Sienna's POV
My paws are bleeding.
I do not know when that started. Sometime during the endless running through the dark. The palace kept me soft. Kept me safe. Kept me useless.
The forest does not care that I was a princess. The rocks do not bow. The branches do not step aside. They just cut and scrape and draw blood like I am any other wolf.
By the time the sun comes up, I am lost.
I have run so far that the palace scent is completely gone. I have no idea which direction I came from or where I am heading. The forest looks the same in every direction. Trees and more trees. Sky that is too bright and makes my eyes hurt after hours of darkness.
My stomach is screaming.
I try to hunt a deer near a clearing. I see it drinking from a stream and something inside my wolf goes alert. This is it. This is how I survive. I crouch low, the way I have seen other wolves do it in the palace hunts. I move closer.
The deer bolts before I am anywhere close.
I chase it but I am too slow. Too clumsy. Too royal. It disappears into the trees like it was never there at all and I am left standing alone, panting, starving.
I try again with a rabbit. Same result. The animal sees me coming and runs and I cannot catch it because I do not know how to hunt. Nobody taught me this. Nobody expected me to need to know.
The palace fed me three times a day. The palace had servants who prepared everything. The palace had magic to preserve food and spells to keep the kitchens cold. I never had to think about where food came from. It just appeared.
Now there is nothing.
By afternoon I am desperate enough to try eating berries. I do not know if they are poison or not. I do not care. The pain in my stomach is worse than the risk of being sick.
I collapse by a river around sunset.
The water is cold and clear and I drink until my belly aches. Then I drink more because the ache is something. It is proof that I am still alive, still here, still fighting.
I shift back to human form for a moment just to see if I remember how. My skin is dirty. My silver hair is tangled with leaves and blood. There are scratches covering my arms from branches I ran through. My feet are torn up and bleeding the same way my paws were.
I look like a wild thing. I feel like one too.
The sun is dropping fast. The forest is getting dark again and I can already feel the temperature changing. It will be cold tonight. Colder than last night.
I find a cave tucked into the side of a hill. It smells like animals but nothing is living in it right now. I squeeze inside and curl up on the hard ground, wrapping my arms around myself because I am shaking and I cannot stop.
Six days left.
My father gave me seven days to come crawling back. To admit he was right. To accept Prince Kessler and his cold eyes and his hunger that has nothing to do with love.
I would rather die out here.
The thought is not noble. It is just honest. Every part of me hurts. Every part of me is terrified. But the thought of going back, of standing in front of Kessler and accepting his touch, of watching my father smile like he won something, is worse than any pain.
So I will survive. I will figure this out. I will prove that I can exist without them.
The cave is dark now. The night is complete. I huddle in the corner and try not to think about how alone I am. How small I am. How the palace could erase me and the rest of the world would not even notice.
Helena noticed. The thought comes out of nowhere. Helena cried. Helena tried to reach me.
But it was not enough to matter.
I am drifting between sleep and waking, caught in that space where dreams and nightmares are the same thing, when I hear them.
Wolves.
Not far away. Close enough that I can hear the individual voices in their howls. There are at least five of them. Maybe more.
My body goes rigid.
I shift back to wolf form without meaning to. My instincts are screaming at me to run but I stay frozen in the back of the cave because I remember my lessons. A rogue does not have territory. A rogue is fair game.
These wolves are hunting.
I cannot tell if they are hunting me specifically or just hunting in general, but it does not matter. Either way, I am food to them. Either way, I am alone and they are a pack.
The howls come again. Closer this time.
My wolf wants to run. My human mind wants to run. Everything inside me wants to get out of this cave and sprint deeper into the forest, following some instinct that says there might be safety somewhere ahead.
But my body is too exhausted. My paws are too injured. My mind is too broken.
I stay in the cave.
The howls echo through the forest like a song of death. The wolves are communicating with each other, coordinating, getting closer. I can smell them on the wind now. Unfamiliar scent. Aggressive scent.
Hungry scent.
One of them is directly outside the cave. I can hear it sniffing at the entrance, trying to catch my scent. I hold my breath like that will make a difference. Like somehow they will not notice me if I just stay still enough.
The wolf growls.
It is a low, threatening sound that vibrates through the ground beneath me. The wolf is massive. I can hear it in the weight of that growl. Bigger than me. Stronger than me. More experienced than me.
This is how I die. In a cave. Alone. Unmourned. On the first night of being a rogue.
More wolves join the first one. I can hear them padding around outside. They are deciding whether I am worth extracting from this cave or if they should just wait and starve me out.
I am counting my heartbeats. Waiting for them to rush in. Waiting for the teeth and the blood and the end of everything.
Then something changes.
A new scent floods into the cave. Different from the others. Darker. Older. A scent that carries so much power that the other wolves go silent.
An Alpha.
Not just any Alpha. Something ancient in my wolf recognizes this scent as different. As dangerous. As something that makes the other wolves back away like they just realized they were hunting in the wrong territory.
The other wolves retreat. I can hear them moving away, confused and frustrated but obedient to something older and darker than their hunger.
The Alpha wolf stands at the entrance of my cave.
I cannot see its face in the darkness but I can see the outline of it. Massive. Scarred. Still as a statue. Watching me like I am the most interesting thing it has ever seen.
My wolf goes absolutely silent.
We stare at each other across the darkness of the cave and I feel something shift inside me. Something recognizes something in him. Not danger. Not yet. Something else.
Something that makes me feel less alone for the first time since I started running.
The Alpha steps closer.