Chapter 10

~Annalyn POV~

I woke up on the ground.

Cold dirt under my palms, bark scraping my knees, the smell of pine and something metallic coating the inside of my mouth. I blinked and the forest swam into focus as dark trees, thick roots, the red moon hanging above me like an open wound.

I was naked.

I sat up too fast and my vision tilted sideways, and every bone in my body felt like it had been taken apart and put back together wrong. My shoulder throbbed where Matteo had bitten into me. The third mark. I remembered that... his teeth, the burn that split through me like lightning, and then a voice tearing out of my throat that didn't belong to me.

After that, nothing.

There was blood on my thighs, which is not mine. I didn't know how I knew that, but I did.

I pressed my hand against a tree trunk and pulled myself upright. The night air hit my skin and I barely felt it. Something else was covering the cold, buzzing just under the surface of me, like a second heartbeat that wasn't quite synced with my own.

Then I heard howling from far off, but getting closer. Not one wolf, but dozens.

My wolf knew the sound before I did and she pressed against my ribs like she wanted out. Not in fear but wanted to face it.

"They're not celebrating, they're hunting." The voice said in my head.

I started running.

I didn't decide where to go, my legs just moved, bare feet slamming against the forest floor, branches slicing my skin. It hurt, but the pain felt distant, like it was happening to someone else. Something ancient had taken the wheel, steering me through the dark like it had done this before, like it knew exactly where we were going even if I didn't.

Back at the mansion, I later found out, Lucas had completely lost it.

He'd overturned the bed, smashed a lamp, and was pacing the room in a cold sweat when Calix finally said what no one wanted to say out loud.

"She's in the forest."

Matteo still had his head in his hands, the third mark tingling on his lips. He hadn't moved since I disappeared. Lucas rounded on him first, sharp, ugly, the kind of anger that's actually fear wearing a different face.

"You marked her and she vanished." Lucas's voice was low and dangerous. "That's on you!"

Matteo was on his feet before the sentence finished. "She was dying without it, Lucas. What did you want me to do, watch?"

"I wanted you to ask her..."

"She didn't have time."

"Enough!" Calix's voice cut through both of them like a blade. He was staring at the window, jaw tight. "Her scent just shifted direction, she's moving fast." He paused. "And she's not alone." All three of them went still.

Outside, the howling grew louder as I stumbled into a clearing and froze.

Twelve of them, massive, half-shifted, eyes burning red in the dark. They formed a perfect circle around me, close enough that I could see the fur spreading across their arms, the way their faces blurred between human and wolf, the trembling in their hands that wasn't weakness.

It was restraint, and none of them moved or lunged at me. They lowered their heads.

I didn't understand it at first, my brain kept screaming run, run, run, but my wolf went completely still inside me, and still wasn't afraid. Felt something that made no sense at all given twelve half-shifted wolves were surrounding me in a forest at midnight.

One of them lifted his head slightly, a man, barely holding his human form, his voice rough and trembling like even speaking cost him something.

"Moon Alpha." He exhaled the words like a prayer. "We have been waiting."

I opened my mouth but nothing came out.

"What..." I stopped, exhale. "What are you talking about? I'm not... I don't even know how to shift yet, because I've never done that."

"You don't have to shift." Another voice, a woman this time, kneeling. "We feel you, we've felt you for weeks. The pull, call, it's been getting stronger every night." Her red eyes lifted to mine, wet and certain. "Since they started marking you."

Something moved in my chest, not my heartbeat or even my wolf.

My spine bent slightly on its own. My vision shifted at the edges, the forest sharpening into silver detail and every leaf, shadow, breath rising from the wolves around me in small white clouds. I could smell their deference. I didn't know how, but I could.

"Moon Alpha," the first man said again, softer this time. "The pack has been without an anchor for fifteen years. We've been waiting for the one the marks would choose, the one the blood..."

My spine arched forward sharply, and for one violent second I thought I was going to shift right there, right now but my skin pulled tight, and my vision split white and dark, my wolf surging against the boundary between us like she was done waiting and ready to come out.

But suddenly a gunshot cracked through the trees like a thunderclap, and I spun.

One of the wolves behind me dropped, not dead because I could still hear breathing — but collapsed hard onto the ground, a clean hit to the shoulder, dark blood spreading fast across the dirt. The others scattered immediately, melting back into the trees in seconds, gone like smoke. The clearing emptied so fast it was almost like they'd never been there.

I stood alone, my chest heaving and heart hammering as I turned toward the tree line, where the shot had come from, and I saw Isabella.

She stood at the edge of the clearing, still in the clothes she'd been wearing at dinner, rifle raised with both hands. Shaking, the barrel trembling so hard I could see it from where I stood. Her face was a disaster and lips pressed white, eyes wet, mascara cracked down both cheeks. She looked like someone who had just done something she couldn't take back and already knew it.

"Isabella." My voice came out low, but careful. "Put the gun down."

She didn't. Her eyes darted to the wolf on the ground, then back to me. Her breath was coming in short, sharp pulls as she looked terrified. Not of me, of something behind her.

And I felt him before I saw him, the shift in the air. The quiet that wasn't empty but obvious.

Ezra stepped out from behind her, unhurried, arms folded across his chest. He looked at the clearing, at the fallen wolf, at Isabella still shaking with the rifle in her hands, and he smiled.

Slow and satisfied. The smile of someone watching a plan unfold exactly the way they'd drawn it up.

"Good girl," he said to Isabella, not looking at me, not yet, like I wasn't even the point. "You did exactly what I told you to."