The first thing I noticed was that I wasn’t cold anymore.
There was no dirt or wet leaves under me, and that felt wrong before I even opened my eyes.
The last thing I remembered was the forest floor, damp and freezing under my back, rogue voices circling closer than my own heartbeat.
Now there was warmth against my skin, soft fabric instead of dirt, and a low, steady hum somewhere beneath me that I didn’t recognize — not a sound exactly, more like the feeling of a large building breathing around me.
I opened my eyes.
The ceiling above me was smooth pale wood, high and modern, with a soft light fixture set into it that looked nothing like anything Hellfang territory had ever built.
I turned my head, too fast, and the room spun hard enough that I had to grip the edge of the bed to keep from being sick.
“Easy.” A woman’s voice, unfamiliar, coming from a chair near the window.
“You’ve lost a lot of blood. Don’t sit up yet.”
I went rigid instead of answering her, every instinct screaming at me to assess the threat before I did anything else — where the exits were, how many people were in the room, whether the door locked from the inside or the outside.
I didn’t know this woman.
I didn’t know this bed, this pack, this territory.
The last people who’d had their hands on me had been rogues trying to kill me, and before that, my own pack had turned on me in front of everyone I’d ever trusted.
“Where am I?” My voice came out cracked and hoarse.
“Dreadmoon land.” She said it like it should mean something to me, then seemed to catch herself when it clearly didn’t.
“You’re safe. My name’s Vera, I’m one of the healers here. Some of our patrol found you three nights ago near the northern border, being attacked by rogues. You’re lucky they got to you when they did.”
Three nights.
I’d been unconscious for three nights, in a stranger’s bed, in a pack I’d never even heard mentioned by name, and I had no memory of any of it — not being found, not being carried here, not whatever had been done to keep me alive.
The gap in my own memory scared me more than the rogues had.
“I need to leave.” I tried to push myself upright, and my arms shook so badly I nearly went right back down.
“I can’t be here. I don’t know you, I don’t know this pack, I don’t—”
“You’re not in any state to leave anywhere.” Vera’s voice stayed calm, which somehow made it easier to listen to than if she’d argued.
“You almost died. Whatever you’re running from, it’s not going to matter if you collapse in the woods again the moment you walk out that door.”
She wasn’t wrong, and I hated that she wasn’t wrong.
I sank back against the pillows, my heart still hammering, my mind racing through everything I didn’t understand.
Dreadmoon.
I turned the name over, searching for any memory of Darius or the elders ever mentioning it, any warning about a pack this close to Hellfang’s borders, and came up with nothing.
That felt strange on its own — packs usually knew their neighbors, especially ones large enough to have healers, private rooms, ceiling lights that looked like they belonged in some human luxury hotel instead of a pack house.
“Why would you help me?” I asked.
“You don’t know me. I’m not pack. I’m nobody.”
Something flickered across Vera’s face, there and gone too fast for me to read it clearly.
“You’re someone who was bleeding to death on our land. That’s reason enough.”
I didn’t believe that was the whole reason, not from the way she’d looked at me, but I was too tired and too disoriented to push.
She stood and crossed to check the bandage on my arm, and it was only when she leaned in to adjust it that I felt the fabric at my collar shift, tugged loose from where it had been resting against my throat.
I felt it before I understood what it meant.
The cool air against skin that hadn’t been exposed in years, the mark on my neck suddenly bare instead of hidden.
Vera went completely still, her eyes going wide.
“Where did you get that?” Her voice had changed entirely — the calm, clinical tone from a moment ago was gone, replaced by something sharper, almost urgent.
My hand flew to my collar, yanking it back into place too late.
“It’s nothing. It’s just a birthmark.”
“That’s not just a birthmark.” She was staring at my throat like she’d seen something she didn’t have words for yet.
“I need you to hold still. I need to look at it properly.”
“No.” Old habit made me curl away from her, pressing my back into the pillows, my hand still clamped protectively over the collar.
Three years of hiding it, three years of being called cursed, wrong, an omen — I wasn’t about to let a stranger stare at the thing that had gotten me thrown out of my own home.
“It’s ugly. It doesn’t mean anything. Just leave it alone.”
“Maeve.” She said my name gently, though I didn’t remember telling her what it was, and I realized distantly that someone must have found identification on me, or I’d said it myself in whatever fever I’d passed through these last three days.
“I don’t think you understand what I just saw.”
“I understand exactly what you saw,” I said, my voice shaking now.
“You saw the reason my own mate rejected me in front of his entire pack four days ago. You saw the reason the elders called me an omen. I don’t need you to tell me it’s strange. I’ve known it’s strange my whole life.”
Vera didn’t argue with me.
She didn’t try to reassure me either, which somehow felt worse — like she knew something I didn’t and wasn’t ready to say it out loud.
She straightened, smoothed her expression back into something calmer, though her eyes kept flicking back to my collar even after I’d pulled it shut.
“I need to get someone,” she said carefully.
“Our Beta. He’ll want to see this himself.”
She left before I could argue, and it wasn’t long before the door opened again — a man this time, older, steady-handed, with an expression I couldn’t read.
Vera introduced him as Alaric on her way back in behind him, and the moment he crossed the threshold, I understood that whatever Vera had seen in my collar, it mattered more than she’d been willing to say.
“May I?” he asked, gesturing toward my throat.
I hesitated.
Every instinct in me wanted to refuse the same way I had with Vera, but there was something in the careful way he waited for my answer instead of just reaching for me that made me loosen my grip on the collar instead.
“Fine,” I said.
“But I don’t understand what you’re all so worked up about. It’s a birthmark. I’ve had it my whole life.”
Alaric leaned in, and for a long moment he didn’t say anything at all.
His silence stretched out until I felt my skin prickling under the weight of it, and I had to fight the urge to cover myself again just to escape the way he was looking at me — not like I was cursed, the way the Hellfang elders always had, but like I was something he’d been searching for without knowing it.
“This isn’t a random mark,” he finally said, straightening.
“There’s a bloodline — old, powerful, tied to this pack generations back. It went missing during a war years ago, the entire line, gone in one night, presumed dead. The mark that bloodline carries is almost identical to what’s on your neck.”
“Almost identical isn’t the same as the same.” I said it fast, defensive, because some old, exhausted part of me refused to let hope get anywhere near my chest again.
Hope was what had sent me into Darius’s study four days ago.
Hope was what had made me beg on a stone floor in front of a hundred people who used to call me Luna.
I wasn’t doing that again.
“Marks like this aren’t unique. Someone told me that once, back at Hellfang, right before they decided it made me a curse instead.”
“I understand why you’d think that.” Alaric’s voice was patient, but there was something underneath it, an edge of excitement he wasn’t quite managing to hide.
“But this isn’t a passing resemblance, Maeve. I’ve spent forty years studying our pack’s history. I know what I’m looking at. There’s one way to know for certain, though, and I—”
The door opened before he could finish.
I felt the shift in the room before I even turned my head — some instinct I didn’t have words for, every hair on my arms rising at once, like the air itself had changed the moment whoever this was crossed the threshold.
Alaric’s whole posture changed too, straightening fast, already turning toward the door with something urgent building on his face.
“Killian—” he started.
I didn’t get to hear the rest.