**Savannah’s POV**
The marble floor echoed under my heels as I followed Jack inside.
I told myself it was practical.
The training base was twenty minutes away.
My feet were already feeling the gravel from the drive.
The dress was torn.
He’d been civil in the car, quiet even, no performance, no angle I could immediately locate — just a man driving in the dark who kept both hands on the wheel and his eyes on the road.
The foyer of his estate was the kind of space that announced money without saying it directly.
Original paintings, antique furniture that existed to be looked at rather than used, crystal chandelier cutting the light into careful pieces.
The full moon hung in the center of the floor-to-ceiling windows at the far end of the room like it had been positioned there deliberately.
“Sit,” he said, gesturing toward a leather sofa.
“I’ll have the guest bathroom prepared.
You can take a moment.”
I didn’t sit.
I stayed standing, weight distributed the way six years of training had made automatic — loose, balanced, ready without announcing itself.
My eyes moved across the room in the systematic way they always did in unfamiliar spaces.
Exits, furniture placement, line of sight to the windows, distance to the door.
He came back with a bone china cup, white, narrow-necked, steam curling from the rim.
“Lavender and chamomile,” he said.
His voice had changed register, I noticed.
Lower.
Unhurried.
The kind of tone calibrated to slow a person down.
“Something warm.
Tonight was a lot.”
I looked at the cup.
Then I looked at his face.
The memory arrived before I could decide whether to let it — Vivienne, six years ago, pressing a water bottle into my hands before training with that particular smile, her voice carrying the same careful warmth.
*Hydration is so important, Savannah.* The sweetness on my tongue that I’d told myself was just the water.
The way the ground had started to tilt beneath me before I’d made it to the parking lot.
An Alpha heir, in his own territory, wouldn’t—
I took the cup.
Soft, harmless, the kind of thing that existed specifically to seem like nothing to be concerned about.
Then the liquid reached the back of my tongue, and I knew.
The recognition was instantaneous and entirely physical — body first, brain catching up a half-second later.
Not the same compound Vivienne had used.
This one was faster, hotter, spreading through my throat before I’d finished swallowing, a wave of heat moving outward from my sternum in every direction at once.
“You—” The word came out wrong.
Thick, the consonants losing their shape.
My tongue felt like it had doubled in size inside my mouth.
The bone china cup left my hand.
I heard it hit the marble — a clean, decisive crack, tea spreading in a dark stain across the pale stone.
“Shh.” Jack’s hands were on my arms, steadying me as my legs started making their opinion known, and the contact made my skin want to crawl away from my own body.
“Just something to take the edge off.
You’ve been so tense all evening—”
He turned toward the study.
Something about papers, something about returning — I caught fragments through the thickening haze.
Three seconds.
Less, maybe.
But my body understood what three seconds meant before my brain finished processing it, and six years of combat training doesn’t live in the conscious mind.
It lives in the muscles, in the reflexes, in the part of you that keeps functioning even when everything above the shoulders is starting to go dark.
The floor-to-ceiling window was unlocked.
I hit it with my shoulder and it swung outward and then I was in the garden, the night air cold and immediate and real, the grass wet under my bare feet.
I moved.
Thorns caught the silver fabric as I pushed through the landscaping, leaving pieces of it behind on the branches — small silver flags marking the path, breadcrumbs in reverse.
The gravel path that followed was worse barefoot than it had been on the drive, sharp edges registering through the drug haze, and I was grateful for every one of them.
Pain meant present.
Pain meant not gone yet.
I made it to the far corner of the garden, to the oak tree where the exterior wall met the hedgerow, and my legs announced that this was as far as they were taking me tonight.
I went down slowly, back against the rough bark, the wet grass soaking through the ruined dress.
Not a fall — a controlled descent, which felt important to note even if no one was there to note it. New chapters come out on g.com first.
The moon above me split into two, then three, then a small constellation of moons dancing against the dark sky.
*Finn.* His face was clear in my mind in a way that nothing else was.
The amber-brown eyes, the dark curls, the way he’d looked this morning eating cereal and telling me something very serious about an owl he’d dreamed about.
*Hold on*, something in me said.
The last coherent part of me, gathered into a point.
*Hold on.*
Jack’s footsteps on the manicured lawn were measured, unhurried.
The light from the estate windows caught the leather of his shoes as he came around the hedgerow.
“What a waste,” he said.
“Silver Creek’s princess, reduced to this.” He stopped a meter away, and his voice carried that specific quality of a man who has decided the outcome.
“Don’t worry.
I’ll take good care of you.
Perhaps I can help give that boy of yours some proper guidance—”
*Finn.*
That last half-sentence hit the center of the fog like a needle, and something in me that had been dimming flared.
My fingers dug into the wet grass.
In a body that had almost nothing left to give, the last functional piece of my will drew itself into a fist.
*You touch him and I will—*
The sound that arrived next didn’t belong to any register I could name.
Not a howl.
Not anything so ordinary as a howl.
It was the kind of sound that made air move backward, that made every leaf in the garden go still, that arrived in the chest before the ears had processed it.
The black shape cleared the stone wall in a single arc.
The wolf was enormous — larger than anything I’d encountered in training, larger than any wolf I could remember seeing, black fur carrying a depth of color that caught the moonlight differently from ordinary black, like something older and denser.
It moved the way things move in dreams, too fast to track, and Jack left the ground before he had time to react.
The impact was decisive.
Distant.
Somewhere in the grass behind me.
Then the wolf was gone and Declan was there — in human form, somehow, kneeling in the wet grass with both hands reaching for me, and those amber-brown eyes were the most present, most focused thing in my fractured field of vision.
His hands found me.
Warm, solid, real.
That warmth was the last thing I registered.
The darkness took everything else.