Chapter 3

The full moon hung high overhead. The stone steps of the Alpha Council Hall gleamed with harsh silver light.

Victoria walked at the front, her tail hanging steady behind her. Beside her was Sebastian, about to receive bloodline certification. As for me, I was escorted by two tribal guards, my arms pinned behind my back, forced to the last row of the observation seats.

As I sat down, the Omegas nearest me wrinkled their noses in discomfort, quickly covering their mouths with their fluffy tails and leaning away. The Bone-rot breath radiating from me made these scent-sensitive lower wolves uneasy.

At the center of the hall, the elder pierced Sebastian's wrist with a thick antler needle.

Dark red blood dripped into the holy water basin. The overpowering Alpha presence exploded outward from the basin like a shockwave. The young wolves in attendance trembled, their ears flattening as they instinctively lowered their heads. The elders nodded with approving smiles.

Only I knew that the blood boiling in that basin was mine—drained drop by drop.

Lila sat at Sebastian's feet, throwing back her head to let out a juvenile howl, amplifying the presence of this "new Alpha."

I closed my blind eye and tried to straighten my back. The guard behind me immediately pressed his hand-bone hard into my shoulder socket. Before leaving, Victoria had given a direct order: "Hold him down. Keep his eyes open through the whole ceremony. This is the glory he owes Sebastian."

On the ceremonial platform, two wolf guards pulled aside a laurel cloth.

It was The Wolfheart Pulse—a moonlit wolf totem painted with Alpha blood.

My throat tightened. That was the protective charm I had painted for Lila on her full-moon night—cutting open the skin around my gland and dipping brush after brush in the warm blood of my heart, stroke by stroke. And now, at the center of the totem, a large, jarring wolf paw print had been added.

"This is my work of heart," Sebastian turned, his gaze crossing the crowd to meet Victoria's. "Dedicated to my Luna, and to my cub."

The hall erupted in cheers. I watched my blood-painted totem defiled by another's mark, and felt only absurdity.

Amid the clamor, Sebastian stepped down from the dais, threading through the bowing wolves, and stopped before me. The guards still pressed hard on my shoulders.

He leaned down, his voice low enough for only me to hear.

"Resentful, aren't you?" There was a twisted glee in his eyes. "You've never understood why your Luna hates you so deeply, have you?"

I met his gaze calmly, betraying no emotion.

"That full moon night, I added heart-muddle flower juice to your water. She went into a mating frenzy, forced to mate with you, and ended up carrying Lila. The elders forced her to marry you. For seven years, she's believed you drugged her and took her by force." Sebastian's breath, laced with the scent of blood—my blood—brushed against my nose. "I was the one who drugged her. But in her eyes, you're nothing but a despicable thief."

He smiled, barely visible. "Now she presses her neck against mine every day, breathing in your blood scent that's running through me, convinced that this is what a true Alpha smells like... Damian, don't you find it ironic?"

The pain in my chest crept up through my veins. I clenched my right hand, but the claw that had degenerated along with my lost fang could only dig its blunt, human-like nails into my palm—drawing no blood.

Before I could speak, Sebastian's eyes flickered.

He raised his left paw and slashed hard across his own right arm. Skin split open; blood gushed like a fountain; an overwhelming, suffocatingly pure Alpha presence crashed down upon the hall.

Every wolf in the room was struck numb by the blood-borne force, instinctively dropping low to the ground.

"He attacked me!" Sebastian staggered back, clutching his wound with a pained howl. "He's trying to take back the bloodline the Moon God has already stripped from him!"

The wind shifted.

Victoria's figure shot into the back row like a loosed arrow. No questions. She didn't even glance at the scene. Her long legs, clad in hard-soled combat boots, left a blur in the air—her foot landing squarely and viciously at the center of my sternum.

"Crack—"

A sharp sound resonated deep in my eardrums. I heard it—the fifth crack of the wolf core encased in my gland. Irreversible. Final.

The force sent me and my chair crashing backward. I lay on the dusty stone floor, coughing up blood. A boot sole appeared in my field of vision.

Victoria stepped down onto my right hand—the hand that had clenched, stained only with its own palm blood from holding back.

She put her full weight onto the boot tip; the anti-slip studs ground into my fragile finger bones. The dull crunch of bone was jarringly loud in the deathly silent hall.

"If your claws ever reach for him again," she looked down at me with the same disgust she'd give to swamp filth, "I will tear them off one by one myself and throw them to the vultures on North Peak."

She lifted her foot, turned, and carefully cradled the fallen Sebastian in her arms. The entire clan, like retreating tidewater, swarmed around their new leader and surged out of the hall.

On the vast stone steps, only I remained, lying in my own blood. Not a single wolf looked back.

When I opened my eyes again, my nose was filled with the sharp medicinal tang of distilled moonherb.

The old physician from the Guild sat by my bed, his withered hand slowly withdrawing the antler probe from my chest. Deep furrows lined his brow; his cloudy eyes carried an irreversible weight.

"The wolf core has reached its fifth crack." He tossed the probe into the tray with a sharp clink. "Without fresh, same-source blood to replenish it, when the next full moon rises, the last trace of wolf nature inside you will be gone."

I stared at the ceiling, the corner of my mouth twitching—a motion that pulled at the sore muscles of my face.

Where was there any blood left to trade? The very foundation that sustained this shell was already flowing through the veins of the new Alpha, now adored by the entire tribe.

The sound-bone on the bedside table flickered to life. Hours earlier, I had awakened from my coma and called Victoria. She had impatiently promised to come verify the state of my condition.

But now, the voice that emerged was not hers.

A faint, yet identical-bloodlined wave of pheromone pulses rippled through the array. Sebastian—close by—was projecting a thought through the remnants of my blood still in his veins.

"Can you smell it? How docile she is now." The voice carried a seductive gloating. "She's lying in my den, licking the wounds I took today. Damian, even if you die right now, rotting on this sickbed, her nose wouldn't twitch for you."

The connection severed.

I slowly turned my head, closed my remaining left eye, and stopped waiting for any reply.