Seraphina looked at me.

Scared now, aren't you?

You've always been terrified of these cold, wet creatures.

All you have to do is grab my sleeve and beg me to save you, and I'll pull you out.

She stood at the edge of the cliff, waiting for me to throw myself at her.

I wiped the blood off, braced myself against a rock, and straightened up. Then I walked to the edge.

"Thank you, Supreme Alpha."

I jumped.

The wind shrieked past my ears. In that brief fall, I heard her breathing stutter out of rhythm.

Countdown: 4 days.

The Serpent Abyss was pitch black.

Snakes crawled over my body. Fangs sank into flesh. The stench of venom and rot filled everything. My wolf, silent for so long I sometimes forgot it existed, pressed itself flat against the floor of my mind and would not rise.

I dragged myself through the mire.

Five years ago, I'd stayed down here for half a moon cycle to protect Seraphina, slaughtering wave after wave of serpents until the swarm finally retreated.

Now it was just me.

Three days and three nights, and I didn't make a sound. Whenever I couldn't bear it anymore, I stared at the panel.

Almost over.

I clawed my way to the top of the cliff at dawn.

Dried blood crusted every inch of me. The rags of my clothes hung in strips, and the wounds had turned black at the edges. The venom had seeped deep enough that my skin barely registered pain anymore, just a dull, wrong numbness.

Seraphina and Gabriel Foxglove were standing at the rim.

Gabriel shrieked and scrambled behind her.

Seraphina went rigid. She took half a step forward, her hand rising before it fell back to her side.

She raised a barrier of wolf aura, dense and pale as frost, and drifted further away, as though avoiding something filthy.

"You've dirtied the ground."

Her voice was raw. "Hand the serpent gall to Gabriel for his cultivation, then get yourself cleaned up."

I opened my hand. The serpent king's gallbladder sat in my palm.

Gabriel approached with a silk handkerchief, using it as a barrier between his fingers and mine as he reached for the gall. The faint sour-sweet smell of dried foxglove and weak chamomile drifted off him, underlaid with something that didn't sit right.

The instant he took it, his foot slipped. The thick sole of his brocade boot came down on my right hand.

My index finger had already been half-bitten off in the Abyss. Now it separated completely.

Cold sweat soaked through my back.

I pressed my lips together, pulled my hand back, and didn't make a sound.

Seraphina stared at the severed finger. Her own fingers trembled, just once.

She turned and walked away.

Her thoughts spilled over each other in a tangle, bleeding through the damaged bond whether she knew it or not:

Why didn't he cry out?

He used to come running to me over a paper cut, begging me to blow on it for ages.

Does he... not care about me anymore?

No. He's just being stubborn. Trying to punish me.

I watched her retreating figure. The scent of white frost and crushed moonflower trailed behind her, that metallic undercurrent threading through it like dissolved silver.

Who cares.

Countdown: 2 days.

The Servants' Quarters held nothing but straw.

I leaned against the corner and pulled out a tarnished silver-alloy locket. Inside, a lock of fur so old it had gone colorless, but I knew it had once been the warm brown of my mother's wolf.

It was the only thing my parents had left behind.

The year the plague swept through, they'd sent me up the mountain and hung this locket around my neck.

I rubbed the face of it with my sleeve.

Two more days.

I thought about home. Warm milk, flowers on the balcony, Mom and Dad nagging me about nothing. The scent of dried lavender and old wool. A door left unlocked.

The light dimmed.

Seraphina stood a few paces away.

Her hand flicked out. The heirloom locket ripped free and landed in her palm.

"Give it back!"

I lunged for it.

Seraphina raised her arm high, turning the locket over between her fingers as she examined it.

"So this is why your bloodline power has been regressing." Her voice was dangerously low. "The Path of the Unfeeling forbids mortal attachments, and you've been clinging to this thing."

I grabbed her sleeve, stretching for it.

"Please. Don't touch it."

The moment that word left my mouth, her grip tightened.

That familiar voice slithered into my ears, leaking through the bond-bleed:

He's finally begging.

Destroy what he cares about, and he'll break.

Mortal garbage. Why keep it? From now on, your world will have only me.

Seraphina looked at me. Lunar essence pulsed at her fingertips, cold and bright.

"Too late."

A sharp crack.

The silver-alloy locket shattered in her palm, crumbling to fine powder. The tiny lock of fur disintegrated with it, gone as though it had never been.

She opened her hand. Ash-grey dust drifted down over my face.

Cold. Bone-deep cold.

I didn't move. My arm stayed outstretched, reaching for something that no longer existed. The powder settled into my eyes. It stung.

I lowered my hand, sat back down in the straw, and closed my eyes.

Seraphina stared at me.

A pack wolf's voice came shouting from beyond the door.

"Supreme Alpha! Gabriel has gone into bloodline rejection. He keeps coughing blood. The healers say he won't last!"

Seraphina seized my wrist, her grip so fierce it nearly ground the bones together.

"Come with me."

The great hall of the Alpha's Peak.

Gabriel lay on a stone dais draped in pale furs, blood smeared across his lips. That sickly-sweet scent of dried foxglove and weak chamomile hung thick around him, but underneath it, something had turned. The sourness was sharper now, almost acrid, like a body fighting itself from the inside out.

A cluster of pack healers knelt on the floor before him.

"Reporting to the Supreme Alpha: Gabriel's bloodline channels have ruptured. He requires heart blood from a wolf who shares the same cultivation path as a catalyst."

In all the Greyfang Pack, only two of us walked the Path of the Unfeeling. Seraphina and me.

Seraphina flipped her hand and produced a dagger.

It was the one I'd given her three years ago for her Moon Blessing Day. The ward-rune I'd carved was still etched into the blade.

She held it out to me.

"Save him."

I looked at the edge of the blade.

I was leaving soon anyway. It didn't matter if this body was ruined.

"Fine."

I loosened my collar and bared my chest.

Old scars crisscrossed the skin there, layered one on top of another. Every last one from shielding her during Blood Moon hunts and territorial purges.

Seraphina's gaze fell on those scars. The hand holding the dagger went still.

Gabriel let out a groan from the dais.

Her hand drove forward.

The dagger punched through skin and muscle, sinking into my chest above the heart.

The pain was blinding.

I clenched my teeth and made no sound.

Seraphina twisted her wrist, drawing out three drops of blood the color of molten gold and crimson. Heart blood. The kind only a wolf who walked the Path of the Unfeeling could produce, each drop saturated with lunar essence.

The moment the heart blood left my body, my legs gave out. I collapsed to the floor.

My vision went black.

Through the haze, I felt Seraphina's hand reach over and press against my chest.

She didn't stanch the bleeding. Instead, she pinched her fingers together, plucked a scrap of blood-soaked fabric from my robe, and slipped it into her sleeve.

That voice surfaced again through the bond-bleed:

So much blood...

Still warm.

This is his heart blood. Hide it away. For my eyes only.

The hall's entrance was packed with pack wolves.

They watched me lying on the ground. Not one stepped forward.

"Everyone could see the senior wolf resented Gabriel. I just never thought he'd push him this far."

"Having a little blood drawn is getting off easy."

"Exactly. He deserved it."

I lay on the cold stone, staring at the translucent panel hovering before my eyes.

Countdown: 1 day.

I closed my eyes.

Almost there.

Countdown: three hours remaining.

The Greyfang Pack territory was alive with noise today.

Crimson banners hung from every gate, and war-drums echoed through the mountain peaks.

It was Gabriel's Bloodline Ascension Rite.

Never mind that my heart blood was the only reason his bloodline had stabilized. Nothing could stop him from being the star everyone orbited.

They dragged me out of the dungeon.

Plain white prisoner's wrappings, still stiff with dried blood.

Silver-laced shackles on my wrists and ankles. The metal burned where it touched bare skin, a low, constant searing I'd long stopped flinching from.

The silver scraped against the long white stone staircase as they hauled me upward, the sound shrill enough to set teeth on edge.

Seraphina sat enthroned at the very top, upon a seat of carved pale stone.

Beside her stood Gabriel, resplendent in ceremonial furs, color blooming in his cheeks.

What a perfect pair they made.

I was dragged onto the high platform.

Two enforcement wolves pressed down on my shoulders, forcing me to kneel.

I didn't kneel.

Even though the Glacial Dominance damage had eaten into my kneecaps until every nerve screamed, I kept my spine straight.

Seraphina looked down at me from above.

Her voice, amplified by her Alpha aura, carried to every corner of the pack territory. The air itself seemed to press downward with it, heavy and cold, carrying that scent of white frost and crushed moonflower and something metallic beneath.

"You harbored jealousy toward a packmate. Your wolf was corrupt."

"Gabriel has now completed his Bloodline Ascension, yet he still lacks a supreme Moonblood Spine to anchor his foundation."

"As his senior, this shall be your final act of atonement."

Carving out the spine.

So this was the grand finale all along.

My Moonblood Spine was innate, the kind every wolf in existence coveted. A supreme-grade trait, one in a thousand years.

It was also what Seraphina had once been proudest of. Her greatest asset.

Now she was going to cut it out of me with her own hands and put it inside another wolf.

Below the platform, the assembled pack chanted in unison.

"We beseech the senior wolf to offer his spine in atonement!"

The roar crashed over me like a tide, deafening.

I looked at Seraphina.

Her expression remained cold and imperious, but the voice inside her mind was howling:

Beg me!

All you have to do is kneel. Crawl to me and press your throat to the ground!

Admit in front of the whole pack that you can't survive without me, and I'll let you go!

Do it now! Stop being so stubborn!

If that Moonblood Spine is truly gone, you'll be nothing but a broken wolf. And then the only place you'll have left is by my side!

She had already woven her net, every thread accounted for.

She believed that as long as I drew breath, I would forever be a thing she held in the palm of her hand.

Too bad.

She miscalculated one thing.

I didn't intend to live.

I straightened slowly, shrugging free of the pack enforcers pinning me down.

I didn't look at the Supreme Alpha on her throne.

Instead, I let my gaze sweep across the place I had called home for twenty years.

Every stone path, every ancient tree. I had bled to protect all of it.

Now, looking again.

Filthy.

"You won't need to do it yourselves."

My voice was quiet, but the wind carried it to every wolf in the square.

The next second.

I raised my right hand.

Two fingers pressed together like a blade, the last flicker of lunar essence I'd burned my life force to gather condensing at their tips.

Squelch.

The wet sound of a blade entering flesh.

My hand drove backward, plunging into my own spine.

Blood erupted in a torrent.

It soaked through the white prisoner's pelts, pooled across the pale stone beneath my feet.

"You've lost your mind!"

Seraphina shot to her feet, every shred of composure ripped from her face in an instant.

Under the stupefied, horror-stricken stares of every soul present, I clenched my teeth and hooked my fingers around the vertebrae.

And wrenched.

"Ngh!"

The pain tore through me like my soul was being split in two, and a strangled groan escaped my throat.

But I didn't stop.

Inch by inch, I dragged the Moonblood Spine out of my own body, crystalline and gleaming with cold light. The marrow pulsed once, twice, a pale luminescence that made every wolf in the square flinch as if the Moon Goddess herself had opened an eye.

Flesh came with it. Sinew snapped and trailed behind.

The wet, grinding sound of tearing tissue turned the entire square deathly silent. Not a single wolf breathed. Somewhere in the crowd, someone's inner wolf began to keen, and the sound spread like a contagion, a low collective whine that no one could stop.

I stood drenched in my own blood, the still-dripping Moonblood Spine clutched in my fist.

My body swayed, barely upright. Deep inside me, my wolf, silent for years, stirred for the first and last time. Not a howl. Not a whimper. Just a slow exhale, like an animal finally allowed to close its eyes.

"The Moonblood Spine you wanted."

I looked at Seraphina. Looked at her face, white as a corpse.

Her inner voice was nothing but shrieking panic now: No! Stop! Stop it! I won't go through with it! I don't want it anymore!

I smiled.

Smiled until tears ran down my face.

"Alpha, this bloodline power, this bone and blood. Today I return every last bit of it to you."

My fingers closed like a vice.

Crack.

The Moonblood Spine shattered in my bare hand, reduced to a cloud of glittering dust.

Crystalline powder mingled with a mist of blood, drifting down over the entire pack territory like a rain of crimson snow. Where the dust touched the ground, the earth hissed faintly, as though the land itself recoiled from the waste.

I owe you nothing.

"I wish you both a lifetime of happiness. In life or death... may we never meet again."

The Severance Countdown hit zero.

[Host extraction successful.]

My body grew weightless.

In the suffocating silence, my flesh began to break apart.

Like the last embers of a dying fire, I dissolved into motes of light.

Seraphina let out a scream so raw it cracked her voice:

"NO!!"

She lunged from the dais like a woman possessed, her Alpha aura erupting outward in a shockwave that buckled the knees of every wolf within fifty paces, but her hands closed on nothing but drifting sparks.

I scattered on the wind.

Not a wisp of my soul remained.