The words hung in the freezing air, but my body gave out before I could speak.

A vicious, tearing spasm ripped through my abdomen, folding me completely in half. My knees hit the wet floorboards with a dull thud. The amniotic fluid pooled between my boots, warm and heavy against the drafty chill of the cabin.

"Derek..." I gasped, clawing at my belly as the contraction tightened into a brutal knot. "Derek, stop. Please. The baby—"

He paused. For half a heartbeat, I searched his face for the man I had spent three years protecting. I looked for fear, or regret, or even basic human decency.

There was nothing.

Carly stepped smoothly in front of him, resting her manicured hand on his chest. Her green robe parted, showing bare skin, but her eyes were fixed on me like a hawk over roadkill.

"Don't lose your nerve now, Alpha," Carly purred, her voice sweet and poisonous. "Think about what Marcus offered. Fifty miles of prime border territory along the northern ridge. Full timber rights, deep water access, and ironclad protection from the Nighthollow Pack." She slid her hand up to Derek’s collar, tilting her head. "And you get me. An obedient Luna who doesn't hoard pack resources. No fated mate baggage. Just pure power. But Marcus’s deal dies if you stay tied to her. You have to cut the cord tonight."

Derek looked down at me.

I was on my hands and knees in amniotic fluid, shivering, bleeding from hauling his crates through a blizzard. I saw the gears turning behind his dark eyes. There was no internal struggle. No grief. Only pure, ruthless arithmetic. He was weighing the life of his mate and unborn pup against fifty miles of dirt.

"Derek, look at me," I sobbed, my voice cracking under the pressure of another crushing wave of labor. "She’s your daughter. She’s coming right now. Take me to the healer."

Derek sneered. He took a half-step back, pulling away from my reaching hand as if my touch might contaminate him.

"You brought this on yourself, Isabelle," he said coldly. "You destroyed the keycard. You forgot your place."

He cleared his throat. The words rolled out of him with practiced, rehearsed precision:

"I, Derek Vance, Alpha of the Ironvale Pack, formally reject you, Isabelle, as my mate and my Luna."

The world shattered.

It didn't feel like a broken heart. It felt like an iron hook had caught inside my chest and violently yanked my soul out through my throat. At the base of my neck, the mate mark he had given me three years ago didn't just fade—it split open.

A sound like tearing flesh echoed in my ears. The skin burned white-hot, then instantly went dead and icy cold, like frostbite biting straight to the bone. The mate bond snapped like a heavy cable under maximum tension, severing with the raw, blinding agony of a limb sawed off without anesthesia.

A ragged scream tore out of my lungs.

Inside me, the fierce silver wolf that had just opened her eyes let out a high, wounded yelp. She convulsed violently against my ribs, thrashing as the psychic tether snapped. Then, with a hollow, dying whimper, she collapsed into absolute blackness.

Silence fell inside my head. Horrible, empty silence.

I slumped forward onto my forearms, panting, dry-heaving against the cold timber. Blood dripped from my neck, sizzling against the wet floor.

Before I could even draw a full breath, a heavy boot stepped down hard on my calves.

"Don't pass out yet, sweetie," Carly whispered.

She knelt beside me. From her leather bag, she pulled out a thick coil of coarse rope. It was already looped and measured, dusted heavily with a sickly yellowish powder. This had never been an impulse. It was planned down to the second.

The stench hit me instantly—bitter, rancid almonds.

*Wolfsbane.*

"What are you doing?" I choked out, trying to kick, trying to pull my legs beneath me. "Get away from me!"

"Hold her still, Derek," Carly commanded.

Derek didn't hesitate. He stepped forward and planted his heavy boot onto the small of my back, pinning me to the floor. The pressure squeezed the air from my burning lungs.

Carly wrapped the rough hemp around my ankles, pulling the knot so tight the fibers bit into my skin. Then she wound it up around my knees, binding my thighs flush together.

"Stop!" I shrieked, tears blinding me as another contraction slammed into my pelvis. The baby was pushing down, but my legs were lashed shut. "You're suffocating her! Let me push!"

"Oh, stop whining," Carly laughed, giving the knot a vicious yank. "Ancient she-wolves used to birth pups mid-hunt without making a single sound. You can hold it in for a little while. Besides, Derek just had the truck detailed. We can't have you ruining the leather seats with your mess."

The moment the yellow powder rubbed against my bare skin, fire erupted.

The wolfsbane didn't just burn; it melted into my bloodstream like boiling acid. Blistering welts flared instantly across my legs, turning my veins a sickly, bruised black. The poison surged straight to my core, slamming a steel door over my wolf's broken consciousness.

Any lingering instinct to shift vanished. My body's natural healing shut down completely. I was trapped—paralyzed in raw, human weakness, burning from the inside out while my daughter starved for space.

"Pick her up," Carly told Derek, dusting her palms off with a satisfied smirk. "Let's go."

Derek reached down, grabbed me roughly by the collar of my heavy coat, and dragged me off the floor. I couldn't walk. My bound legs dragged uselessly behind me as he hauled me through the door and out into the biting wind.

He threw open the back door of his crew-cab truck and shoved me onto the floorboards behind the front seats. My head slammed against the metal bracket of the center console, making my vision swim with dark spots.

"Derek... please," I gasped against the rubber floor mat, my fingers twitching toward his jeans. "The valley clinic... it's twenty minutes east. Please."

Derek slammed the truck door shut in my face.

Through the tinted glass, I saw him jog around to the driver's side while Carly slid into the heated front passenger seat, adjusting the rearview mirror with a laugh.

The engine roared to life.

The truck lurched forward, tires spinning on the packed snow. I pulled my face up toward the window, looking out through the frost.

We reached the main mountain road. To the right was the highway down toward the valley, toward the pack hospital and the healers.

Derek turned the steering wheel hard to the left.

The headlights cut into the dark, climbing up the switchbacks, heading deeper into the frozen wilderness, away from civilization, away from safety, and entirely out of reach.

The floor of the truck was freezing, but my legs were on fire.

The wolfsbane-soaked rope bit deep into my ankles and knees, lashing my thighs together so tightly that my bones ground against each other with every jolt of the truck. Blistering welts were already rising under the rough hemp, spreading up my skin in angry, burning arcs. I could smell it—that sickening, bitter scent of rotten almonds radiating from my own flesh.

My neck felt hollow. Where Derek’s bite mark had lived for three years, there was only cold, dead flesh. The mate bond had been torn away, and the psychic wound was hemorrhaging my aura like a severed artery. With every mile we climbed into the Cascades, a piece of my life force drained out onto the dirty rubber floor mats.

Beneath my ribs, a tiny foot nudged my side.

I pressed my trembling fingers against my swollen belly, curling my upper body as close to my child as the tight space allowed.

"Twenty-one," I whispered, my voice barely a rasp over the hum of the tires. "Twenty-two."

I was counting her kicks. It was the only thing keeping me anchored.

*Stay with me, little girl,* I pleaded silently. *Please, just stay with Mama.*

In the front seat, the glow of Carly’s smartphone lit up the cab. She let out a bright, mocking laugh.

"Look at this, babe," Carly said, leaning across the console and shoving the screen in Derek’s face. "The northern ridge territory Marcus is giving us has two natural springs. We can build the new Alpha cabin right on the bluff."

Derek glanced at the screen, a smug grin pulling at the corner of his mouth. "Told you I'd handle it. Ironvale is finally expanding."

He reached up, grabbed the rearview mirror, and tilted it upward toward the ceiling. He didn't want to see me. He didn't want to see the blood pooling beneath my hips, or the way my face was pressed into the dirt of his floorboards.

Another contraction hit me. It was violent, a sledgehammer striking my pelvis from the inside. My daughter was trying to come into the world, but my bound legs gave her nowhere to go.

I clamped my teeth into my arm to stop from screaming.

*Shift,* I told myself. *You have to shift. Break the ropes.*

I reached deep inside, searching for my wolf. But there was nothing. No silver eyes, no fangs, no snarling protector. My wolf was collapsed in the dark, buried beneath the suffocating poison of the wolfsbane and the shock of the broken bond. She was unreachable.

*The pack link,* I thought frantically. *Wesley. Someone.*

I pushed my thoughts toward the pack network, but my mind slammed into dead static. The moment Derek spoke the rejection, Ironvale had severed me. To the pack’s magic, I didn't exist. I was nobody.

A heavy, suffocating stillness crept into my belly. The kicks stopped.

"No," I choked out, tears burning my eyes. "No, no, Emmeline, kick me. Please."

Thirty seconds passed. Then a minute.

A weak, fluttery movement pushed against my palm. It was faint. Faltering. She was losing oxygen. Trapped inside a dying body, starved for space and air, my baby was fading.

They were going to drive until we were both dead, and then they were going to dump our bodies into a ravine and call it a rogue attack. No one was coming to save us. If anyone was going to bring help, I had to do it myself.

My vision was tunneling. The edges of the cab blurred into streaks of black and gray.

*I am not dying on this floor,* I thought. *My daughter is not dying in this truck.*

I closed my eyes and pulled on the absolute last reserve of my soul. Past the wolfsbane burning through my blood, past the bleeding hole where my mate bond had been ripped away, there was a tiny, stubborn ember. It wasn't Ironvale magic. It wasn't anything Derek had ever touched. It was older, deeper, and purely mine.

I took all my agony, all my fear, and every single beat of my daughter's struggling heart, and I forged it into a single, desperate scream.

I didn't aim it at Ironvale. I didn't aim it at anyone I knew.

I just threw it outward into the frozen dark—a raw, wordless distress pulse tearing through the sky like a flare. Under pack law, through wolfsbane suppression and a severed bond, it was physically impossible.

The pulse ripped out of my chest, shattering the last of my strength, and shot into the void.

Hundreds of miles away, across jagged peaks and frozen pine forests, the signal struck something vast.

It didn't bounce off empty space. It collided head-on with a frequency that had been waiting for it in the shadows for ten years.

Deep within the sovereign territory of the Lycan Court, Prince Evander froze.

He was walking the perimeter of the royal guard barracks, snow falling silently around his broad shoulders, when the invisible shockwave hit him. It wasn't just a mind-link; it was her. The distinct, undeniable soul-signature of the girl he had loved in silence for a decade, drenched in blood and screaming for her child’s life.

Evander’s eyes flared molten gold.

He didn't give an explanation. He didn't issue an order.

Mid-stride, his human bones snapped and reformed with terrifying, fluid speed. A massive, pure-black Lycan wolf—towering nearly nine feet tall—burst through his clothing before his boots even hit the ground. A royal roar tore from his throat, shaking the snow from the spruce trees and dropping every guard in the courtyard into an instinctive crouch.

*With me!* his Lycan command thundered across the compound.

Ten royal escorts shifted behind him in an explosion of fur and raw power, but Evander was already gone. He hurled himself across the frozen border, his massive paws tearing chunks out of the ice, moving at a lethal, impossible speed only royal Lycan blood could sustain.

His wolf had locked onto her dying scent. And this time, he was not letting her go.