Escape Beneath the Blizzard

Maya’s POV

The cold of the night struck my face like a slap of reality the moment I crossed the fortress’s iron fence. I carried no luggage, no extra clothes, not even a single piece of bread for the journey. The only thing protecting my body from the storm that had just broken loose was an old, worn wool cloak and, hidden beneath my blouse, the silver medallion that had belonged to my mother before my parents disappeared at the border.

My worn boots sank into the soft snow with a dull crunch. Every step demanded twice the effort because of the weight of my thighs and wide hips, but the adrenaline coursing through my veins was stronger than my physical exhaustion. The broken bond in my chest no longer bled; now it was a numb black hole. Hunter believed I would freeze to death in the sacred forest, that I would collapse after only a few miles and come crawling back on my knees to become his doormat. He was wrong. I would rather let wild wolves devour my flesh than endure Chloe’s humiliations or the indifference in his eyes ever again.

Suddenly, a deafening howl, charged with a brutal Alpha vibration, tore through the air from the fortress’s main tower.

The sound made the skeletal trees tremble, and the snow piled upon their branches crashed to the ground with a dull thud. My blood froze in my veins. Silver Moon’s war drums began to echo in the distance, a frantic, relentless rhythm announcing the beginning of a hunt. Hunter had discovered my escape much sooner than expected. I knew perfectly well he wasn’t looking for me because he missed me or because he felt even a gram of guilt in his miserable heart; he was hunting me out of wounded pride. For an Alpha as arrogant as he was, the fact that the fat servant he had just rejected had walked away on her own terms was a direct slap to his authority. He couldn’t allow the pack to see me walking away with my head held high.

“Search the eastern flank! Don’t let her cross the frozen river!” one of the pack’s trackers shouted in the distance, his voice reaching my ears distorted by the whistling wind.

I quickened my pace as much as my body allowed, plunging deeper into the northern forest. The snowstorm raged with savage violence, erasing my footprints almost immediately beneath the white blanket, which was my only true advantage against the wolves already on my heels. My lungs burned with every breath of icy air I swallowed, and the bitter cold was beginning to stiffen the muscles in my legs. I could no longer feel my toes.

I suddenly tripped over a root hidden beneath the snow and fell face-first, sinking up to my elbows into the frozen ground. A muffled gasp escaped my lips as I rested my forehead against the icy bark of a pine tree, feeling my tears freeze on my eyelashes. For a millisecond, weakness whispered in my ear to stay there, to surrender to winter’s embrace and let hypothermia end everything once and for all.

But at that very instant of surrender, a strange, violent pulse of warmth surged from the deepest part of my lower abdomen.

It wasn’t the suffocating warmth of Hunter’s bond. It was something completely different, something ancient—a pure, celestial, overwhelming energy I had never experienced in my twenty years of life. My mystical wolf, the one everyone in the pack had insisted was nonexistent, dead, or defective, showed signs of life for the very first time. A subtle flash of silver light illuminated my dark eyes in the gloom of the forest, and the weakness vanished entirely from my muscles, replaced by renewed strength that had me back on my feet in the blink of an eye.

The crunch of heavy claws racing across the packed snow behind me forced me to spin around, pressing my back against the pine trunk.

Three ash-gray wolves, Hunter’s elite trackers, emerged from the frozen bushes. Their eyes glowed with a savage yellow hue in the darkness, their fangs bared as they drooled at the prospect of capturing the fugitive. At the center of the formation, the largest wolf shifted mid-charge, revealing one of Silver Moon’s cruelest warriors—a man who used to dump his food onto the floor just to make me pick it up.

“Well, well… look who we have here,” the warrior hissed, brushing the snow off his face with a disgusting smile full of malice. “Alpha Hunter gave a very clear order, Maya. He said that if we found you after the deadline, we could have some fun with you before throwing your corpse at the border. After all, you’re no longer the Alpha’s woman. You’re a rogue now. You belong to any one of us.”

The man pulled a heavy hunting dagger from his belt, twirling it confidently between his fingers while the other two gray wolves began circling around me, growling low as they completely cut off my only escape route toward the northern lands.

I clutched my mother’s medallion against my chest, feeling the edge of my own fury growing inside me in a way that frightened me. I was no longer the submissive servant who lowered her head when dirty soapy water was dumped over her feet. If this was where fate wanted me to die, I was taking one of these damned bastards to hell with me. The silver warmth flowing through my veins intensified, gathering in my palms as though waiting for the perfect moment to strike.

The warrior took an aggressive step forward, raising the dagger with the clear intention of slicing the tendons in my leg to stop me from running, but just before the blade touched my skin, a colossal crack, like lightning splitting the earth apart, echoed throughout the entire forest clearing.

A gigantic silhouette—a wolf with fur as black as the abyss and a monstrous body more than twice the size of Silver Moon’s trackers—leapt from the top of the rocky hill directly onto the leader of the guards. The impact was so brutal that the frozen ground trembled, shattering the tracker’s bones in a single second.

The black beast released a roar that made the foundations of the mountain groan, and a pair of gray eyes—intense, lethal, and filled with the aura of a Supreme Alpha that stole my breath completely—locked onto me through the curtain of the snowstorm. I was standing before the Lycan King of Blood Moon, and his gaze promised that my ordeal had only just begun.