Chapter 17
I stand on the rooftop helipad of the tallest Vale skyscraper in Milan, the city sprawling below like prey beneath the gaze of a predator. The wind is sharp up here, slicing across my skin like the claws of the moon itself, testing me, daring me to falter. Once, I would have flinched. Once, the girl I was, the servant girl with bent back and blistered hands, would have cowered from cold air, from storms, from everything stronger than her.
But that girl is gone.
Now, the wolf beneath my skin stirs, restless, awake, pressing against my bones like fire under ice. I lift my face to the rising sun, spine straight, eyes locked on the crimson horizon. Milan’s skyline glitters like steel teeth, but it is no longer a cage. It is mine.
I used to scrub floors beneath these towers. Picking cigarette butts from marble steps while whispered to myself: One day, one day, you’ll stop crawling. Thirty years of bending my neck under the weight of weak wolves like Alpha Shawn. Thirty years of silence, shame, and invisible
service.
Now I own the building. Now I own the skyline. Now I own them.
‘I spent three decades crawling beneath towers like this,” I murmur, my voice edged with a grow that rattles in my chest. “Scrubbing their floors, breathing their dust. Now the wolf in me stands above them all.”
Footsteps echo behind me. I don’t turn. My senses tell me who approaches. Ram’s gait is heavy deliberate, the tread of a wolf who knows the ground belongs to him. Edrick moves faster mpulsive, like his blood is always one second from shifting.
Ram comes to my side, laying a broad hand on my shoulder. His touch is warm, steady, carrying he weight of brotherhood and pack bond.
We’re proud of you, Stella,” he says, voice gravel, ancient as the bloodline we share. “You survived hell. Now we teach you to rule it.”
The wolf inside me paces. My lips twitch into something between a smile and a snarl.
Edrick’s voice cuts in, smooth, heat coiled like flame. “You’re a Vale. You always were. With Damien at your side, you’ll take back every second they stole, every name they spat, every crown hey denied. No one steals from the blood of our pack and lives.”
turn to them, my kin, my pack, the only ones who never left me in the shadows. The only ones who saw my wolf, even when I couldn’t shift, even when I wore chains of shame.
breathe in the storm gathering at the edge of dawn, letting it fill my lungs.
‘No more tears,” I snarl, my voice a battle drum laced with the howl of my wolf. “No more apologies. You will teach me everything, every ledger, every contract, every enemy’s scent, and the blades they hide. I will not be a symbol. I will be fang and claw. I will be the storm. A Luna
born in blood and fire.”
The wolf inside me howls, and for once, I do not silence it.
**
The days blur like claws in motion. I waste none of them.
1/3 30.8%
Damien trains me not as a student but as a wolf sharpened for war.
Numbers become prey tracks, corporations, and pack hierarchies. He shows me shadow networks, blood-soaked routes, and the art of silencing without spilling, or with.
I watch. I learn. Then I strike, cleaner, faster.
I see fractures the way a wolf sees broken bone, smell fear in inked contracts. They call it manipulation. I call it instinct.
I know when to corner. When to hunt. When to kill.
“You absorb too fast,” Damien says one night after I tear apart a thirty-million-dollar trade scam with a signature and two whispered names. “You’re ruthless. I wasn’t expecting this.”
I sip my espresso, meet his gaze, and let a low growl bleed beneath my words.
“That’s because you were expecting prey.”
He doesn’t argue. He knows the voice of a wolf when he hears it.
**
The media howls like scavengers circling a kill.
They post my old photographs: hair tied back, scrubbing marble floors with raw knuckles. They scream scandal as though shame is a collar they can force around my throat.
“From Housekeeper to Heiress: The Scandal of the Century.”
“The Ravenshade Maid Who Took Milan.”
“The Widow with Teeth.”
They think it’s an insult. But it is proof. Proof that I came from dirt and rose higher than their glass towers, higher than their gilded chains. Proof that the wolf they tried to break now runs the back.
sit at breakfast, draped in silk, claws hidden but sharp, and laugh, a real, guttural sound from deep in my chest. Edrick almost chokes on his toast.
‘Let them bark,” I say. “They want a crown without bleeding for it. They don’t know the price of crawling.”
Damien doesn’t laugh. His eyes are sharp and soft all at once, fixed on me like he’s trying to decide if I’m fire or fang.
You’re terrifying,” he says quietly, “in the most beautiful way.”
smirk, my lips curling like the edge of a snarl.
‘Good. That’s exactly what I want to be.”
And I will be.
**
The storm breaks before the alarms.
We are in the war room, Damien, Ram, Edrick, and I-blueprints and blood-red maps sprawled ike carcasses across steel tables. We carve our expansion through Europe’s underbelly, fang by fang.
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Thunder cracks, the sky snarling its warning. The wolf in me growls back.
Then the alarms scream.
The estate shifts. Guards rush in, guns drawn, earpieces hissing. Gunfire outside, disciplined, merciless. This is not a warning. It’s survival.
“It’s him,” Edrick spits, his lips peeled in a snarl. “The bastard crawled back.”
Damien’s voice cuts like iron. “Alpha Shawn. At the gate. Alone, bleeding. He fought his way through like a dying war dog.”
Ram growls low. “Then finish him. He should’ve been buried long ago.”
I raise my hand. The room stills. Wolves hold their breath.
“Let the dead man speak.”
Damien studies me like I’ve grown fangs. Perhaps I have.
“I said speak, not survive,” I continue, eyes lit with stormfire. “I will hear him. Then we decide how deep his grave goes.”
The atrium gleams with marble and gold, storm light clawing at the glass in iron streaks.
He waits when I enter-bloody, broken, his scent thick with fear and rot. Blood pours from his shoulder, yet he clings to defiance, a dying wolf too proud to kneel.
Then his gaze finds me…
Not the maid. Not the servant. Not the ghost in linen.
I prowl forward, silk and diamonds wrapping me like a queen’s armor, the wolf beneath my skin pacing, baring its fangs.
He stares. Blinks. Chokes on words.
“You-” he rasps. “You look like… like them.”
I bare my teeth, a snarl sharper than a smile.
“No,” I growl, my voice carrying the hunger of a wolf at the kill. “They look like frauds. I look like justice.”
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Lucia Morh is a passionate storyteller who brings emotions to life through her words. When she’s not writing, she finds peace nurturing her garden.