8

I had dreamed of it for years. One step beyond Black Moon. Then another. Then another, until the walls, the basement, the kitchen, Victoria’s voice, Dominic’s silence, and Alpha Andre’s sentence all disappeared behind me. I had imagined the forest opening like a door.

It did not.

The trees stood close together, their branches twisting above my head and blocking most of the sky. Roots caught my ankles. Wet leaves clung to my feet. 

Every breath pulled pain through my ribs, and after a while, I had to press one hand against my side just to keep moving.

The compass stayed in my other hand. Its needle pointed north without hesitation now, and it held steady as if it knew where I had to go, even when I did not.

“Please,” I whispered, though I did not know who I was speaking to. My mother, maybe. My father. The Moon Goddess, even though she had given me a mate who let them drag me away. “Please do not lead me into another grave.”

The compass did not answer. It only pulled my eyes back to the same direction every time the forest split into two paths. So I walked until the lights of Black Moon disappeared completely. Then I walked longer, because stopping meant thinking, and thinking meant remembering Dominic’s face when I said the rejection. His silence had followed me into the trees. It moved behind me with every broken branch and every distant animal sound, always close enough to make my chest hurt again.

After a while, the pain in my body became easier to understand than the pain in the bond. Bruises were simple. A cracked rib was simple. Blood in my mouth was simple. But the space where the bond had been felt raw and strange, like something inside me kept reaching for a hand that had never reached back.

Crack!

A sound came from somewhere ahead, and I stopped so quickly that my knees almost gave out. For a few seconds, I heard only my own breathing. Then it came again. A low, broken sound, half breath and half groan.

I should have turned away. I knew that. A wounded thing in the forest could be a trap. It could be a wolf. It could be something worse. I had just escaped a death sentence, and I had no knife, no food, no shoes, and barely enough strength to stand.

Still, I moved toward the sound.

The trees thinned near a fallen trunk. Moonlight slipped through the branches there, pale and weak, and showed me the shape of a woman lying in the dirt.

At first, I thought she was dead.

Her hair was dark and tangled with leaves. One arm was stretched out beside her, fingers curled against the ground. Blood soaked the side of her dress, and there were burns across her shoulder that looked too clean to be made by fire. The skin around them was silver-gray at the edges.

I took one step back.

The woman’s eyes opened.

They were dark. Not wolf eyes. Not human eyes either. 

“Do not,” she rasped.

I froze. “I was not going to hurt you.”

Her mouth moved like she wanted to laugh, but the sound became a cough. She tried to push herself up and failed. Her hand went to her side, and fresh blood slipped between her fingers.

I looked behind me, then at the forest around us. “Who did this?”

She did not answer. Her eyes moved over my face, my torn dress, my bruises, then stopped on my hand.

On the compass.

For the first time, something sharper than pain crossed her face. “Where did you get that?” she whispered.

I pulled the compass closer to my chest. “It is mine.”

Her gaze lifted to my eyes. “That was not my question.”

I did not like her tone. Even half-dead, she sounded like someone used to being obeyed. I almost turned away then. I almost left her there with her blood and her secrets, because I had carried enough of other people’s cruelty for one life.

Then she tried to breathe and could not.

Her body curled slightly, and one hand clawed at the dirt. The sound she made was small, ugly, and real.

I moved before I could convince myself not to. “Stay still,” I said, dropping to my knees beside her.

Her eyes narrowed. “You should run.”

“I am already doing that.”

That time, she did laugh, or tried to. It broke into another cough, and her face tightened with pain. 

I reached for the hem of my dress and tore a strip from it. The fabric was already ruined, stiff with dirt and blood, but it was better than nothing.

“Lift your hand,” I said.

She stared at me.

“Lift it,” I repeated. “Or bleed to death.”

Her mouth twitched, but she moved her hand. I pressed the cloth to the wound. She sucked in a breath, and her fingers clamped around my wrist hard enough to hurt.

“Do not scream,” I said quickly, glancing into the trees.

“I was not going to scream.”

“You looked like you might.”

“I was thinking about biting you.”

I looked at her teeth. They were normal, but that did not make me feel better. “Do not do that either.”

She watched me as I tied the cloth tight around her waist. My hands shook. My right hand was swollen and useless, and every movement pulled at the bruises across my back, but I forced the knot closed. My mother had taught me how to wrap wounds with old shirts and boiled herbs. She had done it calmly, with warm hands and a soft voice, as if pain was something that could be negotiated with.

I did not have her hands. I did not have her voice. But the bleeding slowed.

The woman noticed. “Who taught you that?” she asked.

“My mother.”

Her eyes moved back to the compass. “And did she give you that too?”

I hesitated.

“Yes.”

“What was her name?”

My fingers stopped on the knot.

The question was simple. Too simple. No one in Black Moon asked my mother’s name unless they wanted to spit on it after. I looked down at the woman and saw no mockery in her face, only exhaustion and something like caution.

“Evelyn,” I said finally. My voice came out lower than I wanted. 

The woman closed her eyes.

For a moment, I thought she had fainted. Then her hand found my wrist again, weaker this time.

“Of course,” she murmured.

My throat tightened. “You knew her?”

She opened her eyes, but they were unfocused now. “Everyone who mattered knew your mother.”

I stared at her.

The words should have made me feel something bright. Relief, maybe. Hope. Instead, they made my stomach twist. My mother had been dead for twelve years, and in all that time, the only things anyone had said about her were traitor, witch, and whore.

“What does that mean?” I asked.

The woman’s breathing hitched. She turned her head slightly, listening.

I heard it a second later footsteps. Not one person. Several. Moving fast through the trees.

My body went cold. “The guards.”