Minutes passed. The heavy, oppressive scent of bitter cold and crushed pine needles hung suspended in the damp cellar air, so thick it coated the back of Elyra’s throat. She kept her face pressed against her wet arms on the stone ledge of the pool, her breath held, waiting for the sound of boots on stone, for a blade, for a hand to reach down and yank her up by her wet hair.
Every muscle in her body had locked itself into stillness, as though staying motionless might somehow render her invisible.
Nothing happened.
Slowly, painfully, Elyra opened her eyes.
The dark archway at the top of the pool steps stood empty. The crushing weight that had filled the room only seconds ago had vanished, disappearing as fast and as silently as it had arrived. Her heart still hammered against her ribs, refusing to believe the danger had truly passed.
"Who..." she whispered, her voice barely a dry rasp against the wet stone.
She turned around fully, her hips splashing softly through the pink-tinted water. Squinting into the dim corridor, she found no one there... no shadow, no footprints on the damp flagstones, nothing but the quiet, rhythmic drip-drip-drip of the underground spring.
The silence pressed against her ears until it felt almost louder than a scream.
Elyra didn’t sit there to ponder it. A spike of survival instinct... the only thing she had left, kicked through her frozen brain. Whoever or whatever that presence had been, it wasn’t a hallucination.
And no matter how miserable her life was in this keep, no matter how much she had wished to die just moments ago, she wasn’t about to sit naked in a dark cellar and become some wandering rogue’s midnight snack.
"Get up," she muttered to herself, her teeth clicking together in a violent shiver. "Move."
She pushed herself out of the water, gasping as the freezing night air hit her wet skin. She didn’t bother drying off. Grabbing her torn tunic, she wrapped it loosely around her chest to cover her front, then half-crawled, half-limped out of the pool chamber.
Every step up the basement stairs felt like a butter knife dragging through her lower back, but she pushed through the pain, dragging her numb feet along the dark stone corridor until she reached her narrow wooden door. Her fingers, stiff with cold, fumbled twice with the latch before it finally gave way.
She fell into her alcove, shoved the door shut, and collapsed onto the straw.
She didn’t sleep. She simply lay on her side in the dark, shivering violently under the threadbare blanket, watching the pale moonlight slowly shift across the wall until the high cellar grate turned from black to a dull, foggy grey. Thoughts churned relentlessly through her mind... half of them about the strange presence in the cellar, the other half about the ache spreading through her spine like poison.
At three in the morning, the mechanical screech of her cheap alarm clock cut through the quiet room.
Elyra’s eyes snapped open instantly. Her head throbbed with a dull, feverish heat, and her back felt so stiff she imagined her spine had been replaced with rusty iron.
Three o’clock, she thought, staring at the cracked face of the clock on the floor.
She couldn’t afford to miss her schedule. If her chores weren’t completely finished before the head cook and the estate guards woke up at seven, her father would find an excuse to strip away her only lifeline. He would lock the gates. He would cut off her enrollment. The mere thought sent a fresh jolt of adrenaline through her exhausted limbs.
Going to school was the only thing keeping her sane. Outside the Veyrith estate walls, in the lower town, nobody knew she was the wolfless disgrace of the Alpha line. To the rest of the world, she was just another quiet girl trying to pass her exams, an anonymity she guarded like a treasure.
"Up," she grumbled out loud, her voice sounding like sand scraping together. "Just... get up."
It took her ten full minutes just to swing her legs over the edge of the wooden frame. The silver cuts on her back had stopped bleeding, but they remained hot, raw, and pulled tightly against her skin whenever she moved her arms.
She pulled on a clean, oversized cotton shirt... the softest thing she owned, and wrapped a thick, dark woolen coat around her shoulders to hide the shape of her back. Even that small effort left her breathless, her hands trembling against the fabric.
For four hours, she worked in the dark, quiet halls of the main keep.
She hauled three heavy iron buckets of ash out of the main hearth. She scrubbed the soot off the kitchen walls. She chopped two crates of firewood for the morning bakery ovens and carried six earthenware pitchers of fresh water up to the second-floor laundry room, her arms trembling so hard by the last trip that she nearly dropped the iron handles.
Each task blurred into the next, a mechanical rhythm she performed through sheer willpower rather than strength.
By five minutes to seven, she set down her rag in the scullery, her body completely drenched in cold sweat.
Done.
She didn’t wait around for Mistress Vane or her mother to wake up. Grabbing her worn leather satchel from her alcove, she slipped out through the narrow iron side gate of the estate and stepped onto the gravel driveway leading down to the main road, the cold morning air biting at her cheeks.
Standing right beside the iron gate posts, leaning against the hood of a sleek black sedan, was Kira.
Kira wasn’t pack royalty, but her father served as one of the pack’s senior councilors, which meant she was one of the few people on the estate who had a car, and enough freedom to stand around waiting for Elyra without getting yelled at by the guards. She had a warmth to her that the estate rarely allowed, a brightness that seemed almost out of place against the grey stone walls.
The second Kira saw Elyra walk out of the fog, her face lit up.
"Bestie!" Kira shrieked, bouncing off the hood of the car and sprinting forward with her arms wide open. "You’re actually on time! I thought I was going to have to wait another twenty..."
Kira threw her arms around Elyra’s shoulders and squeezed tight.
"AGH!"
The scream ripped out of Elyra’s throat before she could swallow it down. Her knees buckled violently, and she would have hit the gravel if Kira hadn’t caught her wrists in pure shock.
"Whoa! Hey!" Kira gasped, dropping her arms instantly and staring at Elyra with wide, frantic eyes. "What? What happened? Did I hit your arm?"
Elyra clutched her satchel against her ribs, her breath coming in fast, shallow gasps as the sharp, burning white pain slowly receded from her spine. She squeezed her eyes shut, trying to force a normal smile onto her pale lips.
"Nothing," Elyra choked out, taking a small step back. "I’m fine. Just... pulled a muscle hauling firewood this morning. I’m fine."
Kira’s dark eyes narrowed into a sharp, lethal glare. She crossed her arms over her leather jacket, her wolf’s protective nature flaring just beneath the surface.
"Don’t tell me ’nothing,’" Kira said, her voice dropping into a low, deadly pitch. "You’re pale as a ghost, your lips are literally bleeding, and you just shrieked like I stabbed you. Get in the car."
"Kira, we’re going to be late for the lecture..."
"I said get in the damn car, Elyra."
Kira grabbed Elyra’s wrist... gently this time, and pulled her toward the back door of the sedan. She opened it, shoved Elyra onto the leather seat, and climbed in right behind her.
"Drive, Thomas," Kira barked toward the driver in the front seat. "Take the long scenic route down the mountain road. Don’t pull into campus until I tell you."
"Yes, Miss Kira," the older driver replied, smoothly shifting the car into gear and pulling away from the high iron gates of the Veyrith estate.
The moment the car cleared the main gates, Kira turned on her seat and looked at Elyra.
"Shirt off," Kira demanded.
"Kira, come on..."
"Elyra Veyrith, take the coat and shirt down right now or I swear to God I will rip them off you myself." Kira’s voice trembled, not with anger at Elyra, but with a terrifying, raw dread.
Elyra swallowed hard. She looked out the tinted window for a second, watching the stone walls of her father’s estate disappear into the morning mist. She sighed, a quiet, defeated sound.
There was no point lying to Kira. Kira was the only person in this entire territory who didn’t look at her like a piece of dirt, the only one who had ever seen past the label the pack had given her.
Slowly, carefully, Elyra unzipped her thick coat and let it drop to her elbows. Then she took the collar of her soft cotton shirt and pulled it forward, slipping her arms out of the sleeves and letting the fabric fall to her waist.
Kira drew in a sharp, ragged breath.
"Oh, Goddess..." Kira whispered, her hand jumping to cover her mouth.
The back of the leather seat filled with a dead, suffocating silence.
The wounds weren’t just red scratches. Thirty long, angry, jagged lines crossed Elyra’s pale skin from her shoulders down to her hips. The silver had left broad, blackened edges along the tears in her flesh, hot and angry, oozing faint yellow serum and fresh blood where Kira’s hug had pulled the raw skin apart.
Even in the dim light filtering through the tinted windows, the damage looked catastrophic, the kind of wound that belonged on a battlefield, not on the back of a seventeen-year-old girl.
"Who did this to you?" Kira’s voice cracked, turning into a low, guttural growl that made the air in the car vibrate. Her knuckles went completely white where she clutched her knee. "Who the hell did this to you, Elyra? Was it the guards? Was it your mother?"
Elyra didn’t answer. She just sat there with her head bowed, staring down at her own pale hands folded in her lap, the silence stretching heavier with every passing second.
"Answer me!" Kira shouted, tears springing to her eyes. "They whipped you! They used silver on you! You don’t have a wolf, Elyra! Silver on a human body is poison! They could have killed you!"
"It doesn’t matter, Kira," Elyra said quietly, her voice flat and hollow.
"It does matter!" Kira snapped, slamming her fist against the car door. "They are heartless monsters! Your father is the Alpha of this whole damn territory, your mother is the Luna, and they treat you worse than a feral rogue! I’m going to my father. I’m going to tell the council..."
"No!" Elyra snapped her head up, her dark eyes flashing with a sudden, desperate panic. "Don’t you dare, Kira! You know what will happen if your father brings this up in council. My father will just say I was being disciplined for insubordination. He’ll restrict me to the keep. He’ll take away my school pass."
Elyra reached out, catching Kira’s wrist with her small, cold hand.
"Please," Elyra whispered, her voice cracking. "It’s okay. At least... at least I should just be happy that they still allow me to go to school. If I lose this, I have nothing."
Kira stared at her best friend, her jaw tight, tears spilling down her cheeks.
"And that’s something to be happy about?" Kira choked out, her voice dripping with pure, heartbreaking bitterness. "Being allowed to leave your cell for five hours a day to sit in a lecture hall? That’s what you’re thankful for?"
To Elyra, it was. Being allowed to step onto that university campus, to sit among normal students who didn’t know her family, who didn’t know she was a wolfless omega, was the greatest, most precious luxury she had ever been granted. It was the only place where she felt like a human being instead of a stain on a noble bloodline.
Sometimes, sitting in the back row of a crowded lecture hall, she allowed herself to imagine a different life entirely... one where nobody whispered the word "omega" behind her back, where her name carried no shame.
Kira wiped her face with the back of her sleeve, letting out a long, ragged breath. She reached down into the storage compartment beneath the front seat and pulled out a black plastic first-aid kit.
"Hold still," Kira muttered, her hands shaking slightly as she popped the lid open and pulled out a bottle of antiseptic spray and a roll of clean linen bandages. "This is going to sting like a bitch."
"I’m used to it," Elyra said softly, and the quiet resignation in her voice cut deeper than the wounds themselves.
Kira sprayed the cool, clear liquid over the open cuts. Elyra flinched, her teeth digging into her split lower lip, but she didn’t scream. She simply held on to the edge of the leather seat while Kira gently wiped away the dried blood and laid clean, soft gauze across her back, wrapping the linen securely around her ribs to hold it in place.
Kira’s hands, usually so quick and playful, moved with unusual tenderness, as though she feared causing even a fraction more pain.
As Kira pinned the bandage tight, her eyes fell on Elyra’s hands - the short, unvarnished nails, the faint scars along her knuckles from years of scrubbing stone, the red, raw skin around her thumbs from cold well water.
Kira gently held Elyra’s fingers in her own, looking down at them with a heavy, aching heart.
"Look at your fingers, babe," Kira whispered softly, her thumb brushing over a calloused knuckle. "Nobody would ever believe you’re of the royal bloodline. Nobody."
Elyra offered a small, faint smile - a tiny, tired curve of her lips that didn’t reach her eyes.
"It doesn’t matter," Elyra said, pulling her soft cotton shirt back over her shoulders and zipping her heavy coat up to her chin. "Nobody knows anyway. To the rest of the world, I’m just a wolfless nobody. It’s safer that way."
Kira watched her best friend adjust her coat, her own heart bleeding in silent, helpless sorrow. She wanted to rage. She wanted to scream at Lord Veyrith, to burn the main keep down to the ground. But she knew Elyra was right.
If Kira pushed, if her father got involved, Lord Veyrith would simply crush Elyra even harder just to prove he owned her. There was nothing Kira could do to save her, and that helplessness gnawed at her chest like a living thing.
Kira leaned back against her seat, staring out the window as the car finally turned onto the wide, paved avenue leading up to the grand stone arches of the university.
She stayed quiet for a long moment, watching the groups of students walking along the tree-lined paths, their laughter and easy chatter drifting faintly through the glass. Then she turned her head back to Elyra, her expression turning unnaturally grave.
"Did you hear the news from the main keep this morning?" Kira asked, her voice dropping into a hushed, cautious whisper.
Elyra looked over, adjusting her satchel strap over her sore shoulder. "What news?"
Kira leaned in closer, her earlier anger giving way to something darker and more urgent. "Word came in through the council channels right before I left my house. The Lycan King is coming to our territory in a week’s time."