Chapter 1 The Shattering
For three hundred years, the forest had not changed.
Its trees twisted toward a sky no one else could see, locked in a twilight that never fully turned to night and never quite became day. Mist clung low to the ground, silver and cold, swallowing footprints as soon as they formed. The air smelled of damp earth and old magic—sharp, metallic, and wrong.
Lina had grown up breathing that wrongness.
She knelt by the stream, watching her reflection tremble in the rushing water. A pale face stared back at her, framed by dark, tangled hair that fell in wild waves past her shoulders. Her eyes—too bright, too old for someone who looked barely into her twenties—glowed faintly amber in the half-light.
Not human eyes. Not truly.
“You’re staring again,” she murmured to her reflection, her voice hoarse from disuse. “As if something’s going to be different today.”
The girl in the water didn’t answer. She never did.
Lina lifted her hand and cupped the stream. The water bit at her skin, cold enough to sting, and yet she savored it. It grounded her, reminded her that she was still here. Still alive. Still trapped.
Behind her, the forest sighed.
It was not the sound of wind through leaves; there was no wind in this place, not truly. The air hung heavy, pressing on her skin, thick with magic that hummed like a low, constant growl. The trees creaked, old bark twisting as if reacting to something distant. Something new.
Lina stiffened.
Her wolf stirred, pacing just beneath her skin. It was a pressure she knew intimately—a restless presence that had been her only companion all these years. The animal lifted its head, ears pricking, eyes narrowing at a sound she hadn’t heard in—
No. Not a sound.
A feeling.
The magic around her trembled, just a fraction, just enough to make the hairs at the back of her neck rise. The stream surged, splashing higher against the mossy stones. Birds, the few that still dared to exist in this cursed pocket of the world, burst from the trees in a sudden flurry of wings.
Lina rose slowly to her feet.
Her bare soles made no sound on the damp earth. She moved like a shadow between the twisted trunks, the forest a familiar maze she could traverse blindfolded. Every root, every gnarled branch, every thorn was etched into her bones.
But something was wrong.
The air tasted… different.
Less metallic. Less suffocating.
Her wolf pressed harder, urging, demanding. Move. Look. Run.
“I know,” she whispered, placing a hand against her chest to calm the pounding heart beneath. “I feel it too.”
The forest shuddered again.
This time, Lina heard it—a faint crack, like ice under too much weight. It came from the northern edge. From the place she never went. From the border she had learned, over countless years, not to touch.
The Veil.
Her pulse stuttered.
No one had ever explained it to her. There had been no one left to explain anything when the screaming stopped and the world went quiet. All she’d known was that beyond a certain line, the air thickened until her lungs burned and her vision blurred and her wolf howled in agony.
She had tried to cross once, when she was still more child than beast, more grief than flesh.
The magic had thrown her back, tearing through her like fire. She’d lain on the forest floor for days, her body convulsing, her mind filled with flashes—blood, flames, golden eyes dulling to nothing.
Her mother’s voice, breaking as she whispered: Run, Lina. Run and don’t look back.
Lina swallowed hard, pushing the memory down where it belonged. The wolf snarled at the pain, then shoved past it, fixated on the same thing she felt:
The barrier was weakening.
Another crack split the air. The ground vibrated under her feet. Leaves shook themselves free from branches, spiraling down in a sudden, frantic storm.
The Veil was shattering.
For a heartbeat, terror pinned her in place.
What if it meant the curse was collapsing inward, crushing everything with it? What if it meant the forest would devour her completely at last, finishing what it started?
Or—worse still—what if the world outside the trees had forgotten her?
What if no one remained to remember the name Valerius?
Her wolf lunged against her indecision, sending a sharp jolt of instinct along her nerves. Go.
Lina ran.
Years had honed her body into a weapon, even without a pack to train with, without battles to fight. She knew how to slip between clawed roots and jagged stones, how to leap over fallen trunks, how to sense the patches of ground that would crumble beneath her weight.
The forest blurred. Shadows stretched around her, reaching out like fingers, trying to hold her back.
The Veil doesn’t want to let you go, a small, trembling part of her thought.
She didn’t care.
Breath burned her lungs as she pushed faster, faster, the crackling in the air growing louder with every stride. It sounded like a thousand windows breaking at once. Like bones snapping. Like magic screaming.
Branches whipped against her arms and face, scratching shallow lines across her skin. She relished the sting. It reminded her she could bleed. That she was still something other than a ghost trapped in someone else’s nightmare.
Finally, she saw it.
The border had never been visible before—only a sense, a tightening, a wall of invisible pain. But now the Veil glowed.
A shimmering arc of pale light stretched between two ancient oaks, trembling like a curtain caught in nonexistent wind. Cracks spread through it like spiderwebs of darkness, jagged veins of shadow splitting the glow apart.
Beyond it, she glimpsed… night.
True night. A sky of deep, endless black, pricked with stars instead of the dim, cloudless haze of the cursed forest. Moonlight spilled over unfamiliar trees, over the slope of a hill, over… something metallic in the distance.
Lina’s breath hitched.
The world outside still existed.
She took a step closer. The magic of the Veil brushed against her skin, prickling like static. Her muscles tensed, warning her. Memory snarled inside her chest—the last time she had tried this, the agony that had nearly ripped her in half.
But the glow flickered weakly, struggling to hold form.
“Three hundred years,” she whispered, voice almost swallowed by the crackle of dying magic. “If you wanted me dead, you’ve had your chance.”
Her wolf prowled inside her, powerful and restless. Not afraid. Not anymore.
Lina bared her teeth at the Veil.
Then she stepped through.
The pain she braced for didn’t come.
There was a brief moment of resistance, like wading through thick water. The magic brushed her skin, tasting her, recognizing something in her blood. For a heartbeat, it clung to her, reluctant.
And then—
It broke.
Light shattered around her in a spray of silver shards that dissolved before they hit the ground. The sound crashed through the forest, booming Out into the night beyond like thunder. The air whooshed past her, sharp and cold, filled with scents she had never smelled before—smoke, metal, so many wolves, so many—
Lina stumbled as her foot hit uneven ground. Real ground. Grass that wasn’t cursed, air that didn’t hum with old rage. The night sky above reached wide and open, the moon bright and full, no veil to mute its light.
She froze.
The world was… loud.
Crickets chirped in the distance. An owl hooted from a nearby tree. The wind—real wind—stroked her hair, carrying with it the smell of distant fires, leather, oil, steel, and beneath it all…
Wolves.
Not one. Not two.
Dozens.
Her wolf went utterly still.
A low growl rolled across the hill to her right, deep and warning. Another answered it, closer. Footsteps pounded against the earth, heavy and coordinated—more than one set, moving in formation.
Hunting.
Lina spun toward the sound, muscles coiling. Her heart slammed against her ribs as shapes emerged from the shadows—men, tall and broad, their eyes glowing in the moonlight, the scent of wolf so strong it almost made her dizzy.
They wore dark leather and armor, blades strapped to their hips, insignias she didn’t recognize marking their chests. Their wolves prowled just under their skin, eyes bright, attention sharpened on her like she was prey.
At their head was a figure who didn’t move like the others.
He walked instead of ran, his steps steady and certain. The moon caught on his hair—dark, cropped close on the sides—and on the sharp line of his jaw. His shoulders were wider, his presence heavier, like he dragged gravity with him.
His gaze locked on her, and everything else fell away.
Gold.
His eyes were molten gold.
Her wolf rose up, pressing against her ribs, claws scraping at her insides, utterly silent but absolutely, terrifyingly focused.
Alpha.
The realization slammed through her.
He stopped a few paces away, posture relaxed but coiled with power. The men flanking him spread out, forming a half-circle around her. A trap. An inspection. A threat.
He studied her—bare feet, torn shirt, tangled hair, the faint glow in her eyes. The wildness she couldn’t hide.
For the first time in three centuries, Lina found herself under another’s gaze. Not the forest’s, not the Veil’s, not the ghosts of her past.
A living, breathing Alpha.
His nostrils flared as he drew in her scent, and something flickered across his face—confusion, surprise, something she couldn’t name. His wolf surged forward behind his eyes, recognition flaring bright.
He frowned.
“Who are you,” he asked, his voice a low, rough command that wrapped around her like a hand at her throat, “and where in the goddess’s name did you come from?”
Lina’s heart hammered.
The words she should speak crowded in her throat. Lies. Half-truths. Names that no longer belonged to her. She parted her lips—
And caught the barest hint of something on the wind: the scent of old blood, fading but familiar. The scent of a line that should have died with her people.
Her line.
His eyes were gold, like her father’s.
Her wolf shuddered.
She swallowed, forcing the tremble from her voice, forcing her instinct to kneel or to attack down into silence. She lifted her chin instead, meeting his gaze head-on.
“I came,” she said quietly, “from the place your people sealed away.”
A low murmur rippled through the warriors around him.
The Alpha’s expression sharpened, the air thickening with sudden tension.
“And what place is that?” he demanded.
Lina held his stare, feeling the weight of fate pressing in on all sides.
“The forest where you buried the Valerius tribe,” she whispered. “Three hundred years ago.”
His jaw clenched. For a heartbeat, something raw flashed in his golden eyes.
The warriors shifted uneasily.
Somewhere in the distance, a wolf howled.
And Lina realized, with a sick twist in her stomach, that stepping through the Veil had not freed her at all.
It had delivered her straight into the hands of the descendants of those who had destroyed her family.