Rogue's Omega

Silas’s boot drove into my stomach, and I folded around the pain without a sound. Ten years in this pack had taught me one thing: noise makes it worse.I hit the training yard dirt on my side, and a puff of dust coated my tongue. Silas stood over me with his sandy hair cropped close to his skull, his small eyes bright with the kind of joy only cruelty could feed.“Get up, Mercer.” He nudged my ribs with his toe. “Or don’t. You’re better down there. Like the worm you are.”Two of his friends laughed behind him. I didn’t bother with their names anymore, they came and went, always circling Silas like moons around a rotting planet.I pushed onto my hands and knees. My stomach screamed where his boot had landed, and my claws punched out without permission, thin black points digging into the packed earth. My eyes burned, and I knew they’d gone wolf-gold. That was all I could manage. No fur. No shift. Just pieces of a monster that never fully came.Silas crouched and grabbed a fistful of my

I felt him before I saw him—a pressure in the air, a weight in the dark that made my wolf curl up and go silent.The heat had been eating me alive for hours. Every step through the snow sent a fresh wave of fire through my belly, and my legs were slick with something I didn’t want to name. The pines blurred. My breath came in short, wet gasps. I kept walking because stopping meant dying, and dying meant the pack was right about me.A voice kept calling my name through the trees. Not Maren’s voice. Not Kellan’s. Something older. Softer. It came from the white spaces between the branches, and every time I turned toward it, the forest shifted and the voice slipped somewhere else.“Caelum.”I spun and grabbed a tree trunk to keep from falling. “Who’s out there?” My voice cracked, swallowed by the snow. No answer. Just the wind and the roar of my own blood.“Show yourself.” I stumbled forward, the knife Maren gave me useless in my trembling hand. “I’m not afraid of you.”A lie. My whole bo

I couldn't fight. I couldn't shift. But when the first rogue lunged through the cave mouth, my body moved before my mind could stop it.The attack came fast. Three wolves burst through the entrance with snapping jaws and matted fur, their ribs showing through patchy coats. They smelled like rot and hunger. Bastian met them head on, his massive black wolf exploding out of his skin between one heartbeat and the next. The sound of his shift was thunder in the small space.I pressed myself against the back wall of the cave, and my legs gave out. The stone bit into my back. The heat still pulsed through me, a sick rhythm that made everything blur at the edges, and I watched the fight like it was happening underwater.Bastian's wolf was a monster. Black fur, one ear torn, shoulders thick as boulders. He caught the first rogue by the throat and threw it against the cave wall hard enough that I heard bones crack. But the second rogue was already on his flank, and the third circled toward the

They shoved Bastian into the pit before I could even stand. The crowd roared. And I felt the first blow land in my own ribs. An enforcer with a scar splitting his chin dragged me up a set of stone steps to a wooden ledge that overlooked the fighting pit. The chamber was underground, carved into the bedrock beneath the council hall, and the walls sweated with old moisture. Torches lined the perimeter, and the smoke made everything hazy and orange. Wolves crowded the ledge, pack members I recognized and some I didn't, all of them shouting and stomping their boots on the stone. I grabbed the railing with both hands. Below, the pit was a circle of packed dirt and bloodstains. Bastian stood in the center, his wrists still raw from the silver chains, his shoulder wrapped in a hasty bandage that was already spotting red. He wore no shirt. The scars on his back caught the torchlight like twisted silver ropes. "Place your bets," a beta man with a missing front tooth shouted, and the crowd s

"Sit." Voss gestured to a chair like he was offering tea, not an interrogation. "We have much to discuss, young omega." The chair was carved from dark wood, its arms worn smooth by years of hands gripping them. I didn't want to sit. Every instinct I had was screaming at me to back out of the room and run, but the guard who had escorted me from my cell was still standing outside the door, and Voss's pale eyes were on me with the patient stillness of something that had all the time in the world. I sat. Voss's private chambers were nothing like the rest of Silver Hollow. The stone walls were hidden behind shelves crammed with books and scrolls and glass jars filled with things I didn't want to look at too closely. A preserved wolf claw hung in a shadow box above the fireplace, blackened with age and curved like a sickle. The candles on his desk burned with some kind of herb that made the air thick and sweet, and the smoke curled around my face like fingers. Voss settled into the chai