Chapter Six- The Night Her Wolf Broke Free

Seren’s POV

Twelve days into my stay, something inside me finally gave.

It happened in the hallway outside the laundry room, of all places. A young maid named Della had brought fresh linens to my door, and I’d followed her a few steps to ask where the library was, a small, stupid attempt to find something to do with the hours that stretched endlessly in that house. She turned to answer me, and the moment her eyes met mine, the pulse under my ribs that had gone quiet since the night I left Davan’s flat woke up screaming.

I was confused about what It was, what was happening to me there.

It didn’t feel like a heartbeat this time. It felt like something clawing its way up my spine, and I doubled over, gripping the wall, a sound tearing out of my throat that didn’t belong to any human voice I owned.

“Seren?” Della’s voice climbed into panic. “Seren, your eyes—”

I didn’t hear the rest. Heat ripped through my bones so fast I thought I was dying, my vision splitting into something too sharp, too bright, colors I had no name for bleeding into the edges of the hallway. I heard myself snarl. I felt my hand close around Della’s wrist with a strength that was not mine, and she screamed, and somewhere very far away I understood I was about to hurt her and could not stop my own body from finishing the thought. I closed my eyes, tight, hoping it would stop.

Hoping the feelings would go away. But who was I kidding?

“Seren!”

Two sets of footsteps hit the corridor at a dead run. I registered Caelum first, a wall of dark and controlled fury shoving Della bodily out of my reach, and Rysen a half second behind him, already reaching for my other arm.

They grabbed me at exactly the same moment, one hand each closing around my wrists.

The room went white.

A thin, silver thread of light burst out from beneath my skin, looping from my wrist to Caelum’s, from my other wrist to Rysen’s, three points pulled taut into a single, humming line. The pain didn’t stop. It changed, folded in on itself, and my body finally did what it had been trying to do since I was sixteen years old and every doctor told me I was broken.

I shifted.

Fur the color of unbroken snow rippled up my arms, down my spine, my bones rearranging themselves in a violence so total I should have blacked out from it. When it ended, I was standing on four paws on the polished floor of the Vord estate, a white wolf, a color the council had declared extinct two generations ago, and both Alphas were on their knees in front of me, staring, their faces stripped of every careful, controlled thing they usually wore.

“Get everyone off this floor,” Caelum said, not taking his eyes off me. His voice had dropped into something low and absolute. “Now. Nobody sees this.”

Rysen didn’t argue. He moved fast, herding a shaking Della and two wide eyed guards down the stairwell, and I heard the heavy click of a lock, then another, Caelum sealing the hallway with his own hands before any tracker in the territory could catch the signature of what had just happened inside these walls.

I stood there shaking on legs that had never held me before, and Caelum crouched slowly in front of me, close enough that I could have torn his throat out if the wolf still wanted to. It didn’t. It was calm now, strangely, achingly calm, pressed against the silver thread still glowing faintly where it disappeared into his skin.

“There you are,” he said quietly, and for the first time since I’d arrived at Vord territory, his voice didn’t sound like an Alpha giving an order. It sounded almost human.

I wanted to listen to him, to give into his voice, to let him help me listen, to change back to human. But the wolf was in me had taken over completely that I could barely find myself. I could barely find my own strength. My own voice. It was like being trapped inside my own mind, like a cage.

I let myself drown in it, like I was drowning in an ocean. It felt nice to be drowning and somehow I feel afloat, I wanted to like it, to enjoy it but I was scared of what I could become if I let myself enjoy it, knowing fully well that Davan would do anything to bring me back to human and somehow i felt good.

It took hours to shift back. By the time I did, wrapped in a blanket Rysen had draped over my bare shoulders without a single comment, the three of us sat on the floor of that sealed hallway like survivors of something none of us had chosen.

“A confirmed mate bond voids the original contract,” Rysen said eventually, staring at the thread still faintly visible under his skin. “Pack law forbids treating a true mate as property. You’re not our breeder anymore, Seren.”

“Then what am I,” I asked, my voice wrecked and small.

Caelum looked at me for a long moment, something unguarded moving behind his dark eyes. “Ours,” he said. “That’s all it means right now. Ours.”

It should have terrified me more than the purchase had. Instead, sitting between two men who had just watched me become something no one believed existed, I felt the first flicker of something I hadn’t let myself feel since the night I found that folder under Davan’s bed.

Safe.

Safe was the word after all they would do anything to protect me regardless and make sure i remain more than the “ours” Caelum mentioned. I looked from both men to one another and something inside me smiled.