I swallow hard, familiar grief rising again. I stay silent, afraid that speaking will break whatever fragile opportunity this place has granted me. This isn’t another fractured dream or incomplete message left behind for me to stumble through alone. This is deliberate. My mother’s steady hand personallyguiding me through the truth of the past that she’s kept carefully locked away. Waiting until I was mated to finally give me the information I’ve been desperate for.
“With this being your eighteenth,” she continues, the softness fading as the weight in her voice returns, “we knew your shift could happen at any moment. You’d been showing signs for months already. You could feel your wolf stirring, could feel her emotions bleeding into your own.” She continues to watch the other me with a look in her eyes that holds too much meaning at once. “Your wolf, she felt the pull to Rennick immediately. It scared you, but you, my dear daughter, who’s always preferred the act of suffering in silence, never admitted it. But for Rennick, like I told you already, I suspect he knew you were his fate much longer than he was even aware of.”
The truth in Mom’s words reflects back at me so clearly it’s impossible to deny. The younger me drifts toward him without thinking, pulled by something she doesn’t yet understand. When awareness of what she’s done catches up, she retreats a step, heat in her cheeks, eyes flicking up to him to be sure he hadn’t noticed. My young mate isn’t any less obvious once you know where to look. He angles his body slightly between her and everyone else, acting as her shield. And she—I—miss it entirely.
“The two of you were always drawn to each other,” Mom says, and the words carry a quiet ache, like holding in the truth all this time has finally caught up to her. “But in the months leading up to your birthday, it wasn’t subtle anymore. You were inseparable. You were already feeling the pull of a mate bond, both of you, long before it should have been possible. I could maybe wrap my head around Rennick sensing it—he was older, his wolf strong enough to allow him to shift a year early. But you…” She trails off. “The fact you could sense that connection before your first shift…that’s incredibly rare, Noa.It felt like a sign. Like the Goddess herself had touched your bond.”
I never met anyone who believes in the Goddess the way my mother did. To her, the Goddess was neither merciful nor cruel. She was the maker, older than the moon she reigns from. The ancient hand that shaped us shifters and weaves the gift of mate bonds into us when she deems us worthy.
Her voice shifts, the warmth fading as something more serious takes its place. “It wasn’t only your wolf that was waking. Your magic was rising too. Faster and stronger than your wolf.” A ghost of a smile touches her lips. “That didn’t surprise me so much. You are my daughter, after all.”
My eyes prickle.
She continues. “I thought you would end up a weaver like me, but then knew you were a special kind of oracle when you started hearing the voices. Hearing thoughts people would never speak aloud. From there, you started seeing into minds, learning things you were never meant to know.” Her mouth tightens.
Despite the familiarity of the charmer gifts she’s describing, the way her tone shifts into something dark as she speaks about them has dread settling deep.
“I tried to warn you of the dangers that come when you let your mind slip into places it shouldn’t. I tried to teach you control, but your magic was too green, too unpredictable to contain.”
It’s not the words, but how she says them, heavy with regret, edged with pity, that makes the truth slip into place. I can see it now. What happened back then. The first fissure—the catalyst—that led to everything else breaking.
“I got into someone’s head, saw something I shouldn’t have,” I whisper, my voice sounding far away even to me. “Didn’t I?”
Her composure cracks, grief crossing her face in a way I rarely ever saw in all my years at her side.
“Yes.”
And the world distorts again with her admission.
Only this time, I’m not moving, the world around me is swiped away in one violent rush, like the changing of a slide during a presentation. Everything smears sideways, light bends out of shape as the old scene dissolves and a new one drags itself into focus around me.
When it finally settles, we’re deep into the night, the moon at its highest point. Cold bites at my skin, but it’s the realization of where we are that sends shivers racing up my spine.
I should have known.
I should have expected this.
Thefuckinghelicopter landing pad.
Whatever happened in the past, I’ve known with certainty all of it ties back to this place. Have since the nightmare Rennick and I shared.
My gaze sweeps the open space, searching every dark corner, searching for the menacing wolf made of smoke and shadow that was here last time. But there’s no sign of him. Of any other presence. It’s just me and Mom.
Her voice pulls me back from my anxious searching.
“When your magic reached out and brushed against his mind, it was an accident,” she tells me, that somber lilt back in her voice. “That’s the hardest part to grapple with—that this innocent mistake became the catalyst for the rest. It was the fracture in the glass that kept spreading until it overwrote and changed the very shape of all our fates.”
She turns her head toward me, and as soon as my eyes meet hers, magic hums through the air. The hair on my arms rises as my vision is stripped away entirely. Images bleed in, some blurry and flashing too fast to register what I’m seeing. Otherslinger long enough to bruise. The perspective is all wrong—someone else’s originally—but it’s mine now. It’s a rapid-fire slideshow of thoughts and memories that don’t belong to me flickering through my mind as if they do.
I see a nondescript, windowless van come to a stop beside a line of trees. The back door slides open, and five women are pulled out. Bound and gagged. Filthy from putting up one hell of a fight. Men whose faces I can’t make out force them into a line, spacing them evenly. Too far apart to conspire. Too far to offer comfort or touch. Tears have carved pale tracks through the dirt and blood on their cheeks. Their terrified eyes move constantly, searching the shadows for help or an escape route. They find neither.
But the building they’re marched toward? It’s one I recognize all too well.
The images fade and once my vision is clear I turn my head, taking in the silent, too dark storage building at the edge of the clearing.
“They were kept in the room in the back,” Mom says quietly, as if not to disrupt the ghost of pain that this place holds so profoundly. “But you already found that, didn’t you?”
I did. The painfully empty, cold room made of layered concrete, I now know was poured thick enough so it would swallow sound and keep it from ever reaching the ears of anyone passing by. They weren’t completely wrong when they told us it was used for storage, but now I’m wondering if that had been another carefully worded lie. They weren’t keeping winter equipment in that little room. They were keeping people. Omegas. I know this with a certainty that doesn’t need scent or verbal confirmation. Some truths lodge too deep to mistake—I can recognize traumatized omegas anywhere.
