Chapter 3
I packed my life into one suitcase.
Everything Kael had given me — the clothes, the jewelry, the books he'd said made me "more refined" — I left behind.
I kept only what was mine before him. Which, after three years of erasure, wasn't much.
My leather jacket from when I was nineteen. A pair of combat boots. A silver chain my mother wore before she died.
Nyx purred inside me for the first time in years. *"It feels like waking up."*
I slid the ring off my finger and set it on the kitchen counter.
No note. No explanation. He didn't deserve one.
At 2 a.m., a black SUV pulled up outside the apartment complex. No markings. Tinted windows so dark they reflected the streetlights like mirrors.
The driver stepped out — tall, broad, wearing the unmistakable crest of the Blackwood Pack on his chest.
A silver crescent moon over crossed swords.
He opened my door and bowed his head. "Welcome back, Princess."
Princess.
A title I'd shed like dead skin when I was sixteen. When my father sent me away to protect me from the rival packs that wanted our bloodline extinguished.
*"Hide what you are,"* my father had said. *"Suppress your wolf. Live as an ordinary she-wolf until it's safe."*
So I did. For years.
And when I met Kael, I thought I'd found something worth staying hidden for.
I was wrong.
I climbed into the SUV without looking back at the apartment. The building that had been my cage for three years.
As we drove toward the private airstrip, I let my walls down — just slightly — and felt Nyx stretch inside me like a beast uncurling from a long sleep.
My wolf wasn't the gentle, average thing Kael believed her to be.
Nyx was a Shadow Wolf. Black as a moonless night, twice the size of any Alpha's wolf, and born with power so ancient it scared even my father.
One in five hundred years. That's what the elders said. A wolf born not of moonlight, but of shadow itself.
And I had kept her locked away, small and obedient, because Kael said an Alpha's mate should be soft.
*"Never again,"* Nyx growled, and her voice no longer sounded fragile.
The jet was sleek, unmarked, and waiting on the tarmac with its engines already humming.
I boarded alone.
As the plane lifted off and the city below shrank to scattered lights, I placed my hand on my stomach.
"It's just us now," I whispered to the twins I carried. "Mommy's going to be who she really is. And no one will ever make us small again."
The plane turned north.
Toward the Blackwood territory.
Toward the most powerful pack on the continent.
Toward home.
And toward the father who had mourned me as dead for three years — because that's what I told Kael's pack I was.
An orphan. A nobody. A simple she-wolf with no family and no past.
*Alpha Kael,* I thought as the clouds swallowed the world below, *you never once asked why a lone she-wolf with no pack had a wolf strong enough to make you chase her for months.*
*You should have.*
---
Everything Kael had given me — the clothes, the jewelry, the books he'd said made me "more refined" — I left behind.
I kept only what was mine before him. Which, after three years of erasure, wasn't much.
My leather jacket from when I was nineteen. A pair of combat boots. A silver chain my mother wore before she died.
Nyx purred inside me for the first time in years. *"It feels like waking up."*
I slid the ring off my finger and set it on the kitchen counter.
No note. No explanation. He didn't deserve one.
At 2 a.m., a black SUV pulled up outside the apartment complex. No markings. Tinted windows so dark they reflected the streetlights like mirrors.
The driver stepped out — tall, broad, wearing the unmistakable crest of the Blackwood Pack on his chest.
A silver crescent moon over crossed swords.
He opened my door and bowed his head. "Welcome back, Princess."
Princess.
A title I'd shed like dead skin when I was sixteen. When my father sent me away to protect me from the rival packs that wanted our bloodline extinguished.
*"Hide what you are,"* my father had said. *"Suppress your wolf. Live as an ordinary she-wolf until it's safe."*
So I did. For years.
And when I met Kael, I thought I'd found something worth staying hidden for.
I was wrong.
I climbed into the SUV without looking back at the apartment. The building that had been my cage for three years.
As we drove toward the private airstrip, I let my walls down — just slightly — and felt Nyx stretch inside me like a beast uncurling from a long sleep.
My wolf wasn't the gentle, average thing Kael believed her to be.
Nyx was a Shadow Wolf. Black as a moonless night, twice the size of any Alpha's wolf, and born with power so ancient it scared even my father.
One in five hundred years. That's what the elders said. A wolf born not of moonlight, but of shadow itself.
And I had kept her locked away, small and obedient, because Kael said an Alpha's mate should be soft.
*"Never again,"* Nyx growled, and her voice no longer sounded fragile.
The jet was sleek, unmarked, and waiting on the tarmac with its engines already humming.
I boarded alone.
As the plane lifted off and the city below shrank to scattered lights, I placed my hand on my stomach.
"It's just us now," I whispered to the twins I carried. "Mommy's going to be who she really is. And no one will ever make us small again."
The plane turned north.
Toward the Blackwood territory.
Toward the most powerful pack on the continent.
Toward home.
And toward the father who had mourned me as dead for three years — because that's what I told Kael's pack I was.
An orphan. A nobody. A simple she-wolf with no family and no past.
*Alpha Kael,* I thought as the clouds swallowed the world below, *you never once asked why a lone she-wolf with no pack had a wolf strong enough to make you chase her for months.*
*You should have.*
---