Blood tracked across the snow is a dead giveaway. But I had no choice. I was bleeding, freezing, and carrying the child of the most ruthless man in the kingdom.
Conrad didn’t love me. To him, I was merely a vessel for the next alpha king.
So I ran into the biting winter night, burying my scent under mud and pine needles.
Five years I kept us hidden. 5 years of peace. Then the wolf started howling again.
Ash rained down on the courtyard of Wolf’s Gate. It coated the cobblestones in a fine gray film that smelled of charred pine and roasted meat.
I stood by the heavy oak window of my chambers, watching the execution below. Conrad stood in the center of the yard, his massive shoulders draped in the pelt of a bear he’d killed with his bare hands.
He didn’t use an axe on the rogue wolf kneeling before him. He used his claws.
The sickening tear of flesh echoed up to my window, followed by the dull thud of a body hitting the stone.
My stomach heaved. I gripped the windowsill, my knuckles turning white, and squeezed my eyes shut.
The nausea wasn’t just from the violence. Violence was the currency of Conrad’s realm, and I had been forced into bankruptcy a long time ago.
No, this nausea was deep, hormonal, and terrifying. My hand instinctively dropped to my lower abdomen.
The swell was barely noticeable yet, hidden beneath the heavy velvet and corsetry of my station.
But I knew three moons had passed since my bleeding stopped. Three moons of chewing raw ginger in the dead of night, of bribing the wash maids to stay silent about the lack of soiled linens, of praying to any god that would listen that my body was simply stressed from the sheer brutality of my existence.
But the gods were deaf to the prayers of a king’s concubine. Conrad looked up, his eyes, a startling predatory amber, locked onto my window.
Even from this distance, the weight of his stare felt like a physical blow. He didn’t see a lover when he looked at me.
He saw a broodmare, a necessity to secure his bloodline. He wiped a streak of blood from his jaw with the back of a leatherclad hand and smiled.
It was a cold, empty expression that promised nothing but ownership. I stepped back into the shadows of the room.
Panic, cold and sharp as a butcher’s knife, pierced my chest. If he found out I was with child, I would never leave this fortress.
The child would be taken from me the moment the cord was cut. Conrad would mold him into a weapon, [clears throat] a mirror image of his own cruelty.
I would be discarded, or worse, kept around just long enough to breed a spare.
I refused to let my child’s first memory be the smell of blood on his father’s hands.
Preparations had to be made quickly and quietly. I began stealing from the kitchens, dried venison, hard tac, a small wheel of salted cheese.
I wrapped them in waxed cloth and hid them inside a hollowedout foottool. I stole a heavy wool cloak from the guard’s armory, one that smelled of old sweat and horse dander.
It would help mask my scent. I hoarded copper coins, slipping them one by one into a leather pouch tied to my thigh.
The night I left, the sky was a bruised purple, threatening a blizzard. It was perfect.
The wind howled off the northern mountains, loud enough to cover the crunch of my boots on the frost heaved ground.
The castle was deep in its cups, celebrating the winter solstice with casks of dark ale and roasted bore.
I slipped out through the gate, a rusted iron door used only by the scullery maids to dump the ashes.
The hinges shrieked in protest, a sound that felt loud enough to wake the dead, but the wind snatched it away.
I pulled the rough wool hood over my head and plunged into the treeine. The cold was absolute.
It bit through my layers, settling into the marrow of my bones. I didn’t stick to the paths.
Paths were for prey. I waded through snowdrifts that reached my thighs, forcing myself into the dense, thorny underbrush.
Brambles tore at my cloak and scratched my face. But I welcomed the sting. It kept me awake.
It kept me moving. Hours bled into one another. My lungs burned with every intake of frigid air.
The weight in my womb suddenly felt heavy, an anchor trying to pull me down into the snow.
Just a little further, I whispered to the dark trees. Just past the river, I knew the limits of a werewolf’s scenting ability in extreme cold.
Once the snow began to fall in earnest, it would bury my tracks and freeze my scent to the ground.
But I couldn’t rely on the weather alone. When I reached the banks of the Whitewater River, the water was a churning black mass choked with ice flows.
I didn’t hesitate. I waded in. The agony of the freezing water was a blinding white flash behind my eyes.
My legs went completely numb within seconds. I pushed through the current, the ice battering my hips, threatening to sweep me away.
I held on to the thought of Conrad’s amber eyes, using the terror’s fuel to pull myself up the opposite bank.
I collapsed onto the muddy earth, gasping, shaking uncontrollably. I was soaked, freezing, and utterly alone in the deadliest wilderness in the kingdom.
But as I looked back across the raging black water, I felt something I hadn’t felt since the day I was dragged into wolfgate.
Freedom. It tasted like blood and frost. But I drank it in deep. I forced myself to my feet.
I had to keep walking. The Alpha King would not take my child. Survival is not a heroic endeavor.
It is a series of desperate, ugly choices made in the mud. I spent the next four weeks moving like a ghost through the hinterlands.
I slept in hollowedout logs, buried under mounds of dead leaves to trap my body heat.
I ate grubs dug from rotting bark when my stolen rations ran out. I lost a tooth to scurvy and my hair grew mattered with dirt and dried sap.
The birth happened in an abandoned coffter’s hut near the edge of the dead moors.
There was no midwife, no warm water, no soothing words, just the shrieking wind tearing at the thatched roof and the terrifying primal agony tearing my body apart.
I bit down on a piece of boiled leather until my gums bled, stifling my screams.
If a roaming pack heard me, I was dead. When my son finally slipped into the world, he didn’t cry right away.
For one hearttoppping second, I thought the cold had taken him in my womb. I wiped the fluid from his face with my filthy, trembling hands.
Then his chest hitched. He let out a whale that sounded less like a human baby and more like a pup’s first howl.
I named him Leo, not a wolf’s name, a man’s name. 5 years later, the dirt beneath my fingernails was a permanent fixture.
We lived in Oak Haven, a miserable little logging village tucked into a valley so deep the sun only touched it for 3 hours a day.
The people here were hard, unsmiling folk who didn’t ask questions so long as you pulled your weight.
I chopped wood. I hauled water. I washed the village’s filthy linen in the freezing creek until my hands were cracked and scarred.
Leo grew fast, too fast. At 4 years old, he had the height of a 7-year-old and a disturbing strength he couldn’t yet control.
He shattered a wooden bucket just by gripping the handle too tight. But it was his eyes that terrified me the most.
They weren’t my dull brown. They were amber, bright, piercing, and entirely predatory. Every time he looked at me, I saw the ghost of the man I had fled.
“Mama, look,” Leo said one afternoon, holding up a dead rabbit by the ears. We were behind our small drafty cabin.
He hadn’t used a snare. There was a single precise bite mark at the base of the rabbit’s skull.
I snatched the rabbit from him. My heart hammering against my ribs. “How did you catch this, Leo?”
I snapped, my voice harsher than I intended. He flinched, his small shoulders dropping. “It was slow.
I was fast. We don’t hunt with our teeth.” I hissed, dropping to my knees and grabbing him by the shoulders.
I shook him just a little. I told you, you use a knife. You use a trap.
You never let anyone see you run on all fours. Do you understand me? Tears welled in his amber eyes.
I’m sorry, mama. I was just hungry. Guilt heavy and suffocating washed over me. I pulled him to my chest, boring my face in his dark hair.
He smelled like pine needles and dirt, a scent entirely his own. “I know, sweet boy,” I whispered into his hair.
I know, but we have to be careful. The bad men are always looking. I buried the rabbit deep in the woods.
I couldn’t risk the village butcher recognizing the teeth marks. It was an exhausting, paranoid existence.
I slept with a rusted iron dagger under my straw pillow. I memorized every face in the village.
I watched the treeine like a hawk waiting for a field mouse. The illusion of safety shattered on a Tuesday.
The village square was ankled deep in freezing mud. I was hauling a basket of wet laundry toward the drying lines when I heard the heavy rhythmic thud of destrias warh horses.
Not the swaybacked nags the local merchants rode. I froze, the basket slipping slightly in my grasp.
Through the freezing mist, massive silhouettes materialized. Five riders. They wore heavy armor, the dark steel absorbing the weak light rather than reflecting it.
But it was the banner snapping in the cold wind that made my blood run instantly cold.
A snarling wolf’s head embroidered in silver thread on a field of pitch black iron hold.
Conrad’s personal guard, they reigned in their massive beasts in the center of the square.
The villagers stopped their work, backing away with heads bowed in a mix of deference and sheer terror.
The lead rider pulled back his hood. It was Bran, Conrad’s captain of the guard, the man who executed the king’s will with brutal efficiency.
His eyes scanned the miserable crowd, lingering on the women, searching the faces of the children.
By order of King Conrad, Bran’s voice bmed, bouncing off the wooden walls of the tavern.
The borders of the whispering pines are sealed. We seek a woman. Brown hair, brown eyes.
She harbors a stolen asset belonging to the crown. My lungs forgot how to pull in air.
I dropped my chin to my chest, letting my damp, matted hair obscure my face, and turned slowly.
I didn’t run. Running triggers a predator’s instinct to chase. I forced my legs to move at a steady, agonizingly slow pace toward the narrow alley between the blacksmith and the tanner’s shop.
Get to the cabin. My brain screamed. Get Leo. Get the knife. Run. I had been a fool to think I could outrun a wolf’s memory.
Conrad hadn’t forgotten his property. He had just been waiting for the snows to melt, for the borders to clear, for a whisper of a child with amber eyes to reach his ears.
The hunt wasn’t over. It had only just reached my front door. Mud sloshed around my ankles as I turned down the alleyway, my breathing shallow and fast.
I didn’t run right away. A running woman draws the eye, and Bran had the eyes of a falcon.
I forced myself to walk with the same beaten exhausted gate as the other village women, keeping my head ducked, my wet hair clinging to my cheeks, the stench of the tannery hit me.
A foul wave of ammonia and rotting flesh. I welcomed it. It meant I was out of the main square.
Once I rounded the corner past the vat keeper’s shed, I dropped the heavy laundry basket.
It hit the muck with a wet thud. I hitched up my heavy wool skirts and sprinted, my boots tore through the frozen slush.
My lungs already burning from the bitter air, seized with panic. Oak Haven was a small settlement, a miserable cluster of timber and thatch clinging to the side of a ravine.
But the distance to my cabin at the far edge felt like leagues. I passed the baker’s wife, who gave me a strange look, but I didn’t stop to offer a polite nod.
I burst through the door of my cabin. The hinges screamed. Leo was sitting on the woven rug near the hearth, carefully stacking pieces of split kindling.
He looked up, his amber eyes wide, registering the wildness in my posture instantly. He didn’t ask what was wrong.
At four years old, he had already learned to read the shape of my terror.
“Get your boots, Leo,” I said. My voice was a harsh rasp. Now, I didn’t wait for him to move.
I scrambled to the loose floorboard under my cot. My fingernails cracked as I pried the thick oak plank up.
Beneath it lay a oiled leather rucks sack I had packed three years ago and repacked every month since.
It held flint, a skin of lamp oil, heavy wool socks, tightly wrapped bundles of dried venison, and a pouch of salt.
I dragged it out, the leather stiff and cold in my hands. Mama. Leo stood by the hearth, his small boots clutched to his chest.
We are playing the quiet game, I told him, [clears throat] closing the distance between us.
I snatched the boots from his hands and shoved them onto his feet, my fingers fumbling with the stiff leather laces.
The hardest version we have ever played. You do not speak. You do not cry.
You do not make a sound even if it hurts. Do you understand me? He gave a sharp single nod.
The gravity in his small face mirrored his father’s chilling focus. It made my stomach twist, but I pushed the thought away.
I grabbed handfuls of cold ash from the hearth. Close your eyes. I smeared the coarse gray dust over his cheeks, his neck, his hair.
I did the same to myself, rubbing it deep into my paws, masking the scent of our sweat and fear with the smell of dead fire.
I grabbed the rusted iron dagger from beneath my pillow and shoved it deep into my boot.
Heavy mailed boots slammed against the wooden boardwalk a few houses down. The sound was distinct.
Iron grinding on frozen wood. They were checking houses. Open the door. A deep, rough voice echoed through the thin walls of our neighbor’s home.
There was a crash of splintering wood, followed by a woman’s terrified scream. My heart hammered against my ribs, a frantic bird trapped in a cage.
I hauled the rucks sack onto my shoulders and grabbed Leo. He was dense, his muscles packed tightly onto his small frame, but adrenaline fueled my arms.
I hoisted him onto my hip. We couldn’t go out the front. The back window faced a steep, muddy drop off into a dense brier patch.
It was our only way out. I unlatched the wooden shutters, wincing at the squeak of the iron hinges.
The drop was nearly 10 ft into a tangle of thorns. I looked at Leo, held on to my neck tightly.
He wrapped his small, powerful arms around me, nearly choking me with his grip. Bootsteps pounded on the boardwalk outside our cabin.
Someone slammed a fist against the front door. Open up. By order of the king.
I swung my legs over the window sill. The wood scraped my thighs. I didn’t hesitate.
I pushed off the sill and dropped. We hit the brier patch hard. Thorns as thick as my thumb tore through my wool skirts, slicing into my calves and forearms.
I bit the inside of my cheek until I tasted copper to keep from crying out.
Leo was completely silent against my chest, his face buried in my shoulder. Above us, the cabin door was kicked off its hinges.
It slammed into the floorboards with a deafening crack. I rolled, shielding Leo with my body and dragged us deeper into the underbrush.
The mud was freezing, seeping through my clothes instantly. We crawled on our bellies like worms beneath the lattice of thorny vines.
Empty. A voice drifted from the open window above us. Check the hearth. Bran’s voice commanded.
It was calm, authoritative, and terrifyingly close. Ashes are disturbed. Someone was just here. Search the perimeter.
I didn’t wait to hear more. I pushed up into a low crouch and started moving toward the treeine.
The cragwood was a dense ancient forest that choked the valley entirely. Horses couldn’t navigate the tightly packed trunks and exposed roots.
If we could get deep enough, the riders would have to dismount. But Conrad’s men weren’t just riders.
They were wolves. We reached the edge of the trees just as a shout rang out from the cabin behind us.
Tracks in the mud down the embankment. I hiked Lao higher on my hip and broke into a run.
The cragwood swallowed us whole, plunging us into a green black twilight. Roots twisted out of the ground like skeletal fingers trying to trip me.
Low-hanging branches whipped my face, leaving stinging red welts. I ignored the pain. I ignored the burning in my chest.
Every step took us further from the village, but the forest offered no real sanctuary.
It was a sprawling maze of deadfalls and jagged ravines. I knew the terrain for a few miles, having foraged for mushrooms and trap lines, but beyond that was uncharted territory.
I ran until my legs felt like lead weights, until the taste of blood in my mouth was overwhelming.
When I finally collapsed against the mossy trunk of a massive oak, I was miles from Oak Haven.
I set Leo down. My hands were shaking so violently I couldn’t unbuckle my canteen.
“Are the bad men coming?” Leo asked softly, brushing a stray leaf from my hair.
“I looked back the way we came. The forest was silent, but it was a deceptive, heavy silence.”
Yes, I breathed, pulling him close. But we won’t be here when they arrive. Night fell like a heavy woolen blanket over the cragwood.
The temperature plummeted, turning the damp air into a biting frost that coated the dead leaves in ice.
We had been moving for 6 hours straight. My boots were soaked through, my toes completely numb.
Every muscle in my body screamed in protest, a chorus of exhaustion that begged me to just lie down in the snow and close my eyes.
But I kept moving. To stop was to die. Leo trotted beside me, his small hand wrapped tightly in mine.
He wasn’t panting. He wasn’t stumbling. [clears throat] The sheer stamina of his bloodline was terrifying to witness in a child.
He moved through the treacherous root choked terrain with an instinctual grace, his amber eyes, scanning the dark woods with a clarity I didn’t possess.
“Mama, wait,” Leo whispered, suddenly yanking on my hand. I froze, instantly, dropping to one knee beside him.
“What? What do you hear?” He tilted his head, his nostrils flaring slightly. “Not here.
Smell, wet metal, and anger. My blood turned to ice. Shifters in their human forms wore steel.
Shifters in their wolf forms radiated a pheromone of aggression when on a hunt. Conrad’s trackers had caught our scent.
The ash hadn’t been enough to fool them. Not once they got close. A low, resonant sound vibrated through the trees.
It wasn’t a howl. It was a clicking, rhythmic chuffing. The sound a massive predator makes when it’s communicating with its pack.
They were spreading out, flanking us. We need to hide, I breathed, my eyes darting frantically through the darkness.
The forest floor was too open here. We needed cover. Over there, the rocks, a jumble of massive mosscovered boulders, sat at the base of a steep ridge a 100 yards away.
It formed a natural overhang, a small, shallow cave. I grabbed Leo and scrambled toward it, ignoring the burning in my lungs.
We threw ourselves into the narrow crevice beneath the rocks. Just as the snapping of twigs echoed from the direction we had just come, I shoved Leo deep into the back of the small space, packing him behind a pile of loose stones.
Do not move. I mouthed to him, pressing a finger to my lips. I drew the rusted dagger from my boot.
It felt pitifully light in my hand, a sliver of corroded iron against monsters built of muscle and rage.
I crouched near the opening of the rocks, pressing my back against the damp stone, and waited.
The crunch of boots on frozen leaves grew louder, slow, deliberate. The tracker was in human form, likely because the thick brush made shifting into a massive dire wolf impractical.
A shadow separated itself from the trees. He was huge, his shoulders as wide as a doorway wrapped in dark leather armor.
He held a drawn short sword in his right hand. He stopped 10 ft from our hiding spot, turning his head slowly.
He was sensing the air, his chest expanding with a deep breath. I stopped breathing.
I willed my heart to stop beating. He took a step toward the boulders, then another.
He didn’t see us yet, obscured by the deep shadows of the overhang, but his instincts were pulling him right to us.
He crouched, his boots scraping against the gravel just inches from my face. If he found Leo, he would drag him back to Conrad.
He would kill me without a second thought. I didn’t think. I reacted with the pure feral desperation of a cornered mother.
I lunged out of the darkness. I didn’t go for his chest. The leather armor would deflect my rusted blade.
I drove my entire body weight forward, slamming my free hand full of dirt and freezing mud directly into his eyes.
He roared, dropping his sword to claw at his face, stumbling backward. I didn’t stop.
I threw myself at his waist, driving the iron dagger upward with everything I had.
The blade sank into the soft tissue under his chin, grating against bone as it pierced his throat.
Hot, thick blood sprayed across my face and chest. It smelled of copper and wild musk.
The man choked, his eyes wide and unseeing in the dark, his massive hands grabbing my shoulders.
He was incredibly strong, even dying. His grip bruised my skin down to the bone.
He threw me aside like a rag doll. I slammed into the trunk of a tree.
The wind knocked completely out of me. I gasped, tasting dirt and blood, frantically searching for my dagger.
It was gone, embedded in his neck. The tracker took two stumbling steps toward me.
Blood pouring over his leather armor. He reached for his belt, pulling a hunting knife, but his knees buckled.
He crashed face first into the freezing mud, his body convulsing once, twice, and then going completely still.
Silence slammed back into the forest, heavy and suffocating. I dragged myself to my feet, my body shaking so hard my teeth clattered.
I stood over the dead man, wiping the hot blood from my eyes with a trembling hand.
I had killed a king’s guard. There was no going back now. Conrad would burn the entire continent to find me.
Mama. I turned violently flinching. Leo was standing at the edge of the rocks. He wasn’t looking at me.
He was looking at the dead man. He stepped closer, his small boots squelching in the bloody mud.
Leo, look away. I choked out, reaching for him, but he didn’t look away. His amber eyes were wide, but they held no fear.
No tears. He stared at the pooling blood with a cold, terrifying curiosity. For a split second, the moonlight caught his face, and my breath hitched.
He looked exactly like his father. Conrad’s heir wasn’t just a title. It was a violently encoded instinct.
And I realized with a sickening drop in my stomach that running might not be enough to save my son from the monster in his own blood.
Panic is a luxury you cannot afford when you are hunted. I stared at the dead man in the mud, my chest heaving, the metallic stench of his blood filling my nose.
Hot tears prickled at the corners of my eyes. But I forced them back. Crying wouldn’t save us.
Action would. I turned to Leo. He was still watching the corpse. His small face and unreadable mask.
Look at me, I commanded. My voice cracked, betraying my terror, but I cleared my throat and stepped into his line of sight.
“Leo, look at me.” He blinked, pulling his amber gaze away from the blood, and looked up at my face.
“We do not speak of this,” I said, gripping his small shoulders. “We do not remember this.
Do you understand? We have to keep moving,” he gave that same sharp, terrifyingly mature nod.
I released him and dropped to my knees beside the tracker. My stomach rolled violently, threatening to empty the meager contents of my last meal, but I swallowed the bile.
Survival demands ugliness. The man weighed as much as a draft horse, thick with muscle and heavy leather armor.
I couldn’t leave him out in the open. His blood was a screaming beacon to the rest of the pack.
I grabbed him by the heavy collar of his tunic. I dug my boots deep into the freezing mud, braced my legs, and pulled.
My muscles tore. A ragged gasp ripped from my throat as I dragged his lifeless bulk 3 ft backward, shoving him into the deepest, darkest crevice beneath the boulders.
I furiously kicked loose gravel, dead leaves, and clumps of moss over his legs and torso.
It wasn’t enough to fool a wolf’s nose, but it would hide him from the ravens.
If the carryon bird started circling, Bran would find us within the hour. Before I completely covered him, I stripped him of his belt.
I unbuckled his heavy wool cloak stained at the collar with his own blood, and wrapped it around myself.
It smelled like wet dog, pine pitch, and sweat, but it was incredibly warm. I took his hunting knife, a heavy piece of dark steel, and slid it into my boot where my rusted dagger used to be.
I took his canteen. I took a small pouch of dried meat from his pocket.
I was a scavenger picking the bones of a predator, and I felt no remorse.
“Come,” I whispered to Leo, holding out my hand. His fingers slid into mine. His skin was warm.
[clears throat] Too warm for a child standing in the freezing remnants of a winter storm.
We abandoned the treeine and headed toward the sound of rushing water. Blood trackers rely on the ground.
They smell the crushed grass beneath a boot, the microscopic flakes of dead skin left on a branch, the sweat that drips into the soil.
Water washes all of that away. We reached the icy creek that fed the valley and weighed it in.
The freezing water shocked my system, numbing my feet instantly until they felt like heavy, dead stumps of wood.
I hiked my soaked skirts up to my thighs, dragging Leo against my sides to keep the current from sweeping him away.
We walked in the freezing water for three miles. The moon dipped behind the jagged peaks of the mountains, plunging the forest into a suffocating ink black darkness.
Every shadow looked like a crouching wolf. Every snap of a freezing branch sounded like breaking bone.
I navigated by the sound of the water and the faint pale glow of the snow banks on the banks.
Leo didn’t complain. He didn’t cry that his feet were cold. He trudged through the rushing water, his small jaw set tight, his amber eyes reflecting the harsh ambient light.
He was adapting to the wilderness with a frightening speed. He wasn’t just surviving the elements.
He was studying them. He was becoming the thing I feared most right before my eyes.
Where do you hide from monsters who can smell fear? You go where they cannot breathe.
I had heard whispers in the tavern back in Oak Haven. Drunken loggers spoke of the Silver Peaks, a treacherous mountain range to the deep west.
The old mines there were completely abandoned. No animals lived in the foothills. No birds nested in the trees.
The raw silver ore embedded in the stone poisoned the soil. And for shifters, the silver dust in the air was brutally toxic.
It burned their lungs and thinned their blood. It was a barren, deadly place. It was our only chance.
I forced us out of the water when the creek turned south. We had to head west.
The terrain grew steeper, the mud giving way to jagged shalecovered inclines that tore through the leather of my boots.
My lungs burned with every breath. Exhaustion wasn’t just a feeling anymore. It was a physical weight pressing down on my spine, begging me to lie down in the frost and just go to sleep.
Conrad’s eyes. I forced the image into my mind every time my knees buckled. Conrad’s hands on my son.
The terror was a bitter medicine, but it kept my legs moving. By the time the sky began to bleed a pale, bruised gray, we had cleared the dense treeine of the cragwood.
Before us stretched the foothills of the mountains, the trees here were skeletal, twisted things, stripped of bark and life.
The air felt thin and sharp. I collapsed against a dead, petrified tree stump, dragging Leo down with me.
We huddled beneath the stolen cloak, two freezing ghosts clinging to the edge of the world.
We had survived the night. But as I looked back at the sprawling, dark canopy of the forest below, I knew the hunt was only just beginning.
Morning broke without warmth. The sky remained a solid sheet of bruised iron, heavy with the promise of a blizzard.
We had rested for exactly 1 hour. Any longer [clears throat] and the freezing temperatures would have stopped my heart.
When I forced myself to stand, my joints screamed. The wet wool of my skirts had frozen stiff, slapping against my bruised legs like wooden boards.
Upo, I croked. My voice was entirely gone, shredded by the freezing air and dehydration.
He didn’t move immediately. He was curled into a tight ball beneath the bloody cloak.
When he finally unccurled, a violent shiver racked his small frame. He sat up and my heart slammed against my ribs.
His nose was bleeding. A thin, dark trickle of red stained his upper lip. He rubbed at it with the back of his filthy hand, smearing the blood across his ashcovered cheek.
He coughed, a dry, rattling sound that came from deep in his chest. “Mama, my throat hurts,” he rasped.
He sounded incredibly small, suddenly stripped of that unnerving, predatory maturity he had shown in the woods.
He sounded like a 4-year-old boy. The air, we had reached the edge of the silver deposits.
The microscopic dust blowing off the barren peaks was already working its way into his lungs.
The very thing that would protect us from Conrad’s pack was slowly poisoning my son.
Guilt, sharp and suffocating, clawed at my throat. What kind of mother brings her child to a poison wasteland?
The kind who has no other choice. I know, sweet boy. I know, I whispered, dropping to my knees.
I pulled my canteen from my hip, uncawking it with numb, clumsy fingers. The water inside was slush, half frozen.
Drink this. Just a little. He took a small sip, wincing as the ice cold water hit his raw throat.
We are close, I lied, wiping the blood from his chin with the edge of my sleeve.
Just a little further up the mountain. Then we can rest. Real rest. The bad men cannot follow us up there.
I hoisted him onto my back. He was heavy, but his legs were too short to navigate the treacherous, jagged shale of the foothills.
He wrapped his arms around my neck, burying his face into the collar of my cloak.
I gripped his thighs and started climbing. The ascent was brutal. There was no path, only a chaotic jumble of gray rock and dead earth.
The air grew thinner, carrying a sharp metallic tang that tasted like an old coin placed on the tongue.
My own lungs achd, but it was nothing compared to the hacking coughs that shook Leo’s body every few minutes.
Every cough felt like a knife twisting in my gut. By midday, the snow began to fall.
It wasn’t a gentle dusting. It [clears throat] was a driving horizontal sheet of ice that blinded me and coated my eyelashes in frost.
We found shelter by pure desperate luck. A fisher in the cliff face hidden behind a rock slide.
It was an old prospector’s tunnel, the wooden support beams rotting and sagging under the weight of the mountain.
I ducked inside. The air was stagnant and dry, smelling heavily of raw earth and that sharp metallic sting, but it blocked the wind.
I laid Leo down on a relatively smooth patch of stone deep inside the cave, wrapping the heavy cloak tightly around him.
He was burning up with a fever, his skin radiating unnatural heat, a biological reaction to the silver in his blood.
I took the stolen hunting knife and sat cross-legged at the mouth of the tunnel.
The snow outside was rapidly accumulating, burying our tracks, turning the world into a howling white void.
I pulled my knees to my chest, gripping the heavy steel hilt until my knuckles turned white.
I thought of Conrad. I pictured him standing in his great hall, receiving the news that his tracker was dead.
A mere human woman had killed one of his elite guards. He wouldn’t be enraged.
He would be fascinated. It would make the hunt sweeter for him. He wouldn’t stop.
He would send Bran. He would send the entire iron hold. A sound cut through the howling wind.
It was faint at first. A low, resonant vibration that I felt in the soles of my boots before I actually heard it.
I stood up, pressing my back against the cold stone of the cave wall, peering out into the blizzard.
At the base of the foothills, a mile below our position, [clears throat] a massive silhouette broke through the treeine.
Then another, and another. They were in their wolf forms. Massive nightmarish beasts the size of draft horses, their fur a mix of pitch black and slate gray.
They didn’t move like dogs. They moved with coordinated military precision. There were a dozen of them fanning out across the base of the mountain.
[clears throat] In the center of the formation stood a lone figure in human form.
He wore a heavy black fur cloak that whipped violently in the wind. Even from this distance, through the blinding snow, I knew him.
Bran. They stopped exactly at the treeine. The wolves paced anxiously back and forth, snapping their jaws at the air, their hackles raised.
They were sensing the metallic wind blowing off the peaks. They knew what was up here.
The silver boundary. Bran looked up. He didn’t know exactly which cave we were in, but he knew we were up there.
He cupped his hands around his mouth, his magically enhanced voice carrying over the roaring wind booming up the side of the mountain like thunder.
“Nora!” I squeezed my eyes shut, clapping my hands over my ears. “You have nowhere left to run.
The silver will kill the boy before the sun rises. Bring the king’s son down, and your death will be quick.
Keep him up there, and we will wait until you carry his corpse to us.”
I sank to the floor of the cave, pulling my knees tight against my chest.
I looked back into the gloom. Leo was shifting restlessly, a soft, pained whimper escaping his lips.
His nose was bleeding again. Bran wasn’t lying. The mountain was a sanctuary, but it was also a tomb.
We had escaped the wolves only to lock ourselves in a cage made of poison.
Silence [clears throat] is a liar. In the mouth of the prospector’s tunnel, the silence told me we were safe from the wolves.
But the rattling breath of my four-year-old son told the brutal truth. Time was killing him.
I sat beside Leo on the freezing stone, watching the fever cook his small body.
The silver dust in the air was invisible, but I could taste its bitter metallic edge on my own tongue.
For a human, it was a harsh irritant. For a shifter, it was ground glass in the bloodstream.
I [clears throat] pulled the stolen canteen from my belt. It was completely frozen. Desperate, I unlaced the heavy wool of my tunic and pressed the freezing iron flask directly against my bare stomach, praying my fading core temperature would be enough to melt the ice.
I shivered violently, my teeth clicking together in the dark. If we stayed in this shallow cave, Leia would be dead before the blizzard broke.
If I carried him down the mountain, Bran would bind us in iron chains and drag us back to Ironhold.
Surrender was not a guarantee of life. It was a guarantee of enslavement. Neither was an option.
I had to think like a human, not prey. The men who dug these tunnels over a century ago were ordinary laborers.
They sought the silver veins, but they couldn’t live breathing in the toxic dust any more than a wolf could.
They needed ventilation. They needed deep shafts to reach the underground aquifers to wash the ore and supply their camps.
A shallow cut into the rock wouldn’t require heavy timber supports, but this cave had massive rotting oak beams framing the entrance.
That meant it went deep. It meant there was a path through the mountain, away from the concentrated silver deposits on the surface.
I pulled the canteen from my shirt and shook it. A faint slosh of water echoed inside.
I unccorked it and lifted Leo’s head. “Drink,” I whispered. My voice was a broken rasp.
His lips were cracked and bleeding. He swallowed the freezing slush with a grimace, coughing weakly as it hit his throat.
His amber eyes flickered open, but the predatory sharpness was gone. They were clouded, unfocused.
“Mama, my blood hurts.” “I know,” I said, wiping a fresh streak of crimson from his nose.
“We are leaving this spot. We are going deep into the dark. You have to be brave.”
He gave a tiny, almost imperceptible nod. I stood up, leaving the heavy, bloodstained cloak wrapped securely around him.
[clears throat] I needed my hands free. I walked deeper into the tunnel, running my bare hands along the freezing, jagged walls.
10 paces in, the ambient gray light from the blizzard vanished completely. I was blind.
I dropped to my hands and knees, sweeping the stone floor. It was thick with dust, rubble, and the scattered, petrified droppings of long dead bats.
My fingers brushed against something hard and cylindrical, a piece of wood. I traced its shape, finding a heavy iron band at one end.
An old miner’s torch. Hope is a dangerous thing, but I clung to it. I pulled the flint from my pouch.
My hands were shaking so severely I struck my own knuckles twice, tearing the skin before a spark finally caught the ancient pitch soaked rag wrapped around the wood.
It flared to life with a loud hiss, casting a flickering, sickly orange glow against the tunnel walls.
The light revealed a nightmare. The tunnel didn’t just go straight back. It plummeted. A steep, narrow decline, dropped away into the abyss.
The wooden steps, long since rotted into splintered teeth. The walls were shimmering with raw veins of silver ore, sparkling maliciously in the firelight.
This was the source of the poison. We had to get past it, down to the bedrock where the water flowed.
I returned to Leo and hoisted him onto my back. He felt limp, his chin resting heavily on my shoulder.
I wrapped his arms around my neck and tied them together with a strip of leather torn from the hem of my skirts.
If he passed out, I couldn’t risk him slipping off into the dark. I held the torch in my right hand and the heavy hunting knife in my left.
“Hold on,” I told him. I stepped over the lip of the decline. The descent was agonizing.
The rotted wood of the stairs crumbled under my boots, forcing me to kick steps into the loose shale and packed earth.
Every jolt sent a spike of pain up my spine. The air grew steadily colder, but it also grew heavier.
The metallic taste began to fade, replaced by the damp, earthy smell of deep subterranean rock.
We climbed down for what felt like hours. My legs trembled uncontrollably. The muscles in my calves burned, screaming for rest.
But I ignored them. I focused on the sound of Leo’s breathing. It was still shallow, still wet, but the coughing fits were spacing out.
We were leaving the worst of the silver behind. Suddenly, the narrow shaft opened up.
I stepped off the final crumbling ledge and my boots hit solid flat stone. I held the torch high.
We were standing on the edge of a massive natural cavern. The ceiling was lost in the gloom above.
Stallctites hung like giant stone spears. But it was the sound that brought tears of pure, desperate relief to my eyes.
Rushing water. A deep black subterranean river tore through the center of the cavern, churning violently against the stone banks.
Water meant an exit. It meant the mountain was hollowed out, carving a path entirely under the silver peaks to the valleys on the western side.
I lowered Leo to the ground. He slumped against the damp rock wall, his chest heaving.
The fever was still burning him alive, but his nose had stopped bleeding. I knelt by the river, cupping the freezing pure water in my hands, and brought it to his lips.
“Drink,” I urged. “Wash it out.” He drank greedily the cold water, soothing his raw throat.
For a brief second, I let myself believe we had won. We had beaten the mountain.
We had outsmarted the Alpha King’s hunters. Then a pebble skittered down the shaft behind us.
Echoes in the deep dark are impossible to judge, but the sound was distinctly unnatural.
It wasn’t shifting rock. It was a boot scraping against stone. [clears throat] I spun around instantly snuffing out the torch in a puddle of muddy water.
Plunged into absolute pitch black, my senses dialed up to a painful degree. I held my breath, gripping the heavy steel of the hunting knife until my knuckles achd above us in the narrow shaft we had just descended.
A heavy weight shifted. Loose gravel rained down, splashing into the river. They followed us.
My mind raced, frantically calculating the impossible. Pure-blooded wolves couldn’t survive the silver concentration at the cave mouth.
Their lungs would hemorrhage before they took 10 steps. But Conrad’s pack wasn’t just pure bloods.
He employed half breeds, bastards born of human women who possessed neither the ability to shift nor the overwhelming strength of a true wolf, but retained the heightened senses and a partial immunity to silver.
Bran had sent a hound into the burrow. I can hear your heart beating, little bird.
The voice drifted down the shaft, echoing off the cavern walls. It was a male voice, raspy and arrogant, a half breed named Harlon.
I remembered him from the courtyard at Wolfgate. He was a cruel, rat-faced man who enjoyed breaking the fingers of the scullery maids when they displeased him.
The [clears throat] king wants the pup alive, Harlon called out, his boots crunching slowly down the final steps of the decline.
He was lighting his own way. A faint yellow glow began to bleed into the cavern.
But he didn’t say what condition I had to bring the mother back in. You’ve caused us a lot of trouble, Norah.
Bran is furious. The snow is freezing his pure bread balls off. I didn’t answer.
I knelt beside Leo, my hand clamping firmly over his mouth to muffle his ragged breathing.
I pressed my lips to his ear. “Do not make a sound,” I breathed, barely moving my lips.
I grabbed the leather strap binding his arms, untied it, and shoved him into a narrow recess between two massive stellagmites near the river’s edge.
I draped the dark wool of my torn skirts over him, hiding [clears throat] him in the shadows.
Harland stepped off the ledge, holding a flickering oil lantern high. In his other hand, he held a cruel curved skinning knife.
He was a large man, though not as massive as a true shifter, wearing boiled leather armor and a thick scarf wrapped around his mouth and nose to filter the remaining silver dust.
He swung the lantern, illuminating [clears throat] the edge of the rushing black river. He didn’t see me yet.
I was pressed flat against the damp stone 10 ft to his left, enveloped in the heavy shadows outside the lantern’s reach.
Come now, Harlon sneered, stepping closer to the water. He kicked a loose rock. There’s nowhere to go.
That river goes underground for another 5 m before it hits daylight. You jump in there, you drown in the pitch black.
Just hand over the boy. I tightened my grip on my knife. I couldn’t outrun him.
The terrain was too treacherous, and Leo was too weak to carry in a sprint.
If Harlon found the boy, he would slit my throat and take him. This had to end here on the edge of the black water.
I didn’t wait for him to find me. I pushed off the stone wall. I didn’t scream.
I didn’t announce my attack. I moved with silent lethal intent, closing the distance in three long strides.
Harlon heard the splash of my boots in the shallows. He spun around, raising his lantern just in time to illuminate the descending arc of my blade.
I aimed for his neck, but he was fast. A half breed’s reflexes were still vastly superior to a human’s.
He blocked my strike with the heavy iron base of his lantern. The glass shattered violently, extinguishing the light and plunging us back into the suffocating dark.
He lunged forward, slamming his shoulder into my chest. The impact knocked the breath from my lungs and sent me crashing backward into the freezing river.
The current instantly tore at my legs, threatening to drag me under. Harlon didn’t hesitate.
He waded in after me, guided by the sound of my thrashing. His hand shot out in the dark, his thick fingers tangling in my wet hair.
He yanked my head back with a brutal force, pulling my throat to. I felt the cold, sharp edge of his skinning knife press against my corroted artery.
“Stupid bitch,” he hissed, his hot breath smelling of stale meat and chewing root. I’m going to enjoy this.
I didn’t thrash. I didn’t pull away. I let him think he had won. I let my body go completely limp, sinking slightly under his grip.
As his grip shifted to accommodate my dead weight, I struck. I didn’t use my knife.
I drove my knee upward with every ounce of kinetic energy left in my exhausted body.
I aimed squarely between his legs. Harlon let out a strangled high-pitched gasp. The knife slipped from my throat.
His grip on my hair loosened just enough for me to twist violently away. I lunged forward in the pitch black water, tackling him around the waist.
We crashed beneath the surface of the freezing river. The cold was paralyzing. The current battered us against submerged rocks.
Harlon thrashed wildly, his heavier bulk giving him the advantage. He punched me blindly, his fist connecting solidly with my jaw.
White lights exploded behind my eyes. I was losing my grip. I was drowning. My hand brushed against the heavy leather of his belt.
I felt the iron buckle. I felt the sheath of his dagger. I didn’t pull away.
I pulled myself toward him. I grabbed the thick collar of his boiled leather armor with my left hand, anchoring myself to him in the churning water.
I brought my right hand up, the heavy hunting knife still locked in my grip.
I drove the blade deep into the soft tissue under his ribs. Harlon screamed, a muffled, bubbling sound that was instantly swallowed by the rushing river.
He convulsed, his hands clawing uselessly at my face in the dark water. I twisted the heavy steel handle, dragging the blade upward through his diaphragm.
He went rigid. Then his body went completely slackly. I released his collar and kicked away, breaking the surface of the water with a gasping, ragged breath.
I dragged myself onto the rocky bank, my chest heaving, coughing up freezing river water.
I lay there in the absolute darkness, listening. There was only the sound of the rushing water.
Harland’s body was gone, swept away into the subterranean deep. I lay in the dark, battered, freezing, and bleeding from a dozen cuts.
I was turning into a butcher, carving my way through men just to keep my child breathing.
I pushed myself up onto my hands and knees, ignoring the agonizing throb in my jaw.
Leo. I croked into the blackness. A small, warm hand found my shoulder in the dark.
Leo had crawled out of his hiding spot. He wrapped his arms around my wet, freezing neck.
He didn’t ask what happened. He didn’t cry. “I’m here, mama,” he whispered in the dark.
I held him tight, pulling myself to my feet. We had a river to follow.
Walking blindly through the belly of a mountain strips you of your humanity piece by piece.
You become an insect, relying only on touch and sound. I kept my left hand pressed against the jagged freezing stone wall, tracing the natural curves of the cavern, while my right hand held Leos in a vice grip.
The river rushed angrily beside us, an invisible, churning threat ready to drag us under if we strayed a foot too far to the right.
Ours blurred into a single agonizing continuum of cold and pain. My jaw throbbed where Harlon had struck me, a dull, rhythmic ache that kept time with my heartbeat.
The soaked wool of my garments had begun to freeze again as the ambient temperature of the deep earth sucked the remaining heat from my bones.
I was moving on borrowed time, fueled by a terrifying cocktail of adrenaline and maternal instinct.
Leo, however, was changing. As we put miles between us and the toxic silver dust of the upper peaks, his ragged breathing smoothed out.
The fever that had been cooking his blood dissipated into the damp cave air. His hand gripped tightly in mine.
No longer felt weak. In fact, he was gently pulling me forward. His shifter biology, freed from the poison, was knitting him back together at a terrifying speed.
In the absolute dark, where I was practically helpless, my 4-year-old son was navigating the uneven, treacherous stone floor with the shorefooted grace of a predator.
“Watch your step, mama,” he whispered into the blackness. “Big crack in the floor.” I paused, tapping my boot forward.
Sure enough, a wide fisher split the stone path deep enough to snap an ankle.
I stepped over it, my stomach tightening. He wasn’t guessing. He could see in this pitch black hellscape.
His eyes were adjusting, tapping into a nocturnal lineage that belonged solely to the man hunting us.
I was raising a weapon, and it was sharpening itself against the wet stone of our survival.
Eventually, the heavy, suffocating air began to thin. A faint breeze brushed against my wet cheek, carrying the scent of damp earth, decaying leaves, and pine sap.
It was the smell of the living world. A pin prick of pale grayish blue light broke the darkness ahead.
It was so faint I thought my exhausted brain was hallucinating. But Leo dropped my hand and ran forward.
“Leo, stop!” I rasped, terrified he would slip into the water. “Light,” he called back, his voice echoing off the narrowing tunnel walls.
I stumbled after him, my legs trembling so violently I nearly collapsed. The pin prick grew into a jagged, uneven archway, the roar of the subterranean river shifted, morphing into the crashing sound of a waterfall tumbling out into a wide gorge.
I pushed through the final stretch of the tunnel, shielding my eyes as we broke out into the freezing dawn.
We stood on a narrow ledge overlooking a vast, untamed valley. This was the western reach.
Endless miles of dense ancient evergreen forests stretching toward a distant coastline. The silver peaks towered behind us, a physical and poisonous barrier between us and the Alpha King’s domain.
Conrad’s pure-blooded trackers would never cross the poisoned mountain, and his half-breed hounds would think twice after Harland failed to return.
We had achieved the impossible. We had crossed the border. I fell to my knees on the frostcovered moss.
My body finally surrendering to the brutal toll of the escape. I couldn’t hold back the sob that ripped from my raw throat.
It was a wretched, ugly sound, a release of 5 years of paranoia, terror, and blood.
I wept for the innocent village woman I had been forced to bury under dirt and ash.
I wept for the blood permanently stained on my hands. A shadow fell over me.
I looked up through my tears. Leo stood at the edge of the cliff. The heavy bloodstained cloak of the dead guard whipping around his small ankles in the morning wind.
He wasn’t looking down at the beautiful sprawling valley. He was looking back at the mountain.
Back toward Iron Hold, the weak morning sun caught his face. His jaw was set tight, muscles feathering under his pale skin.
His amber eyes burned with an intensity that made the breath catch in my throat.
There was no fear in him, no relief, just a cold, calculating stillness. “They won’t stop,” he stated.
“It wasn’t a child’s question. It was an alpha’s assessment.” “No,” I whispered, wiping the grime from my face.
“They won’t,” he turned back to me. The golden hue of his irises cutting through the cold morning mist.
Then we have to get stronger, mama. Strong enough to kill the king. A chill that had nothing to do with the winter air settled deep into my marrow.
I had dragged my son through hell to save him from becoming a monster. But as I stared at the chilling reflection of Conrad in Lao’s eyes, I realized the bitterest truth of all.
You cannot outrun blood. The Alpha King was already inside him. My war wasn’t over.
It had just changed battlegrounds. Thank you so much for journeying through the dark, freezing wilderness with Nora and Leo.
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