Chapter 5: Hunt 

The border road stretched out ahead of Roxie empty and silent, swallowed on both sides by dark trees that blotted out what little moonlight remained.

Roxie kept walking.

Her legs ached. Her feet had gone numb somewhere around the second mile, and the cold had worked its way past her jacket hours ago, settling deep into her bones. She didn't stop. Stopping meant thinking, and thinking meant remembering the sound Jaxon's hand had made against her cheek, the smug curve of Chloe's smile, her father's flat, empty voice telling her she was never Luna material.

Better to keep walking. Better to let the cold numb everything else too.

She'd spent her whole life being told she wasn't enough, not enough wolf, not enough daughter, not enough pack. Tonight had just made it official. Stripped of her rank, stripped of her home, stripped of the one person she'd let herself believe actually wanted her.

Fine,she thought, boots crunching over gravel and frostbitten grass. I don't need any of them.

It was a lie. She let herself believe it anyway. It hurt less than the truth.

The trees thickened the farther she went, the well-worn road narrowing into something rougher, less traveled. She'd left Blackwood territory behind an hour ago, walking with no real destination in mind, just away, just forward, just anywhere that wasn't the pack house glowing behind her like a home that had never truly belonged to her.

That was when she heard it.

A twig snapping. Too deliberate to be an animal. Too close to be nothing.

Roxie's steps slowed. Every instinct she had, dulled by grief but not gone, never fully gone prickled to life along the back of her neck. She glanced over her shoulder, scanning the dark tree line, seeing nothing but shifting shadows and the pale gleam of moonlight through branches.

Rogues, she thought, heart kicking into a faster rhythm. Wolfless and alone out here, she'd make an easy target for any rogue wolf hungry enough to take a chance on unclaimed territory. She quickened her pace, cutting off the road entirely, angling toward the thicker cover of the trees where she might be able to hide.

Another sound. Closer this time. Not one set of footsteps—several, moving in careful, coordinated silence.

What she noticed next was that they're not rogues.

Rogues were chaotic, feral, driven by hunger and instinct. This was something else. Measured. Disciplined. The kind of quiet that came from training, not desperation.

Roxie's stomach dropped.

She broke into a run.

Branches tore at her sleeves, roots catching at her feet as she pushed deeper into the Rogue Lands territory so lawless and dangerous that even Blackwood patrols refused to cross its border after dark. She'd heard stories her whole life about what lived out here. She'd never imagined she'd be running into it voluntarily, choosing the monsters she didn't know over the ones chasing her from behind.

The footsteps behind her didn't fall back. If anything, they closed the distance, moving through the dense trees with an ease that told her exactly how outmatched she was. She was wolfless. Slower. Weaker. She couldn't shift into anything that might give her a fighting chance, couldn't call on strength or speed beyond what her own exhausted human body could give her.

She ran anyway. What else was there to do?

Her lungs burned. Her legs screamed in protest, already worn ragged from hours of walking before this desperate sprint had even begun. The terrain turned treacherous beneath her feet, loose stone, hidden roots, ground that dipped and rose without warning in the dark.

She didn't see the root that caught her ankle until she was already falling.

The ground rushed up to meet her, knocking the breath from her lungs in a single brutal impact. Pain lanced up her knee, her palms scraping raw against rock and dirt. For one disoriented second, she just lay there, ears ringing, trying to force air back into her lungs.

Then they seized her.

Rough, strong, gripping her arms with bruising force before she could even fully process what was happening. She thrashed, some last surge of fight rising up through the exhaustion and grief, but it did nothing against the sheer strength pinning her down. Rope bit into her wrists, cinched tight behind her back. A strip of fabric came next, dark and suffocating, wrapped hard over her eyes until the world went black.

"Move," a voice above her ordered, clipped and cold, utterly devoid of any hesitation.

Panic clawed up Roxie's throat, raw and primal. This wasn't a rogue attack. Rogues didn't carry rope. Rogues didn't move with this kind of terrifying precision, didn't speak in short, military commands. Whoever these people were, they'd been sent. Organized. Prepared.

Someone had wanted her taken, and taken specifically.

She thought of her father's cold, dismissive face. Of Jaxon's rejection. Of Chloe's laughter. Was this some final cruelty from the pack she'd been born into, some last twisted punishment for humiliating a King?

Hands hauled her upright, dragging her forward blind and bound, her bare feet stumbling over rocks she couldn't see coming. She fought every step of the way, twisting against the grip on her arms, but there was nothing left in her exhausted body to make the fight matter.

"Just a little further," one of them muttered, voice utterly indifferent to the terror radiating off her. "Get her in the vehicle before”

The words cut off.

A sound rolled through the trees—massive, guttural, shaking the very ground beneath her feet like distant thunder given voice. The hands gripping Roxie's arms went rigid.

"What was that?" one of the men hissed.

No one answered. Roxie stood frozen between her captors, blind and bound, heart hammering so hard she thought it might tear through her ribs, straining to hear whatever had just made grown men go utterly silent with fear.

Then, from somewhere in the shadows ahead, a voice erupted through the trees, deep, booming, powerful enough to rattle the branches overhead.

"Release the girl. Now."