I couldn't breathe. The world had collapsed into a single, suffocating point of pain. My body was on the floor of what had been my bedroom—our bedroom—but nothing felt real anymore. Not the silk sheets beneath my cheek. Not the fading scent of my son on his favorite stuffed wolf. Not even the hollow echo of my own heartbeat. Jayden was gone. My beautiful, innocent pup had fallen from the packhouse balcony. They said it was an accident. They said I was there. They said it was my fault.

The door clicked open, and I didn't turn to look. I knew who it was. The heavy footsteps of Alpha Davis, my mate, my supposed protector, filled the room with the same oppressive weight that had been crushing me since the news broke. Behind him, the lighter, sharper steps of Maren—his mother, the former Luna, the woman who had never thought me worthy of her son.

'This is pathetic.' Maren's voice cut through the silence like a blade. 'Look at her, Davis. This is the Luna you chose.'

I wanted to speak, to defend myself, but my throat had closed around a knot of grief so profound that words couldn't survive it. I had been there. I had been holding Jayden's hand. I had turned away for just a moment to answer a question from one of the pack mothers. And then...

'He was only three years old!' Maren's voice rose, her words hammering into my skull. 'A wolfless mother. What use is she to anyone? She couldn't even protect her own pup.'

The accusation hit like a physical blow. I tried to sit up, to protest, but Davis's Alpha tone filled the room before I could find my voice.

'Enough, Mother.' His voice was cold, controlled—the voice he used in pack meetings when someone had disappointed him. He knelt beside me, but there was no comfort in his presence. His hand gripped my shoulder, and I felt the pressure of his Alpha aura pressing down on me like a mountain. 'Katelyn, this is your fault.'

The words shattered what little composure I had left. 'Davis, please—'

'You were supposed to protect him.' His tone was relentless, crushing. 'You failed as a mother. You failed as a Luna. You failed as my mate.'

Each word was a nail in the coffin of the woman I had been. I was wolfless. I was broken. I was alone. And now, I was to blame for the death of my own child.

They left me there, on the floor, drowning in guilt and grief. I didn't move for hours. I didn't cry. I didn't think. I simply existed in a void where everything that had ever mattered had been taken from me.

A week passed in a haze. The pack's whispers followed me like shadows. I heard the words: 'unfit,' 'weak,' 'disgrace.' I stopped eating. Stopped sleeping. Stopped feeling anything except the crushing weight of my failure.

And then came the day of the rejection.

They dragged me to the Black Moon pack courthouse like a criminal. The elders sat in judgment. Davis stood tall, his Alpha aura filling the space, making everyone else seem smaller, lesser. He looked at me with eyes that had once held love but now held only contempt.

'Katelyn Wallace,' he announced, his voice carrying to every corner of the room, 'you have proven yourself unfit to be Luna of the Black Moon Pack. You have failed in your most sacred duty as a mother and as my mate.'

I wanted to scream that it was a lie, that something else had happened, that I would never have let my son fall. But his Alpha tone was crushing my will, suffocating my voice.

'I, Davis Wallace, Alpha of the Black Moon Pack, reject you, Katelyn Wallace, as my mate.'

The words fell like stones. The mate bond, already weakened by his emotional distance, began to tear. It felt like my soul was being ripped apart.

'The dissolution papers.' He thrust a pen into my trembling hand. 'Sign them.'

I stared at the document, the words blurring through my tears. Everything I had built, everything I had believed in, was being stripped away.

'Sign. Them.' Davis's Alpha command left no room for resistance.

With a hand that no longer felt like my own, I signed my name. The moment the pen lifted from the paper, I felt something inside me break. I was no longer Luna. No longer mate. No longer mother. I was nothing.

They let me go then, casting me out like garbage. I stumbled into the streets, an Omega with nothing left to lose. The pack courthouse fell away behind me as I wandered, numb and empty.

And then I heard his voice.

Davis's voice, warm and intimate in a way I hadn't heard in months. I froze, turning toward the sound. In a secluded alleyway, I saw them. Davis and a she-wolf I recognized as Camilla Ruiz. They were embracing, their bodies entwined in a way that spoke of intimacy and secrets.

But it was what—who—I saw in Camilla's arms that stopped my heart.

A small pup, no more than three years old, with my son's eyes and Davis's dark hair. Around his neck, gleaming in the afternoon sun, was the silver howling wolf pendant I had given him when he was born.

Jayden.

My son.

Alive.

The world tilted on its axis. The shock was so profound, so devastating, that something inside me cracked open. And from that crack, a voice I had never heard before—wild, fierce, and utterly mine—began to howl.

The wolf inside me was a storm.

She pressed against the inside of my chest like something trying to claw its way out — enormous and furious and ancient — and every instinct she carried was screaming one word: Jayden.

I pressed my back against the alley wall, out of sight, and I breathed.

Not yet.

The thought came from somewhere deeper than panic. Somewhere cold and deliberate that I hadn't known I possessed until about three minutes ago.

If I shifted now — if I let her out, if I let the aura crackling at the edges of my skin break through — they would know. Silas would know. Davis would know. And Jayden would disappear again, this time somewhere I'd never find him.

Not yet, I thought again, and I pushed.

It was like trying to hold back a tide with my bare hands. She fought me — God, she fought me — and I felt the pressure of her behind my eyes, behind my teeth, a low vibration in my bones that wanted to become a howl. I pressed my palms flat against the brick wall and breathed through it, one breath at a time, until the storm quieted to a growl.

Fine, she said. The word landed in my mind like a stone dropped in still water. But I remember everything.

So did I.

I looked down at myself. The clothes I was wearing were already worn — I'd dressed for a courthouse, not a fight — but they were too clean. Too intact. I grabbed the hem of my shirt and tore it. Found a patch of dirt near the alley's edge and pressed my palms into it, then dragged them across my face, my neck, the back of my hands. I pulled my hair loose from its tie and let it fall in tangles.

Then I walked back to the packhouse.

---

Beta Silas was standing at the service entrance when I arrived, clipboard in hand, looking like a man who had never once questioned whether he was on the right side of anything.

He looked at me the way you look at something you've already decided is worthless.

"Katelyn Wallace." He said my name like it tasted bad. "You've got nerve, showing up here."

I kept my eyes down. I let my shoulders curve inward. I let my voice come out small and cracked, which wasn't entirely a performance. "I have nowhere else to go. I'll do anything. Clean, cook, carry — I just need—" I stopped. Let the silence do the work. "Please."

He looked at me for a long moment. I felt his gaze moving over me — the torn clothes, the dirt, the hollow eyes — and I watched him decide that I was exactly what I appeared to be: a broken, wolfless Omega with nothing left.

"Floor cleaning," he said finally. "Lower levels only. You stay out of the Alpha's wing, the council rooms, and the east corridor. You're paid in meals and a cot in the Omega quarters. You cause trouble, you're out."

"Yes, Beta Silas." I kept my voice flat. Grateful. Defeated.

He handed me a mop and walked away without another word.

---

The lower levels of the packhouse were a map I had once known as Luna. Now I learned them again as a ghost.

I moved through the corridors with my head down and my hands busy, and I watched everything. The guard rotation near the east stairwell — every forty minutes, a gap of about three. The camera blind spot in the hallway outside the records room, where the wall sconce had been broken for what looked like weeks. The way the night staff clustered near the kitchen between ten and eleven, leaving the lower west wing essentially unwatched.

Good, Sera murmured. She had stopped demanding blood, for now. She was watching too.

I scrubbed floors and memorized patterns and let myself be invisible, which was the one thing this pack had always been very good at making me.

---

The communal kitchen smelled like coffee and leftover stew when I slipped in to clean the tile near the back wall. Three she-wolves were clustered around the counter, voices low and animated in the way that meant gossip rather than crisis.

I kept my back to them. Kept the mop moving.

"— swear it was her scent," Judith Salazar was saying. I recognized her voice — she'd always been the kind of woman who collected information the way others collected jewelry. "That floral-musk thing she has. Right near the western border, by the restricted trail."

"Camilla?" one of the others said.

"Who else smells like a garden in February?" Judith laughed softly. "And there were extra guards posted near the old wing of the pack hospital. Rogue guards, not pack regulars. I noticed because Remy was supposed to be on kitchen duty and he wasn't."

The mop handle was slick in my grip.

The old wing, Sera said quietly. That's where they'd keep him.

My hands didn't shake. I didn't look up. I kept scrubbing the same square of tile until the women moved on, taking their voices with them.

Then I stood up slowly, wrung out the mop, and let the information settle into the cold, deliberate place inside me where my plan was beginning to take shape.

Camilla was back. And wherever Camilla was, Jayden was close.

I just had to get to the old wing before anyone realized the ghost they'd let through the door still had teeth.

The hospital's fluorescent lights flickered as I waited, pressed into the shadows of the supply closet. The stolen master keycard felt like a brand against my palm, warm with the possibility of answers. It was 3:17 AM. The night shift nurses had completed their rounds, and the corridors were silent except for the distant hum of medical equipment.

I'd chosen the records room deliberately. If Jayden was being kept somewhere in the hospital's restricted pediatric wing, there would be paperwork. There would be a trail. And I would find it.

The door clicked open.

'Is it secure?' Davis's voice, low and controlled, made my blood freeze. I pressed myself deeper into the closet, Sera's fury a living thing behind my ribs.

'Completely secure,' came another voice—Owen Hale, the pack healer. His tone carried the practiced calm of a man who had made peace with his own corruption. 'The sedation protocol is working perfectly. He's stable, but...'

'But what?' A woman's voice now, sharp with maternal fear. Camilla. My fingers dug into my own arms, hard enough to bruise.

'His wolf is fighting the sedatives. It's only a matter of time before he wakes up fully.'

'How much time?' Davis demanded.

'A day. Maybe two.'

'Not enough,' Camilla whispered. 'August needs that heart tomorrow night.'

The words hit me like a physical blow. I bit down on my own hand, hard, to keep from making a sound. The metallic taste of blood filled my mouth as Davis's voice continued, clinical and cold.

'The procedure is scheduled for midnight. Owen will harvest the heart while the pup is still under sedation. It's the cleanest way.'

'And afterward?' Camilla's voice was softer now, almost tender. 'After we save our son?'

'Afterward, we move on,' Davis said. 'Katelyn is gone. The pack believes the pup is dead. No one will question it.'

'And if they do?'

'They won't.' The absolute certainty in his voice made my skin crawl. 'I'm the Alpha. My word is law.'

I heard footsteps moving toward the door. 'I need to check on him,' Camilla said. 'I need to know he's still...'

'Still alive?' Davis finished for her. 'Go. I have calls to make.'

The door closed. I stayed frozen in the closet, my hand still clamped over my mouth, tasting my own blood.

They were going to kill my son. Tomorrow night. To save another child—August. Their child.

The full horror of it crashed over me in waves. Davis hadn't just betrayed me. He had orchestrated our son's 'death' from the beginning. He had used me as a vessel, a means to an end, to create a healthy pup whose heart could save his secret son.

Sera howled inside me, a sound of pure, primal rage.

Not yet, I told her again. But soon.

I slipped out of the closet when I was certain they were gone. The records room was dark, but I didn't need light. I knew exactly what I was looking for now.

The pediatric wing's security logs confirmed it. Jayden was here, registered under a false name, heavily sedated, with surgery scheduled for tomorrow night.

I memorized the room number, the guard rotation, the camera blind spots.

Then I ran.

The hospital corridors blurred around me as I made for the exit, my heart hammering against my ribs. I couldn't fight them all. Not yet. Not alone.

But I knew where to go.

The forest between Black Moon and Moonveil territories was dark and treacherous, filled with territorial traps and border patrols. But Sera was awake now, and her senses were sharper than any human's. I moved through the trees like a ghost, using the moonlight to guide me, listening for the sound of pursuit.

Behind me, I heard a howl—a search party. Davis had discovered my absence.

I pushed harder, faster, the border just ahead. If I could reach Moonveil territory, if I could find Alpha Vivienne...

The trees thinned. The scent of unfamiliar wolves filled the air.

And somewhere in the darkness, I heard the sound of approaching footsteps.