THE WALK OUT

 Sable caught up to her half a mile down the road, breathless, her boots kicking up dust.

 "El. Elena. Would you slow down before I have to shift just to keep pace with you?"

 Elena didn't slow down. If she slowed down, she might stop. If she stopped, she might turn around and look back at Crimson Hollow one more time, and she couldn't survive that. Not today.

 "I'm fine," she said, which was a lie so obvious that Sable didn't even bother responding to it.

 Instead her best friend fell into step beside her, matching her pace, saying nothing for almost a full minute. That was one of the things Elena loved about Sable — she knew when words would only make things worse.

 "You shouldn't be walking out of pack territory alone," Sable finally said. "Not after a public rejection. You know what that does to your standing. Rogue packs patrol these borders. Omegas without a mate bond are—"

 "I know what I am, Sable."

 "I'm not trying to hurt you. I'm trying to keep you alive." Sable grabbed her wrist, forcing her to stop. Up close, her friend's eyes were wet, angrier on Elena's behalf than Elena had let herself be yet. "Let me come with you. At least to the city line."

 Elena looked back once — just once — toward the dark tree line where Crimson Hollow's territory began, where the torches still glowed faint gold through the branches like the pack hadn't even finished celebrating whatever cruel little ritual they'd just performed.

 "No," she said. "You have a life here. A family. I'm not asking you to give that up because Damian Cross couldn't stomach who I was born as."

 "El—"

 "I need to do this alone, Sable. I need to disappear for a while. Become someone they can't reject twice."

 Sable's jaw tightened, but she nodded slowly, the way people do when they've lost an argument they never really believed they'd win.

 "Call me. Every week. I mean it." Sable pulled her into a fierce hug, and for one second Elena let herself feel the full weight of everything she was walking away from — the pack she'd grown up fighting to belong to, the only home she'd ever known, the boy whose rejection had just carved something out of her chest that she wasn't sure would ever grow back.

 Then she stepped back, shouldered her bag, and kept walking.

 She didn't see Sable's expression shift as she watched her go — didn't see the way Sable's gaze snagged on something behind Elena's shoulder, back near the tree line, where a lone figure stood motionless in the shadows.

 Tobias Rourke had been pack elder for forty-three years. He'd seen every kind of wolf pass through Crimson Hollow's ranks — alphas and omegas, betas and rogues, the occasional shifter so weak-blooded they could barely hold their second form. He'd never, not once in four decades, seen a wolf's eyes turn that color.

 Gold like a struck match. Gold like something out of the oldest pack histories, the ones nobody bothered teaching anymore because the bloodline they described had gone extinct a hundred years before he was born.

 He watched Elena Marsh disappear down the road, phone already pressed to his ear, and when the call connected, his voice was low and urgent.

 "It's me. I need you to pull every record we have on the Ashwood royal line. Now. Tonight." A pause, listening. "Because I just watched an unranked omega's eyes turn gold at the territory border, and if I'm right about what that means, Margaret Cross just made the biggest mistake of her life."