Chapter 2

Liora’s POV

I don’t remember how my feet carried me back to the pack lands that night. All I know is that when the first streaks of dawn stretched across the sky, painting the world in pale gray, I was still running, barefoot, my clothes torn, skin stinging where branches had whipped me. My body felt foreign. Every step was heavy with shame, but my mind kept replaying the same fragments, looping mercilessly.

His hands, his voice, the way my body betrayed me. I mated with a human—an action that could cost me everything.

I didn’t even know his name. He was only a stranger with lost eyes and a stunned, hazy clarity, caught in the same storm as me. And yet the heat in my blood hadn’t cared. My wolf had clawed for release, and I, weak and humiliated, had given in.

When the gates of the pack estate came into view I slowed, clutching at my chest. I couldn’t let them see me like this. Not torn and ruined. Not smelling of a man who wasn’t my mate.

I slipped into my quarters unseen and bolted the door. My legs gave way and I collapsed on the wooden floor, breath ragged, body trembling. The silence pressed in, making the memory louder than any sound. His weight. His mouth on my neck, branding me. For a moment I had wanted to vanish into him.

I crawled to the washroom and turned the water scalding, stepped in and scrubbed until my skin reddened. I dug my nails in as if I could claw away the scent of him, the memory of his hands. It didn’t leave. No matter how much I scoured, traces of that night lingered.

Tears mixed with the water. “It never happened,” I whispered to the tiles until the words were meaningless. The soreness between my thighs told another story, one I could never reveal.

By the time the water ran cold my skin was raw and my soul thinned. I crawled into bed and pulled the sheets over me like a shroud. Exhaustion dragged me under.

I woke to the soft creak of my door. “Liora?” Mami’s voice, cautious and steady.

She came in with a tray of porridge, eyes sharp despite the gentleness in her step. Her gaze landed on the raw patches along my arms where I’d scrubbed too hard, then flicked to my face. “Child.” She set the tray down and sat on the bed, brushing damp hair from my temple. “What happened?”

If I told her the truth the pack would devour me. Alex’s vindictive laughter would echo through the long days to come. Not before he and his pack left at dawn—no. So I shook my head. “Nothing, Mami.”

Her look lingered, deeper than curiosity. She didn’t press with questions. Instead she pulled me into her arms the way she had when I was small, letting me rest my head on her shoulder. “You don’t have to carry everything alone,” she whispered.

I closed my eyes and let her hold me, even though I knew I had to carry this. I had to.

Weeks folded into months. Alex spread his version of the story—loud, smirking—saying he had rejected me because I wasn’t pure, because I’d already given myself away. The pack took him at his word. I became an easy mark: the rogue’s daughter, ruined and expendable.

Then, three months after that terrible night, my cycle didn’t come. I began waking with waves of nausea, faint and sudden, and food—the bread and broths I grew up on—turned my stomach. At first I told myself stress, shock, anything but the truth. But when the nausea sharpened into constant sickness and my chest tightened in a way that would not be soothed, Mami sat me down at dusk and said nothing for a long time.

She sent for the midwife. The woman arrived with a cloth and a small herbal poultice; she watched me with the calm eyes of someone who’d seen too many such things to be surprised. “You’re carrying,” the midwife said quietly. “Three months, give or take.”

Hearing the word made something icy and steady settle under my ribs. I felt the future narrow to a single line: survive.

I made a choice then. To protect what was growing inside me I told the pack I had been attacked after Alex rejected me—that the child was conceived in force. The lie cut me into pieces, but it gave me armor. The whispers shifted from derision to pity. People lowered their eyes. They stopped asking the follow-up questions that would have stripped me bare.

Only Mami knew the whole truth. Not the howl of every detail, but enough. She knew I had not been carried off. She knew my heat had come early, that my body had betrayed me. She had felt the change in me the night I stumbled home; she had seen the way I flinched at touch. She did not ask me to confess. Instead she put her hands on my face and said, “You are not the sum of one night.”

Her face hardened afterward in a way I recognized as resolve. She would not let the pack weaponize this against me. She would not give them more than the lie I offered them. That was all she needed to know to protect me—and that was all I could ask.

Nine months later Johnathan was born.

Labor tore me raw. Hours of pain and heat and animal cries rolled through me until there were no edges left, only the single, bright focus of bringing him into the world. The moment they placed him on my chest, the world shifted. He was so small—perfect in the way small things are—fingers curling, lungs crying. When his tiny hand curled around my finger something inside me broke and remade itself.

I loved him at once, fiercely and without question.

I pressed my lips to his hair. “You’ll never feel the shame I felt,” I whispered. My tears dropped on his skin. “You’ll be free, my little wolf.”

Mami stood close, tears shining in the soft light. “He will be our strength,” she said.

For the first time since that dawn, I felt the thin, warm rope of belonging. Johnathan’s breath evened under my cheek and the room inhaled with us.

But even as I let myself fall into that fierce, animal love, something unwelcome rose in my chest. The face of the stranger slipped into the back of my mind—the stranger whose hand had branded me that night. A flash, a scent, a shape in the trees. I pushed it down, burying it under lullabies and the careful routine of feeding and changing and learning his small noises.

Johnathan was mine now—my son, my reason to breathe. I told myself the man would never know. For his safety and ours, I would keep him out of the story. Still, in the thin hours before dawn, I sometimes woke to the echo of a footfall or the impression of a silhouette between the trunks, and for a dizzy second my chest clenched.

I pressed my hand to my mouth, felt the small steady rise and fall of the child at my breast, and whispered

a promise into the dark: I will protect you. No matter what comes.