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“Oh, yeah? Augustus locked you up, and I bet you didn’t even try getting out. Why would you? You’re not a captive, you’re just a princess at the top of an ivory tower, living the way she’s always lived!” I glance at the side table and let out a bitter laugh. “Eating off a literal fucking silver platter, co-opting the words of a rebellion that has nothing to do with you—not really. All that shit about Omega liberation—it’s just a fun project to you. A little role-playing. We might share biology, but our lives are nothing alike.”

As I talk, I go back to tying the bedsheets together, ripping angrily at the knots to make sure they’re tight. I’m not wasting any more time standing here, talking to her. For all I know, she could have tripped some silent alarm to the guards.

They could be on their way here right now.

A long silence passes, during which I finish tying the sheets, desperately trying not to cry. All this time, I’d thought Aurora was brave. That she was unlike anyone else I’d ever met. Turns out, she was just a princess with a hobby.

“Mylah, you’re not seriously going to climb down from here on knotted sheets, are you?” Aurora takes a step toward me, and I take a step back, shaking my head at her.

When I lift it and meet her eyes, the look in them must be intense enough that she realizes I’m not going to let her stop me. If Aurora tries to keep me from getting out of this damn castle right now, I’m going to end up doing something we’ll both regret.

Face paling, Aurora takes a step back from me and sucks in a tiny breath through her teeth. Good. I hope she’s afraid of me.

Maybe then I can get other people to be afraid of me, too. Maybe I can get everyone to leave me alone as I get the hell out of this damn territory. Go somewhere omegas actually have the choice to make a life for themselves.

“Mylah, please, listen—this is insanity—”

But I don’t listen. I’m done listening to her.

So, instead of slowing down at all, I step out onto the balcony, hair and flyaways whipping around my head in the snow and wind. The cold batters into me, making my cheeks and fingers instantly numb.

It doesn’t matter. I close my mind off to the discomfort and focus on what I’m doing. The sleeting snow almost seems to help with the knot, soaking the fabric and freezing it to the metal railing of her balcony.

Then, I’m swinging my leg over the side as Aurora runs out, screaming something at me through the wind and whipping snow that I can’t quite hear.

I slide down my makeshift rope, gasping for air as I’m swung about, at one point slamming into the side of the castle hard enough that the pain ripples up and through my side. For a heart-stopping moment, I think I might fall to the ground, break all my bones, be scooped up and brought back into the castle to spend the rest of my life in pain.

But then my feet are landing on the frozen earth, and I’m running, leaving the rope whipping in the wind, surely just seconds from being snatched and lost in the woods. Good. The less evidence left behind, the better.

Just as I think it, I also think that Aurora is probably already on the way to her brother.

I run harder, faster, praying all this wet, sleeting snow will cover my scent at least somewhat. I run toward the nearest pack border, since I know my scent will lessen to them the moment I’m outside of it.

I’ve spent too long here. Too long with Augustus. I’m probably already starting to smell like the Northern Kault pack, the way a fast-food worker starts to smell like grease.

But spend enough time away from it, and the smell goes away. I’ll shed skin cells along my voyage. Once I get out of this terrain, it won’t be quite so brutal. The closer I get to the Oceanic packs, the warmer it will become. I might even have to start worrying about a sunburn.

As I push through the woods, it’s like the world wants to keep me from going. Every tree branch an every brush reaches out for me, scraggly bark snagging on my pants. I hug my arms around myself, put my head down, and just keep going. Even when a random root trips me, I pick myself up and keep going. Even when my teeth start to hurt from the cold, and it feels like it’s wormed its way right to the center of me—I keep going.

It feels like hours go past, but I have no way of knowing the time. No phone—I’ve never had one—and no watch. It was left behind on my nightstand the night I was kidnapped. So, I just continue forward with nothing but the whirring of the wind, the ancient creaking of the evergreens, and the distance, haunting sound of an owl.

Then, all at once, I stumble out over the pack lines. I know it in my blood the way you know when you wake up in a strange bed, or when you’re sleeping on the wrong side. Instinctive. Something in the air.

I thought it would feel, a little, like coming home. But instead, it feels like leaving home behind. Resentment piles up inside me for yet another thing—making me miss the Northern territory when I was never supposed to be there in the first place.

Up here, it feels even colder. In the distance, mountains reach for the sky and block out half of the moon. A frigid lake, with a thick crust of ice, shines ethereally just beneath the slopes.

It’s beautiful—but I can’t spend much time here. It’s too cold, and I’m not even close to being dressed correctly. I’ll need to keep running through the night, around the outskirts of the Kault packs, until I reach the river that will lead me all the way down to the ocean.

And there, I should find a new pack. People to take me in. Shifters who won’t judge me for being an omega, for being the way I was born.

My chest starts to fill with hope.

Adrenaline floods my body, warming me all the way down to my boots.

And it’s the very moment that I allow the thought to enter my head that a black SUV speeds around the corner, slides in the snow, and opens to reveal several masked shifters.

They grab me like it’s nothing, their hands pinning my arms and legs, covering my mouth. Within seconds of my optimistic thoughts, I’m stuffed into the back of the SUV and traveling in the opposite direction from what I’d planned. It’s Gavyn’s men—I can smell him all over them. The shapely scent of a burgeoning pack.