The velvet curtain felt like lead in my hand. I watched the spectacle from the slit in the fabric, my breath coming in short, hot bursts that tasted of iron. The hall was a sea of bodies, a shimmering mass of silk and fur that moved to the steady, primal beat of the drums.
The heat was no longer a hum. It was a roar.
I looked down at my hands. Under the flickering torchlight of the service hall, my skin looked translucent. The veins beneath the surface were pulsing with a dark, violet light that shouldn't have existed.
Every time my heart hammered against my ribs, the light flared. The black ash Silas had forced into me was losing. I could feel the medicine curdling in my stomach, turning into a bitter poison that my body was trying to vomit out.
"Kaelen? What are you doing here?"
I spun around. It was Elara, my younger sister. She was draped in a gown of emerald green that made her golden eyes pop. She was beautiful, strong, and every bit the warrior our father wanted me to be. She looked at me with a mixture of pity and sharp annoyance.
"You're supposed to be in the cellar," she hissed, grabbing my arm to pull me away from the curtain.
The moment her skin touched mine, she recoiled. She gasped, clutching her hand to her chest as if I'd burned her.
"You're freezing," she whispered, her eyes wide. "No, you're... you're vibrating. Kaelen, your eyes."
"What's wrong with them?" I rasped. My throat felt like I had swallowed broken glass.
"They aren't brown anymore," Elara said, backing away toward the light of the main hall. "They're white. Like bone. I'm calling Dad."
"No!" I reached for her, but my movements were jerky, uncoordinated.
A sudden, violent cramp doubled me over. I hit the floorboards, my knees cracking against the wood. It felt like someone had taken a serrated blade and run it down the length of my spine. I tried to pull air into my lungs, but the atmosphere in the service hall had grown thin.
The sound of the gala surged as the heavy oak doors at the far end of the hall swung open. Alpha Vane was standing.
The room went silent. Even the drums died.
I watched through the gap in the curtain as Vane stepped down from the dais. He didn't look like a man about to celebrate a union. He looked like a hunter who had picked up a scent he didn't like. His nostrils flared, and his eyes scanned the room, bypassing the council and the candidates.
He was looking toward the shadows. Toward me.
"Alpha?" Isolde's voice was a soft, questioning purr. she reached for his arm, but Vane brushed her off without looking at her.
"Something is wrong," Vane said. His voice wasn't loud, but it carried to every corner of the room. "The air. It's..... stagnant."
I tried to stand up, my fingers clawing at the stone wall for leverage. Another snap echoed in the small hallway. This time, it wasn't the building. It was my collarbone. The pain was so intense it bypassed screaming. I slumped against the wall, my vision fracturing into a thousand shards of white light.
The mountain ash was gone. I could feel it purging from my system, a black bile that leaked from the corner of my mouth.
Shift.
The word didn't come from my mind. It came from the earth. It came from the stones beneath my feet and the moon hanging over the palace roof.
I heard footsteps, heavy, purposeful boots. Vane was coming. He had caught the scent of the dying medicine and the rising storm.
"Kaelen, get out of here!" Elara's voice was a frantic whisper. She tried to grab my tunic again, but this time, the air around me distorted. A ripple of heat threw her back against the opposite wall.
"I can't," I choked out.
My jaw was lengthening. I could feel my teeth grinding together, sharpening into points that cut into my own gums. The taste of my own blood was the final trigger.
The grey fog of the medicine didn't just lift; it incinerated.
Vane ripped the velvet curtain aside.
He stood there, a god of ice and shadow, looking down at the girl he had ordered into exile. He saw me on the floor, my body twisting in ways that should have been impossible. He saw the white fire in my eyes and the way the shadows in the hallway seemed to be rushing toward me, being swallowed by my skin.
"Kaelen?" He whispered her name for the first time without a sneer.
Then he saw the blood. He saw the way the floorboards beneath me were turning to splinters under the weight of a pressure that shouldn't have fit in a human frame.
Vane's wolf surged to the surface. His amber eyes blazed, and he reached for the silver dagger at his belt. He didn't see his mate. He didn't see a girl. He saw a breach in the natural order.
"Silas!" Vane roared, his voice shaking the rafters. "What have you done?"
My father appeared behind him, his face a mask of total devastation. He took one look at me and collapsed to his knees. "It's too late. The cycle is complete."
The first rib snapped outward.
I didn't scream. I roared.
The sound wasn't a wolf's howl. It was the sound of a mountain collapsing. The pressure wave hit Vane full in the chest, hurling him back into the Great Hall. The service wall exploded, stone and timber flying outward as my body expanded.
I wasn't growing. I was unfolding.
The white fur pushed through my skin, thick and shimmering like a fallen star. My shoulders slammed into the ceiling, the massive oak beams groaning and then snapping like dry twigs. I rose out of the wreckage, a towering mass of muscle and ancient hunger.
The gala was gone. There was only the vacuum.
I looked down from my new height. The warriors were on the floor, clutching their throats. The air was being pulled into me, stripped of its life, stripped of its power. I could feel every wolf in the room. They were like small, flickering candles in a hurricane.
And then, I saw him.
Vane was standing in the middle of the debris. He was the only one still on his feet, though his knees were shaking. He looked up at me, his face pale with a terror he had never known.
The golden thread slammed into us.
It wasn't a gentle pull. It was a spear of light that pierced my chest and anchored itself in his. The bond was so loud it was deafening. MATE. The word vibrated through the ruins of the hall. It echoed in the silence of the forest outside.
Vane stared at the white nightmare I had become. He felt the pull. I saw the recognition in his eyes, the realization that the "glitch" he had stepped over for three years was the only soul in the universe meant for him.
He looked at the golden thread. Then he looked at his broken palace.
He didn't reach out. He didn't say my name.
He looked at the fire pit near his throne, where a branding iron sat in the coals, glowing a hateful, murderous orange.
"I will not be mastered," he whispered.
The hunger in me paused. The beast I had become waited for the touch, for the acceptance that would calm the storm.
Instead, Vane moved.
He reached for the iron.