By the second night, he couldn't shift.
The realization came like a physical blow. Shifting was as natural to him as breathing—had been since his first transformation at thirteen. The melding of man and wolf, the perfect synthesis of rational thought and primal instinct. It was the core of what made them werewolves, what separated them from both humans and wild wolves.
For an Alpha, the ability to shift at will was more than natural—it was essential. It was power. It was the physical manifestation of his authority, his connection to the pack, his rightful place in the hierarchy established by the Moon Goddess herself.
He tried.
The moment he recognized something was wrong—when the familiar pre-shift tingling failed to spread through his limbs during his evening patrol—he abandoned his duties without explanation. Left the pack house. Headed for the forest where he had always felt most connected to his wolf.
He went to the forest, ripped off his shirt, and fell to his knees in the clearing under the full moon. The same moon that had watched him destroy his mate.
The irony wasn't lost on him. Here he knelt, under the same sky that had witnessed his rejection of the Goddess's choice, now unable to access the very nature that made him Alpha.
He growled. Commanded his body to change.
The sound rumbled from deep in his chest, a sound that had always preceded transformation, that had always signaled his wolf's eager emergence. His muscles tensed, preparing for the shift that had become second nature over years of practice.
Nothing.
Where there should have been the familiar stretching sensation, the momentary discomfort of bones realigning, skin giving way to fur—there was only resistance. As if a wall had been erected between his human form and his wolf.
His bones refused.
His wolf pulled back like a wounded animal.
The sensation was alien, terrifying. His wolf wasn't just reluctant—it was hiding, retreating from him, from their shared existence. As if it no longer recognized him as its other half.
And that's when he felt it.
Her.
The awareness that had been a dull thread suddenly flared to life, brightening like a star in the darkness of his consciousness. No longer just a presence but a beacon, drawing his attention with irresistible force.
Not her thoughts. Not her scent. But her presence.
Soft. Distant. Like the brush of silk across his mind.
He gasped, falling forward onto his hands, fingers digging into the forest soil as the sensation washed over him. It wasn't painful, not exactly. But it was overwhelming—like suddenly hearing music after hours of silence, like seeing color in a world of grey.
She wasn't trying to reach him.
There was no intent behind what he felt, no message being sent. She wasn't calling to him, wasn't attempting to use whatever lingered of their bond.
But she was there.
Still tied to him.
And it was killing him.
The certainty of it crashed through him with devastating clarity. This wasn't just discomfort. This wasn't just an unexpected side effect of rejection. This was something actively harmful, something unraveling the very fabric of what made him Alpha.
Kael slammed his fists into the dirt, breath heaving.
Rage and fear warred within him—rage at the situation, at the Goddess's choice, at the omega who somehow still affected him despite his rejection; fear at what was happening to him, at what it meant for his position, his pack, his future.
You were supposed to be nothing.
Why do you still live in me?
The question echoed in his mind, directed at a woman who couldn't hear him, who had no idea of the chaos she was causing simply by existing. By being what the Goddess had made her to be—his mate. His match. The other half of his soul, whether he accepted it or not.
The rejection should've freed him.
That was the purpose of it—to release both wolves from a bond deemed unsuitable, to allow them to find more appropriate matches. To maintain the strength of the bloodlines, the stability of the pack structure.
Instead, it had damned him.
Something had gone terribly wrong in that ceremonial circle. Something had twisted what should have been a clean break into a festering wound that poisoned him from within.
As he knelt in the moonlight, unable to shift, unable to connect with the wolf that had always been his strength, Kael faced a truth he had never imagined possible:
He, Alpha of Crescent Fang, might have made a catastrophic mistake.
The days blurred.
Time lost meaning as Kael spiraled further into whatever madness had gripped him. Hours, days—they melted together in a haze of increasing instability, of fraying control.
He refused to see anyone.
Locked himself in his quarters, emerging only to handle essential pack business, to maintain at least the appearance of leadership. The effort it took to present a façade of normalcy drained what little energy he had left.
He snapped at his pack. Broke a training sword in half. Destroyed two rooms in the west wing. The palace staff stopped meeting his eyes. Even the warriors gave him distance.
His legendary control—the discipline that had defined him since childhood—was crumbling. Emotions he had always kept carefully leashed now exploded without warning. Rage. Frustration. Fear. Each outburst left destruction in its wake, left whispers circulating through the pack.
Something's wrong with the Alpha.He hasn't shifted in days.Did you see his eyes? They're changing.
The rumors reached him despite his isolation. His hearing, at least, hadn't diminished—had perhaps even sharpened as his wolf retreated, as if compensating for the loss of other abilities.
And still, every time he closed his eyes—she was there.
Not as a woman.
Not the trembling omega who had stood before him in the ceremonial circle, wide-eyed and disbelieving.
As a force.
Silver. Flickering. Dangerous.
The image came unbidden, growing stronger with each passing night. Evelyn, but transformed. Evelyn, but powerful. Evelyn, but radiating a light that both drew him and warned him away.
She's changing.
The thought surfaced from somewhere deep in his consciousness, a knowledge that felt instinctive rather than reasoned. Whatever was happening to him was happening to her too—but differently. Where he was diminishing, she was growing. Where he was fracturing, she was becoming whole in a new way.
You triggered it.
Another instinctive certainty. His rejection—the very act meant to sever their connection—had instead catalyzed something unexpected in her. Had awakened something that might have remained dormant if he had accepted what the Goddess offered.
He didn't want to believe it.
The implications were too threatening to his understanding of the world, of the pack structure, of his place in it all. If rejecting her had caused this—if his decision, made with such certainty, had been so catastrophically wrong—what did that mean for everything else he believed?
But he remembered her hands glowing in the dark—just for a second. He thought it was his imagination. The firelight. The tension.
A fleeting moment as she'd turned away from the circle, as she'd staggered from the force of his rejection. A shimmer around her fingertips, a whisper of silver light quickly extinguished. He had dismissed it as a trick of the ceremonial fires, as stress playing havoc with his perceptions.
But maybe... it had been real.
The thought haunted him now, grew stronger as his condition worsened. As his wolf retreated further, as the connection between them pulsed with increasing intensity despite his continued rejection of it.
What if you didn't just reject her?
What if you awakened something?
The question repeated like a drumbeat beneath his thoughts, impossible to silence. What if his rejection had triggered some dormant ability in her? What if the Goddess had chosen her not despite her omega status but because of something hidden beneath it?
What if, in his arrogance, he had missed what the Goddess herself had seen?
Kael stared at the flames in his fireplace long into the night, his hand pressed over his heart—where the ache had turned to a dull throb.
The constant pain had become almost familiar now, a companion he couldn't shake. Sometimes sharp, sometimes dull, but always present. A reminder of what he had done, of what he had broken, of what continued to unravel inside him.
His wolf had gone quiet now.
Not resting.
Not dead.
Just... hiding.
As if ashamed.
The sensation was perhaps the most disturbing of all. His wolf had always been a presence within him—proud, strong, certain. Now it cowered in some far corner of his consciousness, as if unable to face what they had done together. As if, perhaps, it had never agreed with his decision in the first place.
Had he even consulted it? Had he even paused to feel its reaction when he looked at Evelyn for the first time? Or had he been so certain, so fixed in his beliefs about what an Alpha's mate should be, that he had ignored its instinctive response?
The questions plagued him through the endless nights, through the fractured days, through the increasing struggle to maintain the façade of the perfect Alpha.
Until the dream.
He woke from a dream drenched in sweat.
It had been vivid beyond reason, real beyond imagination. Not the scattered images of normal dreams but something else—something that felt like vision, like prophecy, like truth.
She was standing in front of him—in moonlight, her hair glowing silver, her eyes like embers.
Not the shy, startled omega from the ceremonial circle. Not the broken, rejected mate who had collapsed under the weight of his words.
Not broken.
Not afraid.
But radiant. Fierce. Unreachable.
Power emanated from her in waves—silver light that flickered like flame, that filled the space between them with a heat he could feel against his skin. Her eyes held knowledge, confidence, a certainty he had never seen in them before.
She looked at him like he was the one on his knees now.
And in the dream, he was. Kneeling before her, wolf subdued, strength diminished, position reversed. Looking up at what he had rejected, at what he had awakened, at what now stood beyond his reach.
She said nothing. She didn't need to. The look in her eyes said everything.
You chose this. Now live with it.
He woke up gasping.
The dream clung to him like a second skin, refusing to fade as dreams normally did. The image of her—transformed, powerful, beyond his control—burned in his mind with undiminished clarity.
And with it came a realization that shook him to his core:
For the first time in his life, Alpha Kael Blackthorn didn't know what to do.
He had no strategy for this. No precedent to follow. No experience to draw upon. Nothing in his training as Alpha, nothing in the pack's histories, nothing in his own confident certainty prepared him for what was happening.
His wolf was retreating. His power was diminishing. His control was fracturing.
And somewhere in the pack, the mate he had rejected was becoming something he had never anticipated. Something that might be beyond his understanding. Beyond his authority.
Perhaps even beyond his reach.
As dawn broke over Crescent Fang territory, Kael faced the unthinkable: he might need to find her. Might need to understand what was happening to both of them.