The Alpha Rejected His Bride For Me
I stepped through the gap in it without slowing down.
Out here the ground changed texture entirely. Scrub grass, dense and ankle-catching, gave way in patches to harder earth and clusters of low thornbush. The trees started thin and became gradually more substantial the further I walked, their canopies closing overhead until the sky was just fragments between branches.
Neither pack patrolled out here. I knew that from Theo, from the resistance conversations I'd half-heard and half-been-told. Contested borderland, technically belonging to no one, managed by no one, useful to no one except people who needed to move without being seen.