Chapter 3

Nothing Left.

The border marker sat half buried in dead leaves, easy to miss unless you already knew it was there. I knew it was there. I had walked this stretch of road a dozen times over the years, always headed back toward Redthorn, always with somewhere to be.

Not tonight.

Tonight I stood on the wrong side of it. A bag over one shoulder. Two changes of clothes inside it, a handful of coin, my mother’s ring. Everything else stayed behind a door I no longer had a key to.

The forest past the marker felt different right away. No patrol routes I had memorized. No familiar scent trails from wolves I had known since I was a girl. Cold ground under my feet. Wind cutting through the thin fabric of my dress, the same dress I had put on that morning thinking about seating charts and toasts, not this.

I walked until my legs gave out, somewhere past a stream I did not recognize, and dropped into a hollow between two fallen trees. My hands would not stop shaking. I pulled my knees up and pressed my palms flat against them, hard, until the shaking slowed into something closer to steady.

Somewhere in the dark an owl called twice and stopped. I still had bread wrapped in cloth from that morning, untouched since the celebration started before everything after it happened. I ate half, chewing slower than I needed to, and saved the rest without deciding to save it.

I thought about the first year of the marriage for a while, sitting there. Damian used to ride out to meet me at this exact stretch of road when I visited my family, waiting under that same tree line so I would not have to walk the last mile alone in the dark. He stopped doing that somewhere around year three. I never asked why. I told myself Alphas got busy, that it did not mean what it looked like it meant.

For six years I woke up knowing exactly who I was. Luna of Redthorn. Wife to an Alpha. A woman with a title heavy enough that people cleared hallways for her without being asked twice. Tonight none of that belonged to me. No title. No home. Not one person within a hundred miles who would open a door if I knocked on it.

I thought about my sister first, and talked myself out of it fast. If Damian wanted to make an example of someone, my family would be the first place his people looked. Two young pups in that house. A mate still trying to earn his place in a pack that already eyed outsiders sideways. I was not doing that to her.

My cousin came to mind next, settled somewhere north, far enough from Redthorn politics that word might move slower reaching her. I held onto that thought a long while. Long enough that I slept sitting upright against a tree trunk sometime past midnight, and woke before sunrise to wolves moving through the brush nearby. Not attacking. Passing through. One of them slowed near the hollow, close enough that I could make out the shape of her against the dark, before she kept walking and left me alone.

By full light I had made up my mind. North road. My cousin’s territory, before word could beat me there. I stood, brushed dead leaves off a dress meant for a celebration and not a night on the ground, and started walking.

The first person I passed on the road was a courier heading the opposite direction, Redthorn colors still on his coat. I stopped him and asked if he would carry a message north for coin, just a few lines to let my cousin know I was coming. He looked at me a long moment before he recognized my face, and then he backed his horse up two full steps before answering.

“I cannot carry anything with your name attached to it. Not after last night.” He was already turning the horse. “You should not even be talking to me right now.”

He rode off before I could say anything else. I stood in the road a while after that, watching the dust settle, before I made myself start walking again.

I stopped at a trading post in the second village, run by a man who used to supply grain to Redthorn’s storehouses. He knew my face on sight.

“You should not be here.” He kept his voice low, eyes flicking past me toward the door. “Redthorn riders came through yesterday. Told anyone with family ties to you that sheltering you counts as aiding a traitor. Your mother’s line runs through my wife’s cousin. They already got the warning.”

“I only need somewhere to sleep. I have coin to pay for it.”

He shook his head, would not meet my eyes doing it. “I have a family to think about too.”

I left before he could tell me twice. That answered the question about my cousin without me walking another mile to find out. The warning had already reached this far. It had already reached her.

By midday, I heard what Damian had told the neighboring territories. Redthorn had sent out a notice with his seal on it. My name was on the list, along with the accusation that I had betrayed the pack. Anyone who gave me shelter could be questioned for helping me.

I stood there reading it twice. He had thought of everything.

Three villages in, I understood exactly how far my name had traveled.

It started small. A shopkeeper who looked past me instead of at me when I tried to buy bread. Two women near a well who stopped talking the moment I passed, then started again in whispers once they thought I was out of earshot. A child pointed at me once before her father pulled her hand down without a word.

By the third village somebody said my name out loud, and the whole square turned.

“That is her.” A man near the well, voice pitched to carry. “The Redthorn traitor. Heard the Alpha name her himself.”
I kept walking. Faster.

“Sold border patrols to Ashgrove,” someone else called out. “My brother serves Redthorn. He told me the whole story.”

People gathered fast. Six of them, maybe seven, closing off the road ahead and the alley behind before I fully registered what was happening. Damian had not simply cut me loose and let it end there. Every territory within walking distance already had a story about me before I ever arrived to tell my own.

“Hold her for Redthorn guards,” a woman said. “Might be a reward.”

“I have done nothing.” My voice barely carried over the noise. “Whatever you heard is not true.”

“That is exactly what a traitor would say.”

The circle closed in tighter. A man grabbed for my arm. I pulled back hard, stumbled into someone behind me, and felt another set of hands close around my shoulder from that side.

“Get her bag,” someone shouted. “See what she is carrying.”

A hand locked around my wrist. I twisted against it, tried to pull free, and a second grip caught my shoulder hard enough that I cried out.

Then a growl split the square open, low and close, and every wolf standing there went still at once.

“Step away from her.”