CHAPTER 1: Release

Elira’s POV

The fist caught me in the ribs before I even saw it coming.

I hit the stone floor hard, air punching out of my lungs, and rolled just in time to miss the boot aimed at my head.

“Thought you could take my rations, pretty girl?” Mira’s voice, all gravel and glee, followed by the scrape of her boots circling closer. “Thought nobody would notice?”

I hadn’t taken anything. It didn’t matter. In here, accusations were currency, and Mira liked spending mine. She’d decided months ago that I made an easy target — quiet, compliant, never fighting back. Prey learns fast which stories keep it breathing, and I’d learned mine.

I scrambled up, back hitting the wall, hands already rising — not to fight, just to cover. Two years taught me that much. Don’t fight. Fighting earned you worse. A split lip healed in days. A week in the dark box didn’t.

“Please,” I said, and hated how flat my own voice sounded, stripped of anything that might have once passed for fear or defiance. “I don’t want trouble.”

“Too late.”

She lunged again, claws half out, and I braced for it the way I’d braced for a hundred blows before this one — shoulders in, chin down, waiting for it to be over rather than trying to stop it.

The door at the end of the block slammed open instead, and a guard’s voice cracked through the corridor like a whip.

“Prisoner 114. Release order. Move.”

Mira froze mid-swing. Around us, the block went still — the particular silence of women deciding, all at once, whether this was worth caring about. It wasn’t. I didn’t wait to see anyone’s face. I pushed past her, ribs screaming with every breath, and walked toward the light at the end of the hall like it might disappear if I looked away from it too long.

Release order.

Two years, and it came on an ordinary Tuesday, mid-punch, with no warning, like the universe couldn’t be bothered to make it mean anything.

I reached for something inside me on the walk down the corridor — some flicker of relief, of joy, anything at all. There was nothing there to reach for. My wolf had gone quiet somewhere around the sixth month, curling into some far corner of me and refusing to answer when I called her. I’d stopped calling a long time ago. It was easier not to hear the silence answer back.

***

They didn’t clean me up. Didn’t ask about the bruise already purpling under my eye, or the split at my lip, or the way I favored my left side when I walked. A guard I didn’t recognize shoved a folder into my hands — my things, what little of them had survived intake two years ago — and walked me through processing so fast I barely had time to sign where he pointed.

“Sign here. And here.” He tapped the page without once looking at my face, the way you’d tap a form for livestock being shipped out. “Congratulations. You’re somebody else’s problem now.”

I signed. My handwriting looked strange to me, too neat, like it belonged to a version of myself I hadn’t seen in a long time — a girl who used to loop her letters and dot her i’s with little circles because Ronan once told her it looked pretty.

Then the gate. Then the light, real daylight, too bright after years of grey stone and worse.

And a car waiting at the curb — sleek, black, the pack crest gleaming on the door like it belonged to a life I no longer had a claim to.

Leaning against it, arms crossed, was Ronan.

My brother. My Alpha now, technically, though he’d always just been Ronan to me — the boy who used to sneak me sweets before dinner, who once broke his own arm trying to catch me off a low wall, who used to say we’d be pack-siblings even after the pack forgot whose blood we actually shared.

He looked older. Harder around the jaw, a new sharpness in the way he held himself. His eyes went wide when he saw my face, and for half a second I watched him catalog the damage — the bruise, the split lip, the way I stood like something might still be broken beneath the shirt.

“Elira—”

I stopped a few feet away and inclined my head. “Alpha.”

Something flickered across his expression — confusion, maybe hurt, maybe both fighting for the same space. “It’s me. It’s Ronan.”

“I know who you are.”

He didn’t move for a second, like he was waiting for me to close the distance myself, the way I always used to — running, crying, throwing my arms around him and demanding to be comforted. I didn’t. I got into the car instead, because standing in the open with people watching had never once ended well for me.

He slid in after me, and the silence stretched long enough that I could hear the engine turn over, the tires crunch against gravel, his own breathing — too quick, like he was working something out and couldn’t quite land on it.

“You look —” he started, then stopped himself. Tried again. “It’s good to see you.”

I said nothing. There wasn’t anything true I could say that wouldn’t cost me something I didn’t have left to spend.

He cleared his throat, glancing at me and then away, the way people do when a silence has gone on a beat too long. “There’s a lot happening at the estate right now. The Lycan King is visiting — it’s important, Elira. Political. I need you to keep a low profile while he’s there. No scenes. No…” He hesitated, choosing the word carefully. “No trouble with your sister.”

Your sister. Not our sister. His.

“I understand,” I said.

He glanced at me sideways, like the easy agreement bothered him more than an argument would have. Maybe he’d been braced for a fight. Maybe some part of him wanted one — proof that I was still the girl he remembered, still worth managing instead of simply informing.

“Mother’s health hasn’t been great,” he added after a moment, quieter now, like he was testing whether that particular door was safe to open. “The stress of hosting doesn’t help. She’ll be glad you’re back, though. I know she will.”

I turned my head toward the window instead of answering. Two years ago I would have asked a dozen questions — what’s wrong, is she in pain, has she seen a healer. Now the words sat in my throat and refused to climb any higher. Asking meant caring, and caring meant hoping, and hope was the one thing prison had taught me to starve out of myself completely.

We drove in silence after that. I watched the trees blur past the window and thought about nothing, which was its own kind of skill, the only one I’d truly mastered in two years. Thinking about nothing had kept me sane. Feeling nothing had kept me alive.

Halfway home, his hand moved — reaching toward my face, toward the bruise, like he meant to check it, to fuss over me the way he used to when we were kids and I’d scraped a knee running too fast down the east hill.

I didn’t decide to move. My body did it before I could stop it — arms up, curling into the seat, head down, shoulders braced for impact, the same shape I’d folded myself into a hundred times in that block, waiting for a blow that always came.

The car went completely silent, save for the hum of the engine.

I lowered my arms slowly, heat crawling up my neck, and stared straight ahead like nothing had happened, like my own body hadn’t just told my brother everything I’d spent the entire drive refusing to say.

Ronan hadn’t moved either. When I finally looked at him, his hand was still hovering in the air between us, frozen mid-reach, and his face had gone pale in a way I’d never seen on him before — not anger, not even confusion anymore. Something closer to fear.

“Elira,” he said quietly, voice barely above the engine noise. “What happened to you in there?”