Then I hear the unmistakable click of a chamber reloading.
My spine goes ice-cold. We’re seconds from dying.
I watch Froggy and Buff take the leap. Stones and twigs bounce off me as they land, and then I don’t think. I just run. The world narrows, like everything is in a minuscule bubble, and I start to think that there’s a possibility that maybe—just maybe—we’ll survive long enough to regret every catastrophic decision that landed us here.
Of all the packs we could’ve pissed off, it had to be the biggest bastard pack on the entire fucking continent. The only one psychotic enough to run with two alphas.
Talon and Thorne Eustace. Twin nightmares in matching skin. They were unhinged, unstoppable, and completelyderanged. And backed by an army big enough to level states if they felt like it.
We didn’t just screw up; we picked a fight with the one pack no one survives.
My stomach twists when I think about the size of their pack.
Here’s the pathetic truth I’ll never say to Buff or Froggy, not even with silver melting straight into my veins and prying the truth out of me.
I miss belonging.
Not the rules.
Not the chores.
Not the suffocating “Yes, Alpha” obedience.
Not even the safety—not really.
I miss the feeling of it.
The quiet hum under your skin when you know you’re part of something bigger than your body. The certainty that someone will be there when you fall. That you matter to more than two wolves who are held together by trauma and stubbornness.
I miss the hum of a den at night, the ten, twenty, fifty heartbeats settling at once. I miss the warmth that comes with it. I miss the smell of home. The scent of the pine sap on the alpha’s coat, smoked meat from the kitchens, and the damp earth after a storm. I miss waking up already knowing who had my back without needing to ask or earn it.
I miss being claimed.
We lost that before we even understood what it was.
The virus not only took our mothers, it took our very basic need to be part of our birthright.
They cast us out before we got the chance to learn what ‘home’ meant, but instinct took care of that. If only to torture us.
A memory flashes, bright and sharp. Buff at five years old, clutching his mother’s necklace hanging around his neck—the only thing he had to remember her by—and shaking so hardhis teeth chattered while I taught him how to skin a rabbit. Froggy silently crying at night because he couldn’t remember his mother’s laugh anymore. Me staring at the moonless night, trying to pretend I wasn’t terrified too.
We should’ve died many times, but we didn’t. And what we have now… it’s not a pack, but it’s something.
Buff, whose heart is bigger than his brain and whose loyalty is stitched into his bones. Froggy, anxious as hell but brave in ways he’ll never see. And me, who somehow became the one they follow, whether they should or not.
We’re feral and stupid.
We’re bonded in ways real packs would never understand.
But still… it isn’t the same. It’s not the real thing.
Some nights, when the adrenaline fades and the forest goes quiet, the ache hits me so hard I could split open from it.
The wanting.
The longing.
The stupid hope that maybe, just maybe, there’s a pack out there we won’t have to beg from, or steal from, or run from.
