She’s alive.
We didn’t fail.
The storm stops mattering. The cold stops mattering. The mountain’s illusions stop mattering.
There’s only Rowan’s scent. One that I can track. No magic can break that connection.
The fates made sure of that.
“I’m coming for you, mate.”
Chapter 13
ROWAN
Freedom tastes like frost and blood. The moment the cold night air kisses my face, Wolf lunges forward from inside me—impatient, wild, and desperate to run. I don’t fight her. Ican’t. The instincts I’ve been without for weeks are shattering like glass.
Shift,she growls.Now.
The first crack of bone steals my breath.
I forgot what this was like…
It punches through me like lightning, splintering wood—sharp, burning, and unforgiving. My spine arches violently, bowing under the force as vertebrae grind and realign in jagged, merciless bursts. Each pop echoes up my back like gunfire.
A raw scream tears from my throat.
This is worse than my first shift and a far cry from the ease I’d begun to settle into before Malrik took Wolf from me. This is messy and violent. A body remembering how to become something it almost forgot.
Pain lashes down my arms as the bones inside themshudder, elongate, and twist into new angles. My fingers curl, spasm, then fuse into paws—tendons snapping like taut wire before knitting themselves back together in molten waves.
My ribs cinch tight around my lungs, squeezing until I can’t breathe. Then they expand—too fast and wide—like someone inside me is remodeling. Each expansion sends a burst of heat flooding through my chest, a furnace igniting beneath my sternum.
Muscle tears away from bone.
Then reforms thicker. Denser.
Moreme.
A second crack ruptures down my legs. I collapse to my knees, palms—no, paws—digging into the snow as my thighs tremble and shorten, joints rearranging with brutal efficiency. Every nerve ending screams. Every breath is a gasp of fire and winter.
The world blurs. Colors smear at the edges of my vision. My human skin crawls like it’s trying to rip itself away from me, and I think it does. Bright silver and white fur bursts through my pores, racing across my body in a cascade of shimmering heat.
My jaw breaks next.
It splinters and reforms in a blink, a muzzle lengthening as teeth sharpen into fangs that I canfeel, heavy and lethal in my mouth.
But underneath the pain—beneath the agony, the panic, the raw violent reprogramming of my own bones—there’s something else.
Relief.
Wolf surges up from within me, fierce and triumphant,howling into the fractures of my mind until we knit together again.
We’re back,she breathes, a mix of pride and hunger and home.
My vision snaps into crystalline clarity.
The snow around us glows under the moon. The cold no longer bites. Every scent splits into a thousand threads. Every sound whispers like a pulse in the air.
