Chapter 3: Flight into the Wilds

The lock on Selene's door clicked ominously as keys rattled in the corridor beyond. Marcus's voice carried through the stone walls, cold and decisive: "Sedate her first. I won't risk another incident."

Kael's silver eyes hardened to steel. "Stand back from the window."

Before Selene could ask what he meant, the rogue wolf gripped the iron bars and pulled. Metal groaned in protest, then snapped like twigs under impossible strength. The sound should have alerted the entire pack house, but somehow it was muffled, as if the night itself swallowed the noise.

"How did you—"

"Questions later. Move now." Kael's hand extended through the demolished window frame. "Trust me."

The door to her prison rattled as someone worked the lock from outside. Selene heard Marcus curse, followed by the distinctive sound of a shoulder hitting wood. They'd be through in seconds.

She grabbed Kael's outstretched hand, and the moment their skin touched, electricity shot through her entire body. Not painful, but awakening—as if every nerve ending suddenly remembered how to truly feel. His eyes widened slightly, suggesting he felt it too, but there was no time to process what it meant.

"Hold tight," he murmured, then pulled her through the window with surprising gentleness for someone who'd just torn apart iron bars like paper.

The ledge was barely wide enough for one person, let alone two, but Kael moved with the fluid confidence of someone who'd spent his life in impossible places. He guided her hands to handholds in the stone, his body shielding her from the three-story drop below.

"Can you climb?" he asked quietly.

Before she could answer, her door exploded inward. Marcus's roar of rage echoed through the night as he discovered her empty room, the destroyed window a clear statement of her escape.

"FIND HER!" His voice carried the full authority of an Alpha's command, and throughout the pack house, wolves began to howl in response.

Kael cursed under his breath and looked up at the roof line above them. "Change of plans. We're going up first, then down fast."

He moved like a shadow made flesh, finding purchase on stone that looked impossibly smooth. Selene tried to follow, but her body felt clumsy and uncertain after years of being told she was too heavy, too slow, too everything wrong.

"I can't—"

"Yes, you can." Kael's voice was firm but not unkind. "Stop thinking like they taught you to think. Your body knows what to do. Let it."

Something in his tone made her stop trying to climb like a normal person and start moving on instinct. Her fingers found cracks in the stone she hadn't noticed before, her feet discovered ledges that seemed perfectly placed. Within moments, she was pulling herself onto the pack house roof with surprising grace.

"How did I—"

"Later." Kael was already moving toward the forest edge of the building. "They'll have the main exits covered within minutes, but there's a gap in their perimeter on the eastern boundary. If we can reach the river—"

A howl split the night air, followed by another, then another. The pack was shifting, trading human cunning for wolf speed and senses. The hunt had officially begun.

"They're faster than us in wolf form," Selene said, fear creeping into her voice.

"In normal circumstances, yes." Kael's smile was sharp and predatory. "But you're not normal, Selene. And neither am I."

He leaped from the roof to a nearby pine tree with impossible grace, catching a branch that should have snapped under his weight but held firm. "Jump. I'll catch you."

Every rational part of Selene's mind screamed that this was suicide. The gap was too wide, the drop too far, the branch too thin to support two people. But as howls echoed closer behind them, rational thought seemed less important than survival.

She jumped.

For a heart-stopping moment, she hung in empty air with nothing but forest floor thirty feet below. Then Kael's hand closed around her wrist, and they swung together through the canopy like something from a dream.

"Keep moving," he breathed in her ear as they landed on another branch. "They've picked up our scent."

They moved through the trees with desperate speed, branch to branch, tree to tree, the forest floor a blur beneath them. Selene had never moved like this before, yet her body seemed to know exactly how to twist, how to land, how to flow from one handhold to the next without thought or hesitation.

Behind them, the howls were getting closer.

"There!" Kael pointed toward a break in the canopy where moonlight revealed rushing water. "The river. If we can reach it—"

A massive grey wolf burst from the undergrowth below them, yellow eyes fixed on their position. Then another. Within seconds, a dozen pack wolves surrounded the base of their tree, snarling and snapping at the air.

"Marcus really doesn't want you to leave," Kael observed with dark humor.

"Can we outrun them?"

"Not as humans." His silver eyes met hers, and she saw something that might have been apology. "Selene, what happened in the arena tonight—you're going to need to do it again. Intentionally this time."

"I don't know how!" The words came out as a near-sob. "I don't even know what I did!"

"You shifted. Partially, but enough to terrify every wolf in that arena." Kael's voice was steady, anchoring. "The power is there, just under your skin. You can feel it right now, can't you? Fighting to get out?"

She could. The fear and adrenaline of their escape had awakened something that prowled restlessly through her veins, something that wanted to answer the howls below with one of its own. Something vast and ancient that had been caged too long.

"I'm scared," she whispered.

"Good. Fear keeps you alive." Kael's hand covered hers where it gripped the branch. "But don't let it control you. Your wolf isn't your enemy, Selene. It's your salvation."

Below them, more wolves arrived. She recognized some of them—pack members who'd watched her humiliation in the arena with satisfaction, who'd whispered cruel jokes about her weight and clumsiness, who'd treated her like a burden to be endured rather than a person to be respected.

The anger came first, hot and familiar from years of swallowed insults and silent rage. But behind it rose something else—something primal and magnificent that had been suppressed so long it erupted like a dam breaking.

Heat exploded through Selene's body as her bones began to shift and lengthen. But this wasn't the painful transformation she'd witnessed in other pack members. This was power made manifest, her human form dissolving into something far grander.

Her clothes shredded as her body expanded, muscles rippling with newfound strength. Her vision sharpened until she could see individual leaves in the darkness, could count the whiskers on the wolves below. Her hearing exploded outward, catching conversations from the pack house half a mile away, the rustle of small creatures in the underbrush, the thundering of her own transformed heart.

But it was her size that truly shocked her. Where other wolves might reach her human shoulder, she now towered over them like a creature from legend. Her paws were the size of dinner plates, her shoulders broad enough to carry a grown man. Her coat was deepest black shot through with silver that seemed to capture and hold moonlight, and when she opened her jaws, her fangs gleamed like ivory daggers.

The wolves below fell silent, their aggressive posturing replaced by instinctive submission. Several actually whimpered and pressed themselves to the forest floor, overwhelmed by the presence of an apex predator their species hadn't seen in generations.

Dire Wolf. The words echoed in her transformed mind with the weight of absolute truth. Not just any wolf, but the wolf—the alpha of alphas, the queen of her kind.

Kael had shifted as well, though his wolf form was more conventionally sized. Lean and silver-grey, built for speed and stealth rather than raw power. When he looked at her, his eyes held something that might have been awe.

Can you hear me? His mental voice was warm and steady in her mind, another impossible thing that somehow felt natural.

Yes. Her own mental voice surprised her with its depth and resonance. Is this real? Am I really...?

You're magnificent. The sincerity in his thoughts made something warm unfurl in her chest. Now we run. Follow me, and let your instincts guide you.

They leaped from the tree together, landing among the stunned pack wolves with enough force to shake the ground. The smaller wolves scattered like leaves before a hurricane, their nerve completely broken by her presence.

Then they were running, and Selene discovered what it truly meant to be free.

Her new body moved with liquid grace through the forest, four powerful legs eating up distance that would have taken hours to cover on human feet. Trees blurred past in silver-touched darkness, and she could smell everything—the pack wolves falling further behind, the clean scent of running water ahead, the musk of deer and smaller game, the green growing smell of plants that bent away from her passage as if recognizing her right to dominance.

This way, Kael's voice guided her toward the sound of rushing water. The river appeared between the trees, wide and moon-bright, flowing swift and cold toward distant territories.

Behind them, howls of frustration echoed through the forest. The pack had lost their trail at the water's edge, and even Marcus's authority couldn't force wolves to follow a scent into fast-moving current.

They plunged into the icy water together, the current strong enough to carry them downstream while washing away any trace of their passage. Selene's Dire Wolf form cut through the water like she was born to it, and beside her, Kael kept pace with the easy strength of someone who'd spent years living wild.

Only when they reached the far bank, miles from pack territory, did they finally allow themselves to slow. Selene collapsed on the rocky shore, her massive form steaming in the cool night air, overwhelmed by what she'd just experienced.

The shift back to human form was gentler than the transformation, though it left her naked and shivering in the moonlight. Kael, also human again, wordlessly offered her his jacket—worn leather that smelled of freedom and far places.

"That was..." she began, then realized she had no words for what it had been.

"Your birthright," Kael said simply. "What you were always meant to be, before they tried to convince you otherwise."

Selene pulled the jacket closer, still trying to process the magnitude of what had just happened. She'd escaped. She'd transformed into something from legend itself. She'd outrun an entire pack of wolves who'd spent her lifetime treating her like dirt.

But more than that, she'd felt alive for the first time in her life. Truly, completely alive.

"What happens now?" she asked.

Kael's silver eyes reflected the moonlight as he looked back toward the territory they'd left behind. "Now we disappear. Marcus will be looking for us, and he won't stop until one of us is dead."

"Because of what I am?"

"Because of what you represent." His expression was grim. "A threat to everything he's built on lies and murder. The return of a bloodline he thought he'd destroyed forever."

In the distance, carried on the night wind, they could still hear the frustrated howls of the pack. Selene listened to them for a moment, then turned her back on the sound and followed Kael deeper into the wilderness.

She was done being their victim. It was time to discover what it meant to be their nightmare.