CHAPTER 6 — "What She Was Born To Be"

"Again," I said, wiping a mixture of sweat and blood from my lower lip. I didn't look at the clock on the reinforced wall of the training arena. I didn't care that we had been at this since three in the morning.

Gideon, one of Maren's highest-ranking combat instructors — a towering, scarred Beta who had survived three separate pack wars — dropped his guard slightly, his chest heaving. "Sera, you've broken two of my ribs. Your stamina... your stamina and mine isn't the same. We're done for today."

"I didn't say we were done," I snapped, I glared at him daring him to leave. "Pick up your hands. Caden won't stop because he's tired." And I know Rowan won't either." I scoff,Rowan had the pride of the whole pack combined.

"He can't keep up because you're suppressing him without even trying Sera," Maren's voice echoed from the observation platform. She walked down the metal stairs, tablet in hand, expression unreadable. "Six months ago you arrived here with a shattered spirit and a body poisoned by suppressants. Today your cellular regeneration operates at a frequency I've only read about in ancient texts..... Gideon, leave us."

He didn't hesitate. He gave me a brief, strangely respectful nod and bolted from the room,he has been doing that for a while now.

I watched him go, my eyebrows knitting together. "Why does he do that? Why does everyone in this compound do that?"

"Do what?" Maren asked, tapping her stylus against the screen.

"Look at the floor when I walk in," I said, pacing the mats, my heart slamming against my ribs. "Yesterday three Enforcers left their table because I sat down two rows away. If Caden told them I was weak, why are they treating me like a disease?"

"They aren't treating you like a disease, Sera. They're treating you like an apex predator." Maren walked into my path, forcing me to stop, and pointed her stylus at my left wrist. The Ashborne Crest had settled from silver-gold into a stark, obsidian-black tattoo that pulsed faintly whenever my adrenaline spiked. "Six months of flushing Rowan's toxins out of your blood has let your natural aura bleed into the environment. Their wolves are shutting down because instinct is telling them to submit to you,which is quite unfamiliar to them."

"I haven't even bared my fangs," I muttered. "Caden used to tell me mine was a genetic dead end. Too small. Too quiet. Too soft to hold a pack together."

He said it so many times I was beginning to believe it.

"Caden lied because he was terrified of what would happen if you stopped believing him," Maren said, her voice dropping into a harder register. "But we've reached the limit of what conditioning can do. You've mastered combat. You know the territory. Your body is ready. There's one wall left."

She grab my chin gently to look at her.

I knew what she was going to say before she said it. A cold knot of anxiety twisted in my gut. "The shift."

"You haven't shifted once since the night of the severing," Maren stated bluntly. "Every time I push, you pull back. You lock her down. Why?"

I opened my mouth. Closed it again.

Because the last time I let her out, he made her kneel in front of forty people and called it discipline.

"Because the last time I shifted, Caden used his Alpha command to force me onto my back in front of his entire council to prove a point," I said instead, my jaw aching from how hard I ground my teeth.God!how much I hated him for it

"He crushed my wolf's pride, Maren. He made her a prisoner in my own skin. I'm afraid if I let her out now, she'll still feel the leash...

and the burn"

"That leash is gone. You cut it yourself, on my table." Maren stepped closer and gripped my shoulders, her hold tight and unyielding. "Your wolf isn't a prisoner. She's the weapon. If you want to walk back into that territory and take your son from Rowan, you cannot do it as a human woman. Let her out, Sera. Let me see what you were actually born to be."

What if she says no?

What if five years of silence taught her that the only safe thing is to stay curled up in the dark, and she never wants to come out again — not even for me?

I sigh heavily and closed my eyes anyway. I let the ambient noise of the compound fall away and reached down into the quiet, guarded place where she had been sleeping since the night Caden gutted her.

'Wake up,'I told her. 'We're going home soon. But I need you to stand first.'

Nothing.

'Please.'

Still nothing. Just silence, thick and stubborn, like she'd heard me and decided not to answer.

'I know he hurt you. I know what he made you do in front of them. But I'm not him. I'm not asking you to kneel. I'm asking you to fight...for our son'

Something in the dark finally stirred — not gently. A snarl, low and furious, rattled up through my own chest before I understood it wasn't mine. She didn't want to wake up. She wanted to be left alone, the way I'd left her alone for five years while I made myself small enough to survive.

'I'm sorry,'I told her, and I meant it more than I'd meant anything in a long time. 'I let them do that to you. I won't again.'

The silence cracked.

What answered wasn't agreement. It was rage — old, cold, five years deep — and it came up through my spine like a blade being dragged the wrong way through bone.

I doubled over. My knees hit the mat.

'This isn't how it's supposed to—'

The pain envelope my body,

The heat didn't build. It detonated, I could feel my body fighting itself, my own bones refusing the shape she wanted to take, my muscles seizing as two different instincts — the woman who had spent years learning to be small, and the wolf who no longer knew how to be anything else — tore against each other inside the same skin.

It didn't feel like transformation. It felt like being unmade,my body slammed on the floor.

I heard myself screaming before I understood I'd opened my mouth — a raw, tearing sound that i didn't belong to me or anyone erupt. My spine arched off some axis I didn't control. Somewhere very far away, Maren was shouting my name, and I couldn't have answered her if I'd wanted to; there was no 'me' left standing between the two forces ripping through my body, only the sound, and the tearing, and the horrifying certainty that I had asked for something I didn't have the right to survive.

'Please,' I begged her, or myself, or both. 'Please, I can't—'

I could feel the metallic taste at the back of my throat

And then, all at once, she stopped fighting.

It wasn't surrender. It was recognition — the moment she finally understood I wasn't Caden's voice in her head, ordering her down. I was the one who'd freed her. And when she understood that, she didn't yield to me.

The pain didn't fade so much as transform into something else entirely — a flood of sensation so total it staggered me from the inside. I felt my paws hit the mat before I understood I had paws. I felt the world sharpen into hyper-detailed, monochromatic clarity, sound and scent arriving all at once, too much and exactly enough. I was enormous. My shoulders sat level with Maren's head. My fur came in thick and pristine and midnight black, and my claws sank into rubber built to withstand far less than what had just come through it.

For one suspended second, I understood something I hadn't let myself believe in five years: 'she was never ruined like I thought. She was just waiting for me'

Then the dominance hit — not mine, not entirely, but ours — a shockwave of raw command that rolled outward from my body and didn't ask permission from anything in the room.

It felt like the universe cracked open.It felt familiar and unfamiliar at the same time.

just as I was about to catch my breath, something massive, dark, and utterly certain of itself slammed straight back into my mind.

'Mine.'

The voice didn't come from the room. It exploded inside my skull, deep and predatory, thick with something dangerously close to hunger, and my wolf — still raw, still new, still half-formed in her own freedom — arched her spine before either of us decided to let her.

'So this is where you've been hiding,'the voice rasped, heavy with an intent I didn't have a name for yet. The aura behind it tasted like crushed pine, dark earth, and lightning, thick enough to feel like a hand closing around my throat without ever touching it.

'Who are you,'I thought, or she thought, or we thought together — I could no longer tell where I ended and she began. 'Get out of my head.' I shook my head violently.

'Let me see you, sweet girl,' the voice growled instead, sliding over my spine like something with weight and intention. 'I'm coming for you. You can't hide forever.'

I had just spent five years learning what it cost to let a man's voice into my head uninvited. I wasn't doing it again — not even for whatever this was, not even for the way my own wolf hesitated, just for a second, before I threw up every wall I had left and tore the connection out by the root.

I gasped as I reversed the shift, the change coming easier this time, almost grateful, like she wanted to come back just as badly as she'd fought to stay hidden. I stood on two legs again, naked, drenched in sweat, my chest heaving, my throat raw from the scream I only half remembered making.

What was that? I grabbed my shoulders, shuddering from just thinking of it.

What just touched me?

Maren didn't move for a long moment. When she finally did, it wasn't toward me — she stepped back, her spine hitting the metal stair rail, and for the first time in six months I watched something on her face that wasn't calculation. Not fear exactly. Recognition. A theory becoming a fact she wasn't ready to hold yet.

She hadn't felt the voice in my head. But she'd felt what my body did in the seconds after, and whatever that was, it had knocked something loose in her too.

She reached into her jacket, pulled out an encrypted satellite phone, and turned her back to me. Her fingers weren't quite steady as she dialed.

The line clicked open instantly.

Maren didn't wait for a greeting. She kept her eyes fixed on the cracked mats beneath her feet and said two words.

"She's ready."