering in the evening chill. My body was exhausted — six hours on my knees in the yard, no food since yesterday's banquet, my muscles trembling with fatigue. Around me, wolves were already shifting. The air filled with the sound of cracking bones and rustling fur as bodies transformed, growing larger, more powerful.

Colt stood at the front of the pack in his human form, watching. Camille was beside him, already shifted into a sleek, dark-furred wolf that pressed against his leg. He ran his hand along her spine absently, like petting a prize show dog.

His eyes found me across the clearing. They were flat. Expectant.

"Everyone runs," he said. Not to me specifically. To the pack. But his gaze didn't move.

I closed my eyes and reached inward.

The shift was supposed to feel like falling into warm water. That's how the others described it — a rush, a release, a joyful surrender to the wolf within. For me, it felt like dragging something dead up from the bottom of a well.

I pulled. I begged. I clawed at the dark, silent place where my wolf lived.

And slowly, agonizingly, she came.

The transformation was wrong. I felt it immediately. My bones cracked too slowly, grinding rather than snapping clean. My skin rippled and tore rather than flowing smoothly into fur. When it was finally over, I stood on four trembling legs and knew — without seeing myself — that something was deeply, visibly wrong.

I was small. Half the size of the other females. My fur was thin and patchy, a dull, grayish color that looked like dirty dishwater. My ribs were visible beneath the sparse coat. I looked like a sick dog, not a wolf.

The clearing went quiet.

Then someone laughed. A single, sharp bark of disbelief. It spread quickly — snickers, whispers, open stares. Even the other Omegas edged away from me, as if whatever I had was contagious.

Sasha's wolf — glossy, well-fed, a rich chestnut brown — trotted past me and deliberately bumped my shoulder. I stumbled sideways, my weak legs barely catching me.

Colt watched from the front. His expression didn't change. He simply turned away, shifted into his massive black wolf form, and launched into the forest.

The pack followed. Three hundred wolves surging forward in a thunder of paws and muscle.

I ran. Or tried to. My legs shook with every stride. The pack pulled ahead of me within seconds, their powerful forms disappearing into the dark trees while I limped behind, gasping, my small body struggling over roots and rocks that the others cleared effortlessly.

The distance between us grew. The sound of the pack faded. The forest closed in around me — dark, cold, indifferent.

I ran alone.

Camille's wolf was beautiful. I hated that I noticed.

She was pure white — not the dirty, yellowish white of old snow, but the clean, blinding white of fresh paper. Her coat was thick and glossy, every strand catching the moonlight as she ran. She moved like water, effortless and fast, her paws barely seeming to touch the ground.

I was still limping somewhere in the middle of the pack when she circled back.

I didn't see it coming. I was watching my own feet, trying to keep my trembling legs from folding under me, when something massive slammed into my left shoulder. The impact was clean and deliberate — not an accident, not a stumble. A check. The kind you throw when you want someone to go down.

I went down.

The mud came up fast. I hit it face-first, sliding several feet before I stopped, my small body half-buried in the cold, wet earth. The impact knocked the air out of me completely. I lay there for a second, stunned, tasting mud and dead leaves.

Above me, Camille's white wolf paused. She looked down at me with pale, cold eyes. Then she shook herself — a single, elegant motion that sent a spray of mud across my already ruined fur — and ran on.

The rest of the pack thundered past me without breaking stride. Paws hit the ground inches from my head. No one stopped. No one looked down. I was just an obstacle in the path, something to step around.

I pushed myself upright. My legs shook badly. My left shoulder screamed where she'd hit me. I stood there in the dark, covered in mud, watching the last wolves disappear into the trees.

Then I started walking.

I didn't run. I couldn't. I just walked, slowly, through the dark forest, following the distant sound of the pack until the trees thinned and the lights of the pack house came back into view.

---

The post-run dinner was held in the great hall, long tables set end to end, the air thick with the smell of roasted meat and woodsmoke. Wolves filled the benches in their human forms, loud and flushed from the run, still buzzing with that particular energy that came after a shift.

I stood in the doorway for a moment, still damp, my shoulder aching, a streak of dried mud along my jaw that I hadn't been able to fully wipe away.

A young Omega boy appeared at my elbow. He pointed wordlessly toward the far end of the hall, where a single narrow table sat pushed against the back wall, half-hidden behind a support pillar. The Omega table. Four other Omegas were already seated there, heads down, eating quietly.

I walked to it.

At the Alpha table, Colt sat at the head, Camille pressed close against his side. She had changed into a white dress that matched her wolf form, her dark hair loose and perfect, her hand resting on Colt's forearm like she'd been doing it for years. She was laughing at something he said, her head thrown back, the sound carrying across the entire hall.

She made sure it carried. That was the point.

I sat down and looked at the empty space in front of me.

A few minutes later, a plate appeared. It was set down hard enough that it scraped against the wood. I looked up.

One of Camille's girls — a Delta named Priya, with sharp cheekbones and sharper eyes — stood over me with her arms crossed. She looked at the plate, then at me, with the expression of someone who had just done something they found deeply amusing.

The plate held kitchen scraps. Literally. Bread crusts. A few spoonfuls of something that might have been stew, scraped from the bottom of a pot. A bruised apple.

Priya smiled. "Eat up," she said, loud enough for the nearby tables to hear. "The Moon Goddess already said no. Least you can do is not waste good food on a lost cause."

Someone at the next table snickered.

"Three years," Priya continued, tilting her head like she was genuinely puzzled. "Three whole years, and you still don't get it. He was never going to mark you, Nyomi. You were just... convenient."

I picked up the bread crust. I took a bite.

Priya waited for a reaction. When she didn't get one, the amusement on her face curdled slightly into something uglier. She leaned down, dropping her voice. "You should leave. Staying just makes you look pathetic."

I chewed. Swallowed. Reached for the apple.

She made a disgusted sound and walked away.

I ate everything on the plate. Not because I was hungry — I was, but that wasn't why. I ate it because putting something in my stomach was a practical thing, and practical things were the only things I could manage right now. One practical thing at a time.

At the Alpha table, Camille laughed again. Colt smiled down at her.

I didn't look away. I made myself watch for exactly three seconds, long enough to let it be real, long enough to stop pretending it might still hurt less if I didn't look directly at it.

Then I looked back at my plate.

---

The storm came in fast, the way October storms do in upstate New York — no warning, just a sudden drop in pressure and then the sky opening up all at once.

I was still at the Omega table when the rain started hammering the windows. Most of the pack had already drifted away from dinner, back to their rooms, back to their lives. I was in no hurry. The Omega quarters were cold and damp even on dry nights.

The young Omega boy found me again. He looked genuinely uncomfortable this time, his eyes not quite meeting mine.

"Miss Camille gave orders," he said quietly. "The pack house is locked for the night. Omegas without assigned duties are to shelter in the yard outbuilding."

I looked at him. "The outbuilding doesn't have a roof on the east side."

He swallowed. "I know."

I stood up.

The guards at the back door were two men I recognized — Deltas who had eaten at my table when I was still in the Alpha suite, men I had served coffee to on Sunday mornings. They didn't look at me as I walked past them into the rain. One of them reached back and pulled the door shut behind me. I heard the bolt slide home.

The cold hit me like a wall. The rain was heavy and driving, the kind that soaks through everything in seconds. I stood on the back steps for a moment, blinking against it, then walked.

Barnaby found me at the border tree.

I didn't know how he'd gotten out — someone must have left a gate unlatched, or he'd pushed through a gap in the fence the way he sometimes did when he was anxious. He was soaked, his golden fur plastered flat against his body, his tail wagging low and uncertain. When he saw me, the tail went faster.

I sat down under the tree. The roots were thick enough that the ground beneath them was only half-wet. Barnaby climbed immediately into my lap, all forty pounds of him, pressing his damp head against my chest.

I put my arms around him.

The rain came down in sheets. The pack house lights glowed warm and yellow through the trees, every window lit, the sound of music and voices drifting faintly through the storm. In there, Camille was probably curled against Colt's side in front of a fire, wearing my sheets, breathing in the room I had kept for three years.

Out here, I sat in the mud with a wet dog and a titanium ring that wouldn't come off.

Barnaby licked my jaw, right over the dried mud streak. Once, twice. Methodical and gentle, the way he always cleaned my face when I was upset, as if he could fix things with enough patience.

I pressed my face into the top of his head and breathed.

The rain kept falling. The border trees swayed. Somewhere deep in the dark forest behind me, something shifted — a sound, or maybe just a feeling, the faint, distant impression of being watched by something very large and very still.

I didn't turn around.

Barnaby's ears pricked forward. His tail, which had gone still, began to wag again — slow, curious, not afraid.

I held him tighter and stared at the pack house lights through the rain.