7

“I did not bewitch anyone.”

“Then what are you hiding?”

Before I understood what she meant, her hand went to my dress. I tried to pull away, but two girls caught my arms from behind. Victoria searched me with rough, angry movements, and when her fingers closed around the chain beneath my collar, my heart almost stopped.

“No,” I breathed.

She yanked it free.

The silver compass swung between us, catching the light.

For a moment, even Victoria fell silent. The old metal was dark at the edges, the glass scratched, the small crest almost worn away from years of being hidden against my skin. It should have looked like nothing. Just a poor, broken thing, like me.

But it did not.

Victoria held it up for everyone to see. “If you are not a witch,” she said, her voice full of triumph, “then what is this?”

I stared at the compass in her hand and could not answer. My mother’s voice came back to me, telling me to keep it hidden, telling me that when I was old enough, I had to follow where it pointed. No matter what they told me about my parents, I had to remember they loved me. They had a plan for me.

But how could I explain that to people who had spent years calling them traitors?

Alpha Andre arrived with Luna beside him, and the hall parted at once. His eyes went first to Victoria, then to the compass, then to me.

“What is happening here?” he asked.

Victoria stepped toward him, still holding my only treasure like proof of a crime. “She is a witch. She used something on Dominic. I saw it. Everyone saw it.”

“I did not,” I said quickly, but my voice trembled. “Alpha, I swear I did not.”

Victoria lifted the compass higher. “Then why was she hiding this? Why would a servant have a noble compass with a crest no one recognizes?”

Alpha Andre’s face hardened.

I looked at Dominic. He was the only one who could say I had not bewitched him. He had felt the bond too. He knew it was not a spell, not a trick, not something I had chosen. I hated that I had to look at him. I hated that, after everything, some desperate part of me still thought he might speak.

“Dominic,” I whispered.

His eyes met mine, but he said nothing.

“Please,” I said, and I hated how broken my voice sounded. “Tell them.”

He looked away.

Something inside me went cold then. Not the cold of fear, not the cold of the basement at night, but something cleaner. The kind of cold that came when pain finally burned through everything soft and left only the truth behind.

I had begged the wrong person.

Victoria smiled when she saw his silence. “See? Even he knows what she is.”

I looked at Dominic one last time. The bond still pulled at me, wounded and humiliating, asking for comfort from the person who had just abandoned me in front of everyone.

I would not give it that.

I lifted my chin, even though my whole body was shaking. “I, Melany, reject you, Dominic Black, as my mate.”

The hall fell silent.

For the first time in my life, it was not the silence of people ignoring me. It was the silence of people who had finally heard me.

Dominic’s head snapped back toward me. Victoria’s smile vanished. Luna’s eyes widened slightly, and even Alpha Andre seemed too shocked to speak for a moment.

I swallowed the pain rising in my chest and forced the words out before courage could leave me.

“I reject a bond that would make me belong to a man who stands there while they call me a witch.”

The severing came like a blade.

Pain tore through my chest so violently that I nearly fell, but I stayed on my feet because I could not let them see me collapse. Not then. Not after that.

Dominic took one step forward, his face pale with anger or pain. I did not know which, and I no longer cared.

Alpha Andre’s voice cut through the hall.

“Enough.”

Everyone turned to him.

His eyes were fixed on me with a hatred that had nothing to do with the compass anymore. I had not only been accused of witchcraft. I had humiliated his son, rejected the future Alpha before the whole pack, and spoken as if a slave had the right to choose.

“Melany, daughter of traitors,” he said, each word cold and final, “you are sentenced to death.”

The guards seized me before I could move.

I did not scream when they dragged me out of the hall. I did not look at Dominic, and I did not call his name again, because I had already begged once and his silence had answered me better than any words could. The only thing my eyes followed was the compass in Victoria’s hand.

She noticed, of course.

As the guards pulled me past her, Victoria smiled and lifted the silver chain between two fingers, letting the compass swing in front of my face. For one desperate second, I thought she would keep it. I thought she would take the last thing my mother had left me and lock it away somewhere I would never reach. 

Instead, she laughed softly and threw it at my chest. “Die with your trash.”

The compass struck me and fell near my feet. I nearly stumbled trying to reach it, but one of the guards shoved me forward, and another hand twisted in my hair to drag me toward the doors. I stretched my fingers down blindly, my breath caught in my throat, and somehow managed to close my hand around the cold metal before they hauled me outside. 

They took me into the forest before the sun had fully disappeared. The trees beyond Black Moon’s border stood close together, dark and silent. The moment we crossed the pack line, they threw me to the ground, and the first kick struck my ribs before I could lift my head.

I rolled onto my side, curling around the compass hidden against my chest. Another boot hit my back, then my thigh, then my shoulder. 

Pain flashed through me so sharply that I cried out before I could stop myself, and one of the guards laughed. That sound cleared my head more than the pain did. If I screamed, they would keep going. If I begged, they would enjoy it. 

So I bit my lip until I tasted blood, folded my body around the compass, and forced myself to go still.

A boot slammed into my side, but I did not move. Another kick caught my hip, and I let my head fall against the dirt as if my body had finally given up.

“Is she dead?” one guard asked, breathing hard.

Someone nudged my leg with his boot. I kept my eyes closed and held my breath, even though my lungs burned.

“Looks like it,” the other muttered. “Leave her. The forest can finish the rest.”

Their footsteps moved away through the leaves, but I waited until the forest swallowed their voices completely. Only when the wind in the branches became the loudest sound around me did I dare to open my eyes.

Everything hurt. 

My ribs, my mouth, my back, and the place in my chest where the bond had been torn open by my own words. I had rejected Dominic, but the pain did not feel like victory. It felt like cutting off a poisoned limb and still bleeding from the wound. For a while, I could not move at all. 

Then my fingers tightened around the compass.

I brought it close to my face with a shaking hand. Dirt clung to the scratched glass, and my blood had smeared across the silver edges, but the old needle inside was moving. For years, it had leaned toward the same strange direction, never north, never anywhere that made sense. I had turned it in my hands a hundred times as a child, waiting for it to behave like an ordinary compass. 

It never had.

Now, beneath the cracked glass, the needle trembled once, then turned slowly, stubbornly, as if it had been waiting for this exact moment. When it finally stopped, it pointed straight north.

Tears blurred my vision before I could stop them. My mother had not lied. My parents had left me a way out. They had known there would come a day when Black Moon would no longer be my prison, because I would have nothing left to lose.

I pressed the compass against my chest and forced myself onto my knees. The pain almost dragged me back down, but I stayed up, one hand on the ground and the other closed around the compass. Far behind me, the lights of Black Moon glowed between the trees, warm and golden.

I looked back only once. Then I tucked my hair behind my ear and let my green eyes face the dark forest without shame. With my bloody fingers closed around the compass, I turned away from the pack that had buried me alive and walked north.