THE PROPHECY WAS WRONG

🩸WARREN🩸

MINE!

The word exploded through my skull the moment our eyes met. I did not choose it. It simply arrived, tearing through every wall I had spent twenty-four years building brick by brick.

Kian roared inside my chest, a violence I had never felt from him before. Not once. Not in every fight I had ever thrown him into, not in every kill I had let him taste.

MINE.

The force of it nearly knocked me off balance where I sat. My hand found the arm of my chair and gripped it until I felt it start to splinter under my palm.

Twenty-four years of discipline kept my face exactly where it belonged. Cold and unreadable. Carved from the same ice everyone in this pack had accused me of since I was a boy. But underneath that stillness, something ancient had clawed its way awake, and it was already dragging its claws down the inside of my ribs, demanding I move, demanding I claim, demanding things I had sworn my entire life I would never want.

No.

Absolutely not.

This could not be happening.

Not like this.

Not with her.

I forced myself to look at her again, hunting for the mistake, because there had to be one buried somewhere in this room.

She was bruised along one side of her face, the skin already purpling beneath the dirt smeared across it. Her dress had torn at the shoulder before she ever set foot in my hall, and her long silver hair hung in tangled ropes around her face, loose from whatever braid it once held.

She knelt with her wrists bound behind her, shoulders curled inward like she was trying to fold herself small enough to disappear. She smelled of soil and sweat and something underneath both of those things that made my chest tighten before I understood what it was.

She was a thief.

A fat, dirty thief dragged into my hall in chains because she had the nerve to steal vegetables from my own land.

This was not the woman they had spent my entire life searching for.

I had heard the words since before I understood what language was. Every elder repeated them like scripture whenever they thought I was out of earshot. Every priest recited them during every ceremony I was forced to sit through, pretending the words meant nothing to me. Every whispered conversation in every corridor of this pack house died the instant I walked past, because everyone knew the prophecy by heart, and not one of them wanted to be caught saying it in front of me.

The mate of the Forbidden Alpha Prince shall be the Starborn Omega, marked by three stars upon her brow.

The woman destined to cleanse the cursed bloodline running through my veins. The woman destined to save me from the thing sleeping inside my blood, the thing that had already taken my father from me before I ever opened my eyes.

I hated those words. I hated them more with every year that dragged past.

I never wanted saving. I never wanted a mate handed to me by dead men who scrawled prophecies onto stone tablets they would never live to see fulfilled. I never wanted my future decided by fate instead of by my own two hands.

I searched her face again, desperate for anything that would explain what had just torn through me.

Nothing.

No stars marked her forehead. No mark touched her skin anywhere I could see. Nothing about her suggested royal blood, or rare lineage, or any bloodline worth twenty-four years of searching.

This was impossible.

The bond had not snapped into place with a princess, or the Starborn Omega everyone had hunted across kingdoms and bloodlines and noble houses for two and a half decades.

It had snapped with a thief. A fat, dirty thief kneeling on the floor of my hall with dirt caked beneath her fingernails.

The guards were still waiting. I realized that I had said nothing for far too long, that the silence had stretched well past control and started curdling into something the guards were beginning to notice. One of them shifted his weight.

“What did she steal?”

My voice came out calm. Bored, even, exactly the way I wanted it to sound, though nothing underneath my skin felt calm or bored in the slightest.

One of the guards upended her bag over the floor. Vegetables scattered across the polished stone, rolling in different directions before coming to a stop against the legs of my chair. Carrots. Onions. Bell peppers. Ordinary, pathetic things. The kind of theft that should have ended in a slap across the wrist and a warning never to set foot on my land again.

“How much?”

The guard gave me a number. It meant nothing to me. My attention had already returned to her.

She looked up. Only for a second. Our eyes met, and the bond tightened again, chains locking into place one link at a time, each one pulling harder than the last.

Kian surged against my ribs, howling for me to close the distance between us, to touch her, to mark her before anyone else in this room could look at her the way I was looking at her now. I shut him out before he could finish the thought, burying him the way I buried every instinct that ever threatened to make me weak in front of witnesses.

The guard cleared his throat. “What should we do with her, Your Highness?”

I understood, in that breath, exactly what I had to do.

If I sent her back into whatever gutter she crawled out of, I would spend the rest of my life not knowing. Wondering whether fate had somehow chosen her despite everything that made no sense about it.

But if she stayed close enough for me to watch, the truth would surface on its own. If days became weeks, and weeks became months, and nothing happened, no stars appeared, no prophecy stirred to life, then I would finally have proof strong enough to bury this bond and everyone’s hope along with it.

“Lock her up.”

The guard blinked, clearly bracing for a different order. “But Your Highness—”

“She’ll repay every coin she stole.” I let my voice drop, flat and final, the tone I used on men right before I made an example out of them.

“For how long?”

I did not look at her. I could not afford to. “Until I decide her debt has been paid.” I said slowly. “She’ll serve the pack.”

Everything had to stay under my control. No one could know what had just happened inside this hall. Not these guards, already trading glances they thought I could not see. Not my mother, who would read the truth off my face the second she looked at me. Not Garrick, who had spent twenty-four years combing kingdoms for the Starborn Omega and would not rest until he understood what I was hiding from him. Not Emery, who already knew me better than anyone alive had any right to.

And especially not her.

The guards hauled her out. The doors shut behind them. I sat there in the silence that followed, my hand still locked around the splintered arm of my chair, waiting for my pulse to remember how to slow down.

A knock came against the door. It did not matter whether I answered. Only one person in this entire pack house had ever ignored my permission and walked in anyway, and she proved it again before I said a single word.

Emery had been walking into my rooms uninvited since we were children, since the days her father used to drag her along to every council meeting. We grew up shoulder to shoulder in these halls, trained in the same yard, bled from the same training blades. She was the only person alive who remembered me before the weight of this bloodline settled onto my shoulders, and she used that history like a key that opened doors nobody else could touch.

She studied me for a long moment, her green eyes moving from my face to the vegetables still scattered across my floor. “You missed the memorial.”

“I was busy.” I kept my voice flat, already bored with where this was headed.

“So I heard.” She crossed her arms. “What happened?”

“Nothing.”

She laughed, low and familiar, a sound I had heard a thousand times across twenty years. “You say nothing when something happened, Warren.”

“Shouldn’t you be with your father right now?” I already knew Garrick had asked her to help prepare the memorial grounds that morning, but I said it anyway, because I wanted her out of my sight before she pushed any further.

Her jaw tightened, but she let it go, the way she always let my cruelty go. Her eyes drifted back to the vegetables. “A thief?”

I did not answer.

She laughed again, softer this time, careless in a way that made my stomach drop before she even finished the sentence. “I hope she wasn’t your Starborn Omega.”

The room went cold in a way that had nothing to do with the season. I stood before I even registered moving, the chair shrieking against the stone floor behind me.

“Don’t.”

Her smile died instantly. “Warren?”

“Don’t joke about that prophecy.”

“I wasn’t—”

“I said don’t.” My voice came out lower than I meant it to, rougher, carrying an edge I usually reserved for men who deserved to be afraid of me.

For the first time in twenty years, Emery looked at me like she did not recognize the man standing in front of her. “I’ve upset you.”

“You’ve said enough.”

She searched my face for an answer I refused to give her, waiting, hoping I would crack the way I never once had in front of her before. When I gave her nothing, something in her expression folded inward.

“I’m sorry.” She left without another word, the door clicking shut behind her, softer than it should have been given how hard I had just spoken to her.

The room fell silent and empty again. I walked to the window overlooking Shadow Pack, watching lanterns strung between the trees below for tonight’s bonfire, watching my people carry on with their small, ordinary lives while something ancient still clawed beneath my skin.

Twenty-four years. That was how long they had searched for the woman destined to save me.

And fate had delivered a fat, dirty thief instead.

Good.

Thieves did not become legends.

They did not fulfill prophecies carved by men who died long before their words came true.

They did not save cursed princes from the darkness sleeping in their own blood, and they certainly will not save me, not the way my father let a woman save him and then died anyway, his sacrifice worth nothing in the end but a memorial stone and a widow who still cried into an old leather journal every night.

I would keep this thief exactly where I could watch her.

I would wait. When no stars appeared, when nothing about her changed no matter how many weeks or months passed, everyone would finally see what I already knew in my bones to be true.

The prophecy was wrong.

Fate had made a mistake.

And no one would ever know she was mine.