Chapter 002

Sienna’s POV

The air hit me first. It was clinical and sharp, thick with the industrial rot of bleach and old iron. I tried to drag oxygen into my lungs, but my chest was pinned under an invisible weight. My body felt more heavy, eyelids rusted shut by dried salt. I was dead weight, a suit that didn’t fit my soul anymore.

I tried to shift. Clang. The sound of metal striking metal echoed through the hollow room. The bite of steel dug into my wrists, right where my pulse hammered against the restraints. I was strapped to steel, not stone this time. Like a specimen in a jar.

Deep within, my wolf stopped whimpering. She began to pace. A low, guttural snarl vibrated in my throat. She felt the violation before I saw the blade.

Then came the scent of cedar and cold.

My eyes snapped open. The overhead bulb buzzed with a dying insect-hum that burned into my retinas. Lucas stood by the far wall, a funerary statue carved from ice. He stared at my feet as if I were already a corpse he was waiting to bury.

“Oh, look. The vessel is finally awake,” Ivy purred.

She was standing beside Lucas, draped in a silk dress that looked obscene against the grime of this room. She invaded Lucas’s space, cupping his face and pulling him down into a kiss. She kept her eyes open, locking them on mine with a cruel, triumphant glint.

Lucas didn’t flinch. He didn’t fight. When she finally pulled away, his eyes met mine. They were flat and cold. There was no love left in them.

“Mother, the heart rate is peaking,” Ivy said, her voice rising with a sick excitement. “Let’s not waste the moon. I’m not letting my son be born a weakling just because an Omega is hoarding the bloodline.”

“Patience, Ivy,” Morrigan replied. She stepped into the light wearing a sterile white lab coat, carrying a tray of instruments. “The vessel is ready. Moon’s high.”

Vessel. A harvest.

“Lucas,” I choked out, my voice sounding thin and distant. “You marked me yesterday. You claimed me. Why?”

“Stop it, Sienna.” He turned his face to the wall. His jaw worked, but he wouldn’t look at me. “You’ve always been fragile.” He muttered it like a line he’d been taught. “This... this is service.”

“Fragile?” My body began to shake in a violent tremor. “You’re standing there while they plan to carve me open!”

“The moon is peaking,” Ivy snapped. She leaned over the table, her face inches from mine. “Stop, Ivy. Please,” I begged, pride stripped away by raw terror. “Just let me go. I’ll go to the human cities.”

Ivy blinked. For half a second, something like surprise crossed her face. Then she laughed.

“You really are stupid,” she whispered. “You think this is about the man? I want what she denied me. Womb, name, blood. You’re the last.” She licked the mate-mark on my neck. The one Lucas had given me with promises of forever.

“Enough,” Lucas said, finally walking to the bedside.

A desperate surge of hope rose in my chest. But inside me, my wolf rose. Her eyes turned a blinding, pale white.

“Lucas, look at me,” I whispered. “You said I was your anchor.”

“Sienna, I do love you,” he said, leaning in close. He reached out to touch my hair, but his fingers flinched back as if the air around me was already starting to burn. “Father’s dying. This buys him time.” He swallowed. “The pack needs strength. You... you give that.” He flinched from the heat building off my skin. “Your spark. His future.”

I went limp. He stepped back and turned his head to stare at the wall, muttering a pack mantra under his breath.

The room went deathly silent. Then, the blade went in.

A jagged, cold slice across my abdomen made my vision white out. Then the needle followed, sinking deep. I felt a sickening, hollow suction—a dragging sensation as if the heat was being pulled out of my marrow.

“It’s working,” Morrigan whispered.

I forced my eyes to track her hand. She was holding a glass vial, and for a second, I saw it. The liquid inside wasn’t red. It was a thick, pulsing gold that illuminated her fingers from within. She stared at the stolen light with greedy, wide eyes.

That was the moment the hum in the room changed.

A roar ripped from my throat. It wasn’t human. It was a vibration that seemed to rise from the tectonic plates beneath the floor.

The buzzing bulb overhead shrieked and exploded. The pressure of my scream hit the windows, shattering the glass into a thousand diamonds that blew outward into the night.

Everything became a blur of motion and shadow. I couldn’t see their faces anymore, but I heard the clatter of the tray hitting the floor and Ivy’s sharp, terrified scream.

“The light—Morrigan, it’s burning through the glass!”

The heat in my veins intensified until I couldn’t feel the table or the restraints. I was no longer a girl; I was a sun collapsing in on itself. My fading sight caught one last thing: the gold blood wasn’t just in the vial anymore. It was leaking from the wound in my side, pouring onto the floor in a brilliant, molten river that set the darkness on fire.

My heart stuttered, stopped, and the blackness finally came.