Chapter 3: Run!

Ophilia's POV

Crimson.

What did she mean by that? The word wouldn't stop echoing in my head, looping over and over as Chase's fingers dug into my arm and dragged me toward the door.

This wasn't right. It wasn't fair.

I had done nothing wrong. Nothing but sit back while they destroyed my entire life, piece by piece, year after year. They had wanted to humiliate me in front of everyone tonight, and I had only given them a taste of their own medicine.

I had been quiet for far too long. It was time I opened my mouth.

"It's not fair." The words tore out of me, louder than I meant them to be.

Fear rose up fast, threatening to swallow me whole. I had never spoken up for myself before — not once, and certainly never to the Luna Mother herself. But I forced my spine straight and buried the fear beneath something that looked, at least on the surface, like pride.

Sydney turned to face me slowly, and the temperature in the room seemed to drop with her.

"What did you say?" Her voice was quiet. Cold. The kind of cold that promised something worse than shouting. She hadn't expected me to answer. She hadn't expected me to have a voice at all.

I wasn't going to stop now.

"I said it's not fair." My voice held steady, no tremor, no trace of remorse. "My whole life I've been nothing but a servant to you — to all of you — and I've gotten nothing in return. You treat me like I'm nothing—"

"You are nothing." She cut me off before I could finish, each word slicing clean through the air. "Nothing but a useless fat and stupid wolf, a Crimson wolf".

There it was again.

Crimson wolf.

I wanted to scream at her to explain it, to tell me why that word kept falling from her mouth like a curse aimed at the center of my chest. But she wasn't finished. Her voice climbed, sharpened, until it filled every corner of the room.

"You have done nothing but humiliate this family. A girl who takes up as much space as you do was never meant to stand on that platform. You are a mistake — destined for failure."

Each word landed like a blow, and I felt something in me crack open. This was it. This was the reason I'd stayed small and silent my whole life. This was why I'd let them walk over me again and again.

Not this time.

"No wonder your family threw you out. What pack wants a Luna who eats through its resources and gives nothing back?"

My heart didn't just crack. It shattered, all at once, into pieces too small to ever count. I was boiling — rage climbing up my throat, hot and violent — but somewhere beneath it, in the deepest, ugliest part of me, a small voice whispered that she was right. My own family had discarded me. To them, I had never meant anything at all.

Chase's grip tightened, his fingers pressing hard enough to bruise bone.

And then, the one thing I had sworn to myself I would never let them see again — I felt it before I could stop it. Tears, hot and humiliating, sliding down my face.

Sydney's mouth curved. She started toward me, each step slow, deliberate, savoring it. "You are nothing, Ophilia. You always have been, and you always will be."

She lifted a hand and signaled Jace without even looking at him. He crossed the room in three strides, seized the emerald-blue necklace that had never once left my throat, and tore it free before dropping it into his mother's waiting palm.

"Please." My voice cracked despite myself. "Give it back, Sydney."

I didn't recognize the voice that came out of me — thick, shaking, but refusing to break.

She slapped me.

The sound cracked through the room like a whip. My head snapped sideways, my cheek blazing, my vision swimming white for a single heartbeat. "I am still your Luna Mother," she hissed, leaning in close enough that I could feel her breath. "Where is your respect?"

Something detonated inside me.

Heat surged through my veins, molten and uncontrollable, anger burning away every ounce of fear I'd been carrying my whole life. Before I even understood what I was doing, I wrenched free of Chase's grip and my palm connected with Sydney's face — hard, deliberate, final.

The silence afterward was worse than any scream.

Horror flickered across Sydney's face for half a second before her eyes flared gold and her fangs dropped, glinting and sharp. She didn't look at me. She looked past me — straight at Chase. That look. The one she always gave her sons when she wanted someone punished.

I felt the air shift before I even turned my head.

Chase's eyes locked onto mine, and whatever restraint had been holding him together snapped clean in half. He wrenched his hand from my arm like my skin had burned him. Fur rippled up his forearms in a wave, his eyes bled gold, and his claws and fangs tore free of his normal form in the space of a single breath.

"Run, Ophilia."

His voice wasn't his own anymore. Cold. Empty. Almost gleeful.

A smirk curled across what was left of his normal face — and then it was gone, replaced by a black wolf easily twice my size, muscles coiled, eyes locked on me like I was already dead.

I understood, in that frozen half-second, exactly what I was about to become.

A body they'd finally get to break. Just like they'd always said they would.