Chapter One

Chapter One

Six years later

It has been six years since I walked away from everything I knew. Six years since I stopped being the Alpha’s daughter and became something else entirely — a rogue drifting from city to city, never staying long enough to be noticed, never trusting the shadows behind me. I avoid the woods. I avoid packs. I avoid anything that might recognize what I am. What I was.

When I left at seventeen, I told myself things would get better. That distance would heal me. That freedom would fix me. I thought I’d outrun the addiction that had already sunk its claws into me. I thought turning eighteen and gaining my wolf would give me strength, clarity, purpose.

But trauma doesn’t disappear just because you cross a border. Pain doesn’t dissolve just because you shift for the first time. And addiction… addiction doesn’t care how old you are or what bloodline you come from.

Now, almost twenty‑three, I’m still fighting the same demons I carried out of my pack. Some days I win. Most days I don’t.

My wolf, Samarah, tries. She wasn’t there for the years of cruelty, but she feels the echoes of it. She feels the way my chest tightens when someone raises their voice. She feels the way my hands shake when memories surface. She feels the way the substances I use to cope burn through both of us.

Our first shift was agony — old scars tearing open, bones that had healed wrong breaking again as our body reshaped itself. But when the pain settled, she stood tall: a massive she‑wolf with white fur streaked in black, one golden eye and one blue. A creature of strength and beauty, nothing like the broken girl she shares a body with.

I wish I could be what she deserves. I wish I could stop poisoning us. But hiding who I am in a city full of humans — and wolves who blend in far better than I do — makes seeking help nearly impossible. I can’t risk exposure. I can’t risk being found.

And yet, somehow, I found Oakley.

Or maybe he found me.

Oakley is a wizard — or he was, before life chewed him up and spit him out. He comes from a long line of powerful witches and warlocks, Spanish‑born and raised, with magic in his blood and expectations on his shoulders. But one wrong crowd, one wrong choice, and everything he had was stripped away. He was expelled from his convent, cast out, left to fend for himself in a world that doesn’t forgive magical mistakes.

He ended up homeless. Addicted. Lost.

Maybe that’s why we get along — two broken people orbiting each other because no one else wants to get close.

He’s tall, muscular, dark‑haired, green‑eyed — the kind of man people mistake for a wolf until they feel the hum of magic under his skin. He’s not a friend, not exactly, but he’s the closest thing I have to one. When my scent started slipping through the cracks of my control, he helped me create a masking spray. He didn’t ask questions. He didn’t push. He just helped.

He knows something happened to me. He doesn’t know what. I don’t tell him. Some stories are too heavy to hand to someone else.

Sometimes I wonder what my life would look like if things had been different. If I’d finished school. If I’d gone to college. If I’d found someone to love, someone to build a life with. If I’d grown up in a home where I was wanted.

But being the Alpha’s daughter didn’t give me privilege. It gave me a target.

My father — Alpha of the Crescent Ridge Pack — had an affair with one of his housekeepers. My mother. She was an omega with alpha blood in her veins, a woman he should have cherished but instead used. Some say she was his fated mate, but he didn’t want an omega as his Luna. So he hid her. And he hid me.

He visited often when I was little. He cared for her when she fell ill. He held me when I cried. But when she died, everything changed. I was forced into his household, into the arms of the woman he chose instead of the woman fate gave him.

My stepmother.

She discovered the truth — the affair, the child, the betrayal — and she made me pay for it. Behind closed doors, she made sure I understood exactly what she thought of me. I learned early how to stay silent. How to endure. How to survive.

My father never knew. Or maybe he didn’t want to know.

When my twin brothers were born, things got worse. They were younger, but bigger, stronger, raised to believe I was beneath them. Raised to believe their mother’s hatred was justified. The older they got, the more they followed her lead.

And then came the night that broke me.

My seventeenth birthday. A night I should have celebrated. A night I should have felt loved. Instead, I was alone in the storage room that served as my bedroom, exhausted from cooking and cleaning for a family that despised me.

That was the night her guards came.

The night she had them hold me down one by one and assaulted me.

I won’t describe what happened. I don’t need to. Some things don’t need details to be understood. Some pain speaks for itself.

I remember the sound of her laughter on the other side of the door. I remember the moment something inside me shattered. I remember deciding, right then, that I would never stay another night in that house.

That was the night I ran. The night I saved myself. The night I lost whatever innocence I had left.

I had friends once. Pack members who cared. Wolves who tried to help when they saw me spiraling. They knew something was wrong, but they never had proof. Those who tried to speak up were punished. Silenced. Made examples of.

Eventually, they stopped trying. They avoided me. They looked at me with pity instead of hope. They knew. They all knew. But they couldn’t save me.

So I saved myself.

And now, six years later, I’m still running — not from them, but from the ghosts they left behind.