Chapter 1

The forest was a black ocean of trees, their twisted trunks rising like broken bones into a sky smothered by storm clouds. The wind howled through the pines, carrying with it the scent of rot, iron, and old magic. A girl barely more than skin and bone ran barefoot over the needle-strewn earth, thorns biting into her skin, branches clawing at her arms like the ghosts of the dead.

She didn’t scream. Her voice had been taken away long ago along with everything else.

Her breath wheezing, legs trembling, her skin once radiant and rich, was now dulled from months without sunlight, was marked with fresh bruises and old scars.

Her dress hung off her like rags. She wrapped her torn shirt around her body to cover everything which seemed impossible with the bare minimum fabric left off her shirt. Her hair was a tangled snarl, crusted with dried blood and mud. Every step she took sent lightning bolts of pain through her bones. Hunger gnawed at her stomach, but fear drove her faster. She looked like she had survived a war.

The forest whispered threats in every rustle, at every crack of a branch. For eighteen years, the pack had been her home. She had laughed, played, loved and dreamed. She had waited her whole life for her eighteenth birthday, the day when every Lycan shifts into their wolf for the first time, the moment when they feel their wolf rise inside them, primal and powerful.

    But her wolf never came.

And everything has changed from then. Her family turned their backs on her. They called her a defect, a shame, a burden.

The pack which was once her world became her prison. Venu, her mate chosen by the moon goddess, was supposed to protect and cherish her, but rejected her not with words, but with his actions. He paraded around with other females before her, touched them, mated with them, breaking her soul little by little; bound by a bond as he refused to break. He wanted her to suffer. And she did.

She has seen many Lycans without wolves in her own pack being treated better than her. Though her pack makes wolfless Lycans an omega, they had some basic place and respect there. But she had none. She was tortured for not having a wolf. Her family said pain brings out the wolf. She was naive to believe them.

But that’s not the case. There’s something else which she has no idea of. She needs answers. To get what she wants, she has to stay alive and strong. Staying in the pack won’t do any good to her. She has to escape.

She had no wolf, no power, no strength, but she had enough rage to push her.

Her bare feet pounded the forest floor. Each step was agony. Her vision swam. Her lungs burned. She didn’t know where she was going. She didn’t care. Memories clawed at her mind; her mother's eyes as she turned away, her mate’s laugh echoing in her ears, the jeering faces of the pack who once called her sister. Each memory struck her like a whip, driving her forward.

She saw it through the fog, the edge of her pack’s territory. She stepped toward it, her body trembling, one foot almost over the line when a voice broke through the night.

"Anaya, stop!"

Her heart stopped. She turned, breath caught in her throat. There he was, her mate. Standing just yards away, chest heaving, eyes locked on her like a predator cornering prey. He stared at her not with hate this time. Before, those eyes had looked at her with cold hatred, disgust. But now they held fear.

He took a step toward her. Anaya was standing right on the precipice. Her toes were barely touching the border of safety.

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