Chapter 3 - Rowan

Chapter 3

Rowan

After training Freya, I felt… off-balance. Even though we’d gone for a run through the wildlands once already today, I found myself drawn back out there once more. The Moonblessed guard at the wall took one look at me and hurried to open the gate. Almost none of them had ever seen me in my human form, and it unnerved them.

“Thank you,” I called back, broadcasting my words to the wolves as only an alpha could.

Gage had warned me before that I should do my best not to “creep out” packs we allied with, especially if we were on a job. Remembering that made me long for a simpler time, back when we’d taken jobs, finished them, and then moved on to the next.

Too much had changed all at once…

I’d been away on a mission when I got the news we had a new packmate, and a woman at that. I’d felt her heat-fueled lust crash through Gage’s feeble attempts to keep me out of it through the pack bond, and it had sent me into the rut… alone. I’d been so moon-mad I’d even dreamed of her, and this dream woman had consumed my every waking thought for five whole days. The moment my wolf actually laid eyes on her, imprisoned in Ironwood’s dungeon, he recognized her as his mate.

Every single one of my packmates fell for her, and she claimed we were all her mates. But she wasn’t a purebred wolf shifter. No, Freya’s other half had been revealed at the most surprising moment, when Heath, Flint, and Freya had been testing my resolve not to join their threesome.

Suddenly, I’d understood why she hadn’t been able to shift. Freya might be part wolf, but she was also part witch. Mating with her meant mating with both sides of her nature… and that meant being marked with both a wolf’s bite and a witch’s Bonded rune. I wasn’t sure I could bear a witch’s mark on me.

The shadows seemed to shift and contort with every fallen branch I passed, memories flickering just beneath the surface. I saw them again — the coven of witches who had slaughtered the wolf pack that took me in after my original pack had rejected me.

The witches’ cruel laughter echoed in my ears as I relived that torment.

Because of my slip-up, the coven thought we were shifters encroaching on witch territory. They’d seen me shift and jumped to the conclusion that my wolf pack must be a pack of wolf shifters. They’d attacked, driving us into a trap, saying it was their right to eliminate threats on their lands. I’d shifted back to my two-legged form, desperate to explain and begging for the lives of my wolf family.

“I’m the one you want,” I screamed as the first of my wolf family died.

My pleas had gone unanswered as they killed my entire wolf family before my eyes. They’d burned me with witchfire but hadn’t managed to kill me. Leaving me alive proved to be their biggest mistake.

Gritting my fangs against the onslaught of pain, I pushed harder against the unyielding earth, as if I could outrun the ghosts of that brutal night so long ago. The witchfire scar on my tail burned, echoing the pain in my memories.

Sensing the turmoil that gripped me, my wolf silently insisted Freya was nothing like the ones who had given me these burns.

But the darkness inside me refused to relent. Instinct took over. Run, hunt, claim — these were the only drives that made sense when everything else seemed so muddled.

My human mind didn’t resurface again until my wolf’s fangs sank deep into a deer’s neck and my weight crushed it to the ground. It let out a scream of terror before I shook my head and put it out of its misery. My wolf fed, something that didn’t bother my human side one bit.

Some shifters feared the thought of hunting and eating their prey as a wolf. Mainly because they shifted back too soon, I imagined. Digesting raw venison with a human stomach was a bad idea. I wouldn’t have that problem, because I always remained in wolf form as much as possible.

Now that Freya had shifted for the first time, I didn’t have to worry about shifting back to communicate with her. As her packmate, it was my duty to help train her, to shape her into the powerful packmate I knew she could be.

Because in truth, no part of me believed Freya had cast any type of spell on our pack anymore. Her aunt’s witch coven had taken her by surprise. She wasn’t in cahoots with them.

The pain from their witchfire prison paled compared to the torture of seeing them hurt Freya. Her cries of agony wounded me far worse than any magic ever could. My wolf had been desperate to help her, but we’d all been helpless to stop her torment.

In the end, Freya had saved herself.

Not through the use of her witch magic, but through her wolf. As soon as she’d shifted, her glorious Odinswolf lit up the clearing as the lightning in her fur raged to life. My shock knew no bounds when her wolf defended her. Her lightning grew into a spherical shield meant to keep her from harm. Testing its power cost Pandora her life, which had devastated Freya in a different way.

No, after watching that scene play out, I couldn’t consider Freya the enemy just because of her blood. Her own family member, a witch, had tried to kill Freya — she truly was every bit the outcast we all were. Her family abandoned her to be raised in Ironwood as a rankless pack member. Her wrists remained unmarked until Gage claimed her for the Howling Echo.

I understood all too well how that felt. At the young age of fifteen, the pack I’d been born into kicked me out for being unable to shift, and my own family had forsaken me.

Despite being my parents’ only child, they’d always treated me as a burden. I was a troublesome, disobedient, rebellious child, even before my teenage years. They’d both known I would turn out more dominant than them, and they’d resented me for it.

My own parents hadn’t defended me, so I’d tried to stand my ground.

“I’m an alpha,” I remembered saying. “I’ll be an asset to the pack.”

That’s all they cared about — how we could serve the pack.

“No,” one of the pack enforcers told me. “Your wolf is an alpha, but he won’t come out. That makes you worthless.”

Everyone told their children wildlands horror stories and what would happen if they didn’t obey the pack alpha and his enforcers. On the day of my exile, my uncaring parents stood by silently.

Again, I’d tried to protest on my own behalf, because no one else would. I was only fifteen, so I still had hope my wolf would show.

“Some wolves don’t shift until—”

“This pack is for conquerors and kings, not for weak little boys who can’t shift. You aren’t worthy of the pack alpha’s mark.”

Then the pack enforcer had used his alpha bark to force me into the wildlands. My parents didn’t care when he banished me. They hadn’t exactly said “good riddance,” but the look on their faces was enough to tell me they thought it.

Without any family to care for me, I found myself packless and alone. Not even the pack alpha himself had come to watch my exile. I was too unimportant, a shifter who couldn’t shift.

Except, I could sense my wolf. I knew he would be an alpha, and I was right. The cruel wildlands shaped me into a ruthless young shifter as I killed rogue alphas who were older, bigger, and more experienced than I was.

And then… a wolf family took me in as their own. Though I stayed with them for years, I always made sure to shift back to human form once a month so that I didn’t forget how. Some small part of me clung to my shifter identity, even though it had caused me so much pain.

Doing so had gotten my wolf family killed. If I’d been more careful, those witches never would have sensed a shifter on their territory. I’d been alone again, believing I would never recover from the pain of losing my wolf family.

Then my wolf had caught scent of Heath and Gage. I chuffed a laugh, still remembering the first thing I’d ever heard Heath say.

He’d caught sight of my golden eyes in the shadows, startling a “What the fuck?” out of him.

I never thought I would belong with a pack of shifters again until I met the Howling Echo. Then Flint had joined us, and I’d been content. We felt… complete.

Until Freya’s presence in the pack bond threw my world off its axis.

The others planned to bond with a hybrid, to bite and claim her, and to accept her Bonded rune. It was insane to think I might contemplate mating with her, too.

After being reunited with Gage near Moonblessed, before the witch coven had appeared, I had sensed the tension between him and Freya. My wolf didn’t like seeing disharmony in the pack, especially when it concerned the pack alpha. Gage didn’t seem upset that she’d mated with Heath, though. If anything, he seemed pleased.

After everything that had happened with Freya’s aunt, I expected Gage to want to comfort his mate himself. Instead, he’d left her with me and Flint to train. He’d put distance between them, and I didn’t need a mate bond to sense Freya’s disappointment.

I’d told Heath I feared how this would look to the Frost Fang pack, who I knew from the other alphas’ stories had always been a closed-minded pack. Seeing the pack alpha’s mate bonding other alphas behind his back might destroy everything Gage had worked to rebuild. But they weren’t the only pack at risk if something happened to Gage.

After so many failures with so many packs, I couldn’t bear to watch another pack fail. If the Howling Echo fell apart, I wouldn’t try again. I would give up the life of a shifter and retreat to the wildlands where I’d always belonged.

But as I continued my run through the wildlands surrounding Moonblessed, I allowed myself to dream that we might find a different path forward. For the first time in my life, I looked to the future with hope.