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.

The rain didn't stop until almost dawn.

I sat under that border tree for hours, Barnaby warm and heavy in my lap, listening to the storm work itself out against the leaves. At some point the pack house lights went dark, one window at a time, until the whole building was just a black shape against a black sky.

I should have been cold. I was cold. But there was something else underneath it — that same strange clarity from the night of the banquet, quiet and sharp, like a blade that hadn't been used yet.

Barnaby had gone still in my arms a while back, his ears forward, his nose working the air toward the dark tree line behind us. His tail moved in slow, steady sweeps. Not afraid. Curious. The way he got when he sensed something large and calm nearby — something that didn't feel like a threat, even if it probably should.

I didn't turn around.

I don't know why. Maybe I was too tired. Maybe some part of me already knew that whatever was back there in the dark wasn't going to hurt me, and that knowledge was so foreign and so fragile that looking directly at it might break it.

So I just sat there, holding my dog, staring at the dead windows of the pack house, while the rain thinned to a drizzle and then stopped entirely.

Whoever — whatever — was in those trees never moved closer. Never made a sound. But the feeling of being watched stayed with me, steady and oddly warm, until the sky started going gray at the edges and Barnaby finally relaxed completely, dropping his chin onto my knee with a long, satisfied exhale.

I scratched behind his ears.

"Yeah," I said quietly. "Me too."

I didn't sleep. When the light was strong enough to see by, I got up, tucked Barnaby under my arm, and walked back to the pack house.

The back door was unlocked by then. No one was awake to notice me come in.

---

The kitchen smelled like coffee and last night's roast. I found a clean mug, filled it from the pot someone had already started, and stood at the counter drinking it slowly. My clothes were still damp. My shoulder still ached from where Camille's wolf had hit me. The titanium ring sat on my finger like a cold, permanent accusation.

I was on my second cup when I heard his footsteps.

Colt moved differently from other people. Heavier. More deliberate. Every step announced itself, the way Alpha footsteps always did — a low, subconscious pressure that made the air feel slightly thicker. I had spent three years learning to read his moods from the sound of his walk alone.

This walk was wrong.

I set my mug down.

He came through the kitchen doorway and stopped. He was dressed but barely — a shirt half-buttoned, jaw unshaved, his dark hair still rough from sleep. His eyes found me immediately, and something in them was already off. Already too sharp, too focused, like he'd been thinking about this since before he woke up.

"You were outside last night," he said.

Not a question.

"Yes," I said.

He crossed the kitchen slowly. I didn't move. There was nowhere to go — the counter was at my back, the island to my left, and Colt was filling the space between me and the door with the particular, suffocating weight of an Alpha who had already decided something.

He stopped about two feet away. His nostrils flared.

I watched his face change.

It was subtle at first — a slight tension around his eyes, a tightening of his jaw. Then his gaze dropped to my shoulder, my neck, the damp fabric of my shirt, and the tension became something else entirely. His chest expanded on a slow, deliberate inhale.

The silence stretched.

"Who," he said, very quietly, "were you with."

My pulse kicked. "No one. I was under the border tree with Barnaby."

"Don't." His voice dropped lower, and the Alpha tone bled into it — that particular vibration that pressed against the base of your skull and told your body to submit before your brain could argue. "Don't lie to me. I can smell it on you."

I didn't answer.

His jaw worked. "It's a male scent. Strong. Stronger than anything in this pack." His eyes came back to mine, and what was in them now wasn't just jealousy — it was something uglier, something that had nothing to do with caring about me and everything to do with ownership. "Who touched you."

"No one touched me."

He moved fast.

His hand shot out and grabbed my left wrist, yanking it up between us. I gasped — not from pain, not yet — just from the shock of it, the sudden violence of the motion. He stared at the titanium ring on my finger like it had personally offended him.

Then he grabbed it.

He twisted. Hard.

The pain was immediate and white-hot. The ring didn't move — it never moved, that was the whole point of titanium, that was why he'd chosen it — but the skin beneath it did. I felt it tear, a thin, burning strip along my knuckle as he wrenched the band back and forth, trying to force it over the joint.

I screamed.

The sound tore out of me before I could stop it, sharp and raw, bouncing off the kitchen tiles. Barnaby scrambled up from his spot by the door, barking frantically.

Colt didn't stop.

"Take it off," he snarled, and his voice was fully Alpha now, all command and no reason, the tone crashing over me in waves. "Take it off and tell me who you were with."

"I can't — " My voice broke. "Colt, stop, you're — "

"Tell me."

Another twist. Another scream. The skin around the ring was slick now, warm and wet, and I could feel the blood welling up where the metal had torn through.

I stopped fighting it.

Not because I gave up. Not because the Alpha tone finally broke through whatever had been holding me together since the banquet.

But because something went very, very quiet inside me.

I looked at my hand. At the blood running down my finger, pooling in the groove of the ring, dripping onto the clean kitchen floor.

I looked at Colt's face — the fury in it, the possessiveness, the complete and total absence of anything that looked like love.

He had announced his true mate to the entire pack two nights ago. He had moved another woman into our room. He had sent me to the basement with a shoe box.

And now he was bleeding me over a ring he'd given me as a leash.

The clarity from the border tree came back. Colder this time. Cleaner.

I stopped screaming.