I was the lowest Omega in the pack, yet bound by the Moon Goddess as the fated mate to our supreme Alpha, Silas.

But he despised me, giving all his love and protection to a Beta named Selene and her sister Chloe.

When a Rogue broke into my cramped dorm room and pressed a burning silver blade to my neck, I used our Mind-Link to beg Silas for help.

Instead of saving me, he thought I was faking it to get his attention.

"Go ahead and die. It would be a favor to this pack," he snapped, before brutally severing our mate bond.

The Rogue slit my throat. I became a ghost, tethered to my own corpse.

Hours later, Silas stood right outside my door. But he deliberately shut off his wolf's sense of smell to avoid my stench, completely missing the thick metallic scent of my blood.

He walked away to buy a diamond necklace for Chloe.

I floated there, watching my blood pool on the cold concrete. For years, I had endured their bullying and his coldness, just hoping for a single crumb of his affection.

We were fated mates, yet he let me be butchered without a second thought.

Now that I am truly dead, I watch as the truth finally comes to light.

I watch the great Alpha lose his mind, destroy the women he once favored, and jump off a cliff just to find me.

But as my soul fades into the wind, I feel absolutely nothing.

Chapter 1

Mia POV

The television in my cramped room was the only source of light.

I sat on the edge of my broken bed, the mattress springs digging into my thighs. The damp air of the Omega dorms made me shiver.

On the flickering screen, the annual charity gala was being broadcast from a hall that seemed a world away, its cavernous space filled with men whose suits were tailored to their bones and women draped in gowns that glittered like constellations. But my eyes were fixed on only one man.

Silas.

As the helmsman of the city's largest business empire and the supreme leader of the Blood Moon pack, Silas was accustomed to filling out custom-tailored suits with his broad shoulders, exuding an unquestionable sense of oppression under the flashing lights. Yet fate, with its particular brand of cruelty, had insisted on binding me, this lowest of beings, to his indomitable soul.

I watched him smile at the cameras. His dark hair was perfectly styled. His broad shoulders commanded respect.

Suddenly, the wooden door of my room exploded inward.

A cannonade of sound ripped through the quiet, and splinters of cheap pine rained across the gloom. A massive figure lunged at me before I could even draw breath to scream.

A heavy hand clamped around my throat, lifting my feet off the floor. I was slammed against the cold concrete wall.

I gasped for air, my legs kicking uselessly as my eyes adjusted to the dark.

It was a Rogue.

He was a werewolf without a pack. His clothes were torn. His eyes burned with a sickening, unnatural red, like coals fanned in a diseased forge. He carried the stench of rotting meat, soured earth, and an anger so uncontrolled it felt like a physical heat.

"Not a single peep, little Omega," the Rogue growled.

He pressed a cold, heavy blade against my cheek.

My skin immediately began to hiss and smoke. The scent of burning flesh filled the small room.

It was silver.

Silver was the only metal that could burn a werewolf. It poisoned our blood and stopped us from healing.

A tremor began deep in my jaw as the nerves in my cheek screamed, a pain not of a simple cut, but of being eaten alive by a thousand venomous ants.

"Use your Mind-Link," the Rogue ordered, pressing the silver deeper into my skin. "Contact your billionaire Alpha. Tell him I want ten million dollars, or I'm painting these walls with your insides."

The Mind-Link was a telepathic network. It allowed pack members to speak to each other in their minds.

I was terrified. My body was trembling uncontrollably.

I closed my eyes and reached inward, fumbling for the shimmering cord of light that bound my soul to Silas—the mate bond, that supposed sacred covenant of the Moon Goddess.

Silas... please... help me, I cried out through the link.

On the television screen, I saw Silas stop walking. He was standing next to Selene and her sister Chloe.

He frowned. He looked annoyed.

He stepped away from the bright lights and walked into the shadows of the banquet hall.

What do you want, Mia? His voice came through the link not as sound, but as a violation—a rusted steel needle sliding into my mind, probing for the last nerve of hope so it could be severed.

A Rogue... he broke into my room, I sobbed in my mind. The silver blade moved down to my neck. He has a silver knife. He wants money. Silas, please, he is going to kill me.

Enough, Silas snapped through the link.

His voice carried the crushing weight of the Alpha. It was a power that forced my inner wolf to cower in fear.

I am tired of your lies, Mia, Silas said. You are just like your mother. Always using cheap witch tricks to get my attention.

No! I am telling the truth! It burns! I begged.

Then let it burn, Silas replied. Go ahead and die. It would be a favor to this pack.

A brutal, invisible pressure slammed against my consciousness. With the full force of his will, Silas tore at the link between us, and the shimmering cord in my mind did not just go dark—it frayed, it snapped, it dissolved into nothing.

The Rogue stared at me. He had heard the silence. He knew no one was coming.

"Your Alpha is a cold bastard," the Rogue spat. "He cut my medical funds. My pup died because of him. And now, you will die too."

He raised the silver dagger.

I tried to scream, but the blade drew a searing line across my throat before any sound could form. The pain was not a flash of light, but a sudden, profound emptiness, a void where my life had been. Then came the astonishing warmth of my own blood as it poured down my chest.

I fell to the floor. My vision blurred. The sound of my own heartbeat slowed down.

Thump.

Thump.

Nothing.

Then, a strange detachment began. I tried to brace a hand against the floor to push myself up, but my fingers passed through the grimy concrete as if it were smoke. Gravity lost its claim on me. My perspective drifted uncontrollably upward, my body suddenly weightless as a puff of ash, until the back of my head brushed against the cold, peeling plaster of the ceiling.

Below me, the Rogue was climbing out the shattered window frame into the night.

And on the floor, a small, broken thing in a congealing pool of blackish-red, was my own lifeless body.

I was dead.

*I stared down at the wide, vacant eyes of the girl I had been. Somewhere deep in the darkness of the pack lands, the mate bond was still humming—a severed cord leaking static into the void. I could feel him out there, still alive, still breathing. He had no idea what he had done. But he would. Sooner or later, he would. *

Mia POV

I was no longer tethered to the floor, but hung in the upper gloom of the room like a forgotten wisp of smoke.

Down below, the girl who had been me lay with her face turned to the side, the dark wound on her neck a stark, lipless mouth. The silver had left a blackened, cauterized rim around the gash, a final brand of her killer's contempt.

I was a shade, my soul snagged on the splintered frame of my own life.

*Death had not brought me peace, but it had brought me clarity. I could see the living world still, but more than that—I could sense the stains on their souls, the guilt they carried like tumors. The Rogue's was a blazing red inferno of grief and madness. And somewhere in the distance, Silas's was a cold, quiet knot—buried so deep he did not yet know it was there. *

There was no more pain. The searing kiss of the silver was a memory, as was the suffocating dampness of the Omega dorm.

But an ache persisted, a hollow echo in the place where my heart had been. It was the resonance of the sundered mate bond.

Why had he despised me so?

The answer was a simple, brutal thing. It was my mother.

I closed my spectral eyes, and the whispers of the old Omegas became a living history.

My mother had not merely been a witch; she had been an Elder of formidable power. Decades ago, when the Blood Moon Pack stood on the precipice of annihilation, its warriors decimated by rival clans, she had summoned her family's mercantile fortune and mercenary allegiances, single-handedly bankrolling the war that saved our lands.

But her aid came with a price.

The surviving Elders, desperate and cornered, leveraged her monumental contribution to force Silas's hand. They bound him with a magical mating contract, compelling him to accept my mother as his Luna.

The Luna was the heart of the pack, destined to rule beside the Alpha.

But Silas's heart was already given to another—a high-ranking Beta named Selene.

The contract forced him to banish Selene, an act that carved a canyon of resentment through his soul.

My mother tried to bridge that chasm. She prepared his meals. She submitted to his cold authority. She sought to awaken the wolf within him, to make him see her not as a jailer, but a mate.

But Silas felt only the weight of the chains, the suffocation of magic and duty. His heart did not simply grow cold; it calcified, turning to stone.

Then, she became pregnant with me—though the child was not his. My mother had been carrying me before the contract ever bound her to Silas, a secret she took to her grave. Some whispered my true father was a witch from her clan, killed in the war that she had helped win. I never knew his name.

During my birth, a hemorrhage stole her life before she could hold me, her final breath a whisper in a room that held no love for her.

*My mother's family—the great witch clan that had saved this pack—had been driven out within a year of her death. Silas had branded them traitors and banished them to the northern wastes. There was no one left to claim me. No one left to care. *

I remember the old Omega, Nana, recounting that day.

"I was polishing the wainscoting outside the Alpha's study," Nana had murmured to me years ago, her voice thin as cobwebs. "When the physician entered and announced that his Luna was gone."

I had looked up at Nana, my child's eyes wide. "Did he weep?"

Nana had averted her gaze, her own eyes clouded with a pity that stung more than any blow. "No, child. He drew a long, slow breath. He looked like a man newly unshackled from a great and terrible weight."

Silas did not mourn.

The very next day, he recalled Selene to the pack. He gave her the keys to the main house. He installed her as its mistress.

And me?

I was a newborn infant, wailing in the nursery, my blood carrying the taint of the witch who had ruined his life.

Silas entered the nursery but once.

He stood over my small crib, pinching the bridge of his nose as if I exuded some foul miasma.

He summoned Nana to the room.

"Take this creature to the Omega dorms," Silas commanded, his Alpha voice a physical force that made Nana's knees buckle. "I will grant you ten times your salary to ensure it remains from my sight. It is an ill omen."

He discarded me as one would discard refuse.

I opened my spectral eyes and looked down upon my blood-soaked body.

I was the product of a forced pact, lived as a walking error, and had now died as a bitter punchline.

The hours crept by, each one a slow, silent turn of a screw. The blood on the floor began to congeal, its edges darkening to the color of rust. The television eventually dissolved into static, its flickering life replaced by a dull, humming grey screen. The silence in the room was a heavy blanket, disturbed only by the rhythmic drip-drip-drip of my own blood from the warped edge of the bedframe.

Suddenly, the very air in the room seemed to thin and stretch.

The phantom mate bond in my chest gave a sharp, violent tug, a strange, invisible reeling-in.

I turned my head toward the wooden door.

It had been hours since my last breath, hours spent watching my own flesh grow cold. But now, I could feel him. He was finally back on pack lands.

Someone was approaching down the hallway. The footfalls were heavy, measured, and charged with irritation.

I knew that sound.

Silas was coming.

*The mate bond pulled taut, thrumming with his nearness. He was only a few steps away from the truth now. Would he smell the blood? Or would he walk past, as he always had, refusing to see what was right in front of him? *

Mia POV

From this height, the light seeping under the door was a long, thin blade on the dusty floor. Silas's agitated breathing came through the wood, a muffled, percussive sound that echoed in the space above, and I could not even kick my useless, phantom legs to make a noise in reply.

The footsteps stopped just outside. I could feel his immense presence, a low hum of power against the other side of the cheap pine.

While I waited, my mind unspooled, drifting back to my childhood.

Growing up in the Omega territory was a lesson in attrition.

Omegas were the lowest rank. We were the scullions, the laundresses, the servants. We were invisible.

But Nana loved me. She tried to be a shield.

She would brush my hair and weave beautiful falsehoods.

"Alpha Silas cares for you, Mia," Nana would say, her voice a soft counterpoint to the harsh world. "He is merely occupied by matters of state. But in the quiet of his heart, he thinks of you."

I never told Nana that I had started calling him 'father' in my own head. A child's desperate lie to fill the void where a parent should have been.

I was so starved for affection, I feasted on her words.

I constructed a paragon in my mind, an image of Silas as a stern, silent guardian, waiting only for me to mature and prove myself worthy of his notice.

Then, I turned fifteen.

I was in Nana's room, eating a piece of dry bread. Nana had switched on the television to the pack's private broadcast.

It was a live feed from the main pack hall.

Thousands of werewolves were assembled. The chamber was festooned with white roses and banners of spun gold.

It was a coming-of-age ceremony.

It was not for me.

It was for Chloe, Selene's younger sister. A Beta.

On the screen, Chloe glided down a crimson carpet, a diamond tiara glittering in her hair. She was the very picture of a cherished princess.

The camera panned to the dais.

Silas was standing there, holding Selene's hand.

When Chloe reached the stage, Silas enveloped her in a fierce hug.

I saw the glint of unshed tears in his eyes. He looked proud. He was overflowing with a love I had only read about in books.

"Today, we celebrate Chloe," Silas announced into the microphone, his voice imbued with a warmth I had never heard. "She is the light of this family."

They were a perfect, luminous family.

I sat in the cold Omega room, the dry bread in my hand. The screen's warm glow seemed to mock me. I swallowed the mouthful of coarse crumbs, and they scraped a path down my throat, triggering a deep, involuntary spasm in my esophagus that brought a surge of bitter acid with it.

I understood then that Silas had a vast reservoir of love. He simply had no intention of wasting a single drop on me.

Later that night, I borrowed Nana's old datapad and logged into the pack's private social network.

I navigated to Silas's profile. Only high-ranking members could view his posts, but Nana had an archaic staff account.

His page was a shrine to Chloe.

There was a picture of Chloe standing over a slain deer, the caption reading: So proud of my girl's first hunt.

There were images of her birthdays, her vacations, her new vehicles.

I scrolled down, my hands trembling.

I thought of my own accomplishments.

I had trained until my hands were raw. I had entered the Warrior trials for young wolves, fighting opponents twice my size to win first place.

I had brought my gold-leaf certificate to the main house, clinging to the hope that it might finally earn me a smile.

But when I presented it to him, he had only stared at me with revulsion.

"You fight with cunning," Silas had sneered, his lip curled. "You manipulate your opponents. It is the witch's blood in you. Do not bring this refuse into my house again."

Remembering his cruel words, I dropped the datapad.

I walked to my small desk and pulled out my certificates of merit, my warrior medallions, my academic awards.

I tore them all into small, meaningless scraps, ripping and shredding until my fingers throbbed.

Then, I ran to the washroom. I clutched the cold, stained porcelain of the toilet and vomited, heaving until my stomach was a raw, empty cavern. I wept until my tear ducts were dry.

A loud knock on the door pulled my ghost back to the present.

Bang! Bang! Bang!

"Mia!" Silas's angry voice boomed from the hallway. "Open this door this instant!"

I drifted closer to the door. He was finally here. But he was too late.

*And somewhere in the back of my mind, the thought whispered: he doesn't know yet. He's still angry about whatever Selene told him. He has no idea that the girl he's demanding to open this door has been dead for hours. *