Chaos valley

The car hadn’t even come to a full stop before I threw the door open and collapsed onto the damp earth of Chaos Valley. We were deep between the Twin Sentinels now, the towering peaks blocking out the rest of the world.

Then, the agony began.

A normal first shift is supposed to be guided. An Alpha or a parent is meant to share the burden, grounding the young wolf’s mind so the bones don't feel like they’re shattering into shards of glass. But I was a rejected wolf. I was a rogue. There was no Alpha link to steady me, no pack bond to dull the blade of the transformation.

It was cruel. It was a violent, lonely rebirth.

I screamed, my voice echoing off the mountain faces, until my vocal cords frayed and the sound turned into a guttural, animalistic rasp. I felt my ribs snap and knit, my spine elongating in a rhythmic torture that seemed to last for a century.

Let go, a voice whispered in the back of my mind—not my mother's, but the voice of the wolf who had been waiting in the dark for eighteen years. Let them break. We will build back stronger.

With one final, bone-cracking surge, the human girl died on the forest floor, and the wolf was born.

The silence that followed was heavy. I pushed myself up on four paws, my vision sharper than it had ever been. I could hear the heartbeat of a hawk nesting a mile up the eastern peak. I looked down at my paws; they were massive, far larger than any female wolf I had ever seen. My fur wasn't the dull brown of the Sandwell line; it was a shimmering, radiant silver that caught the moonlight, glowing like liquid starlight.

"Oh, Goddess," Beatriz whispered, her hands over her mouth. "Aella... you're beautiful."

But as I stepped toward a small, crystalline pool fed by a mountain spring, I saw the mark.

Around my neck, hidden beneath the thick silver fur, were two deep, indelible lines etched in a pulsing violet light. The first line was jagged, sliced clean down the middle as if a blade had tried to sever my throat. It was the mark of the Rejection.

The weight of it hit me then. Today was my eighteenth birthday. I was supposed to be celebrating the official discovery of our bond. Since I was fifteen years old, I had lived my life according to the contract our parents had signed. For three years, I had prepared to be Maxwell's wife. Three years of studying pack law, three years of managing his finances, and three years of being the "perfect Luna" in training.

We were set to be married on our twentieth birthday. I had spent over a thousand days building a throne for a man who had been sleeping with my cousin for seven hundred of them.

But the second violet line on my neck was whole. It shone with its own light, unbroken and waiting. It was the mark of a second chance. The Goddess hadn't just healed me; she had left the door open for a destiny Maxwell Sandwell couldn't even imagine.

Suddenly, a violent thrum of power radiated from my core, shaking the very trees around us.

In the Sandwell Pack, I was the Lead Warrior’s daughter. I was the "contractual Luna," a title given by marriage and ink. But as I stood in the heart of Chaos Valley, the land itself seemed to hum in recognition. The mountains didn't just welcome me; they submitted.

The power wasn't coming from a mate. It was coming from me.

I threw my head back and let out a howl that shook the valley floor. It wasn't the howl of a Luna waiting for her King. It was the deep, chest-vibrating roar of an Alpha.

The transition had changed me. My strength, my mother's lineage, and the raw magic of this neutral land had converged. I wasn't just a rogue survivor. I was the Alpha of Chaos Valley.

I shifted back, the silver fur receding until I stood naked and shivering in the mountain air, but my eyes remained a piercing, glowing violet.

"We aren't just hiding here," I said, my voice rasping but filled with a new, terrifying authority. "We’re building. They think I'm the girl who lost her wedding. They’re about to meet the woman who owns the world."