One moon cycle later, at my coming-of-age feast, my mother pressed a moon-blessing charm into my palm. Her hands were warm, her wolf-amber eyes soft with love.
Then she climbed to the highest ledge of our territory and stepped off the edge.
Her journal told me everything. Pages and pages of deliberate humiliation. Seren and Raven's calculated cruelty, their whispered campaigns to isolate her from the pack, to taint her scent-standing until no wolf would acknowledge her presence.
I brought the evidence to my father, Elder Dorian of the Ashvale Pack.
Seren wept, her Omega distress-scent flooding the room. Raven sobbed harder, clutching at my father's arm.
I was cast out of the den that same night.
That winter was brutal. The kind of cold that seeps into your bones and settles there like frost that never thaws.
I was hours away from becoming a lone wolf—packless, unprotected, prey for any territorial male who caught my scent—when Alaric found me. He'd searched every corner of the territory, tracking my fading trail through frozen forests and abandoned hunting grounds.