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.