I fled.
And the forest took me in as its refugee. I would've shifted to my wolf in order to ease my escape but I was well aware of my lack of clothes to change into once I've gotten far.
And I was too busy running to take off the one I was wearing.
Thankfully, I was well trained in my human form and I was able to use past the boarders and into the no man's land. I didn't stop though, I knew it was only a matter of time before they realise I was gone.
I needed to get far enough that they wouldn't find me.
My lungs burned with exhaustion and I collapsed to the floor. I pressed my forehead to the earth and let myself feel it.
All of it. Everything I had been holding at the edge of myself since the stone cracked. The ceremony. Aric's face going blank and careful. The rejection, declared clearly and correctly in front of everyone. Petra's arms around me in that dark cell and the fear in her eyes that she was trying so hard to hide. My gown in the dirt. Everything Iooked forward to that no longer existed.
I broke down into tears.
I don't know how long it lasted but it was enough to hollow me out. Long enough for the cold to settle into my bones properly, for the exhaustion to become something heavier than I could keep fighting.
My eyes closed against my will.
The last thing I registered before everything went dark was a sound somewhere in the trees ahead.
Something large. Moving closer.
And then nothing.
———-
Alpha Darius Night
—-Three miles east of the Silvermoon border, deep inside Nightbane territory.—
He ran because it was the only thing that worked anymore.
Darius Nightbane had tried other things over the years. Work helped some. Sleep rarely came. The running was the one thing that quieted the wolf enough to make the hours manageable, so he ran most nights, long circuits through the dark of his own territory, until the restless energy burned down to something he could sit.
Tonight was the same.
He breezed through the familiar forest, effortlessly, his wolf calm but hyper alert of their surroundings . The trees thinned near the eastern boundary and he usually turned back here.
But tonight, he did not.
He kept going, his usually quiet wolf perked off by the scent it picked on.
The scent reached him again, stronger this time, carried on a gust from somewhere ahead, somewhere past the boundary line, and something about it stopped every rational process in his mind and replaced it with a single wordless pull. He stood at the edge of his territory and breathed it in and couldn't have explained to anyone alive what it did to him.
His feet moved before he decided to move them and he crossed the boundary.
The scent led him through a stretch of unfamiliar undergrowth, closer to the ground now, recent. Someone had come through here in a hurry. Broken branches at the wrong angles, a heel print in the soft earth near the tree roots, a small scrap of pale fabric caught on a low branch that he registered without stopping.
Then he saw her.
She lay curled on her side at the base of a large oak, dark hair spilling loose across her face and half-hiding her features. Her bare feet were cut and raw from running on rough ground, toes curled tight against the dirt.
Darius stopped.
His first thought was cold and simple. Rogue. A rogue wolf near his territory meant one thing and had always meant one thing and he had never lost sleep over it. He shifted his weight, ready to end this quickly and move on.
Then the wind moved again.
The scent hit him full and unfiltered this time, and the wolf inside him didn't just stir. It rose up like something that had been submerged for a very long time and had finally found the surface, and the sound it made in his chest wasn't a growl.
It was one word.
One single word that he hadn't heard from his own wolf since the night everything in his life had gone permanently wrong. A word he had decided, in the years following that night, he would never hear again.
"Mate"
He went absolutely still.
It was not possible. It shouldn't be possible.
It was wrong. It had to be wrong.
He crouched down.
Up close, the signs of what she'd been through were harder to ignore. The red marks on her wrists. The tear tracks drying on her face. The dress she had on looked too expensive to belong to a rogue on the run. This wasn't someone who had gotten lost. This was someone who had been running from something specific.
He should leave her.
That was the right decision. The rational one. Whatever this was, whoever she was, it was not his problem and he had enough of his own.
He stayed crouched over her for a long moment.
He wanted to leave her right there. It was only a matter of time before other rogues or worst still, a beast, found her and feast on her.
He should leave her there .
But he couldn't
He exhaled slowly through his nose. Then, against every calculation he had built his survival on, he slid one arm beneath her shoulders and one beneath her knees and lifted her from the ground. She was lighter than she looked and somehow, that bothered him in a way he wouldn't dare explore. He adjusted her weight against his chest and she made a small sound but didn't wake, her head falling against his chest like she had run out of the energy it took to hold it up.
He stood, contemplating on dropping her and leaving for real. But one look at how relaxed she seemed in his arm had his jaw tightening
Then he turned and walked back toward his territory, back toward his compound, back toward the life he had constructed with considerable care around the principle of not letting anything in that he couldn't control.
He didn't look at the logic of what he was doing. He already knew it wouldn't hold up.