Chapter 003

Lucas's POV

"What!"

The sound ripped out of me before I could catch it. Something inside me shifted, my wolf collapsing into the back of my mind with claws scrabbling before going completely silent. My knees found the floor, palms slapping the tile, the cold biting through the fabric of my pants.

"What is going on." My voice came out rougher than I intended. I clutched my chest because the hollow under my ribs felt wrong, carved out. I stared at Sienna on the table, at her blood dripping into the flask in a steady stream, each drop hitting the glass with a soft and final tick. "Did the experiment fail. Answer me. Why is it red."

"The extraction is standard, Alpha." Morrigan's voice was smooth as silk even as her hand tremored, sliding a second vial beneath the velvet of her tray. The vial hummed with gold light. Her fingers curled around it protectively, one for the Council, one for the cure, the words living only in the way she held the glass rather than saying them aloud.

I turned to Ivy. My hand found her arm, fingers bunching the fabric of her sleeve, and her mouth opened and closed as she looked from Sienna to the floor.

"I do not know," she stammered, wilting under my grip, her shoulders caving inward.

"Morrigan." I released Ivy, who fell gasping with one hand catching the edge of a cart, metal rattling as it rolled. I marched toward Sienna's still form because every instinct I had was screaming at once. I leaned down, brushed a stray lock of hair from her damp face, pressed my ear to her chest, and held my breath.

Silence.

Her scent was thinning. That familiar pull had become a ghost in the clinical air, the orange and cedar that was always her fading down to antiseptic and fear.

"Sienna," I whispered. The name felt too small for the room.

The bond snapped.

I crumbled under a force that was not pain but absence, clean and absolute, like a limb gone in a single cut. Something remained, a thin burning thread carrying my regret like a disease, pulsing against my ribs in a hot wave that forced a guttural roar from my throat. The sound bounced off the sterile walls and came back wrong.

I looked at Sienna's body. I looked at Ivy's mouth. One a problem, one a solution, and the thought made my stomach turn on itself.

I pulled Ivy to me out of self-punishment rather than desire. Her mouth tasted of ash. I shoved her away, disgusted by my own need to feel anything, my hands shaking when they left her.

"Get the guard." My voice came out trembling, which I hated. "Wipe every phone in this facility. If a single frame of this reaches the Council I will have heads."

"Alpha, please." Morrigan's composure cracked at the edges, her voice losing its smoothness. "Her pulse is thready. She will survive if we move her before the elders ask questions."

"Move her." I grabbed Ivy by the wrist, her bones small in my grip. "Have you gone mad. She is a corpse in every way that matters."

"Lucas." Ivy's tears pooled without falling, sitting glassy in her eyes. "I thought I was your Luna."

"I never asked for this." I pointed at Sienna's pale frame, at the chest that did not move. "She was supposed to survive. The heir was supposed to be strong. Morrigan said extraction, not death."

"Mom." Ivy's voice came through the mindlink, her eyes fixed on the body while her lips stayed still. "If she is not dead it is the curse."

"I know what to do." Morrigan's projection arrived in my head, too calm, the calm of someone who has already moved three steps ahead. "Lucas is still yours."

She looked up with her mask back in place, her expression carrying something that almost resembled concern. "Alpha Lucas. The blood is extracted. She needs treatment now. Once she wakes we bring her inside and handle the Council."

"It stays a secret," I snapped, my jaw aching from clenching. "Every part of this."

I lifted Sienna's limp body from the table. My hands shook with every step. She weighed nothing, less than nothing, while the bond thread burned hotter with each breath I drew.

"You are empty now," Ivy whispered as we left, her voice barely reaching me. "Let us see how long the Millennium Wolf lasts without a pack."

~~~~Three days later~~~~~

Sienna's POV

Sunlight clawed at my eyelids.

Too bright. Too direct. The scent was wrong, clinical and sharp, cold with antiseptic and plastic. Measured footsteps paced in the hallway outside, patient in the way of people waiting for something specific. I forced my eyes open. Sterile walls, no windows, high-end equipment blinking nearby.

The pack house doctor. I was still here. Still inside the territory of the people who had carved me open.

The needle. The extraction. The dead look in Lucas's eyes. The memories returned in sharp-edged pieces and I sat with each one until they had finished arriving.

I tried to stand. The floor tilted and I caught myself on the bedframe, gasping. The metal was cold enough to sting. The silver in my veins felt like ice rather than power, felt like winter moving through me from the inside. I was alive. That was all I knew with any certainty. The rest was still blank.

The door creaked open.

"You are awake. Thank the Goddess." The doctor's relief sounded real enough to make things worse.

Dr. Noah. Beta to my father, reassigned here as punishment after my father was cast out. His hair was grayer than I remembered. His hands were too steady.

"Stay still," he said, setting a tray down without touching me yet. "Your body is still recovering. The bond threads are frayed, barely holding." He hesitated, his eyes finding mine and widening before he could stop them. "Your eyes, Sienna."

"I know." I swung my legs off the bed, the hospital gown sticking to my skin. "Here to finish his work. Or did they send you because I did not die quietly enough."

Noah flinched. He picked up the gauze and put it down again. "I served your father for twenty years." His hands shook slightly as he bandaged my wrist, his fingers careful. "I could not stop them that night. But I will not let them touch you again. Not while I am breathing."

"Words are cheap, Noah."

"Your eyes," he said quietly, not looking at me. "They have changed. Silver. Almost glowing."

My heart skipped once. I let out a dry hollow laugh that scraped on the way out.

"Here." He set clothes and dark glasses on the bed beside me. The fabric was soft and completely ordinary. "Go to the mirror. If Lucas sees this he will not let you leave this room alive."

I crossed to the bathroom and locked the door. The click landed loud and final in the small space.

I pulled at the hospital gown and looked at my shoulder. Lucas's mark was already a graying scar, flaking at the edges, fading into nothing. The bond still sent a faint pulse through that thin burning thread, his cloying regret arriving against my skin like a touch I had not asked for and could not yet remove.

I looked up.

The woman in the mirror had silver eyes. Not grey, not blue. Silver, the color of metal held to light. I looked again, certain it was the fluorescent bulbs playing tricks, but the hair was different too.

I reached up and touched the strands falling over my shoulders. The color of a winter moon. Cold and bright and not mine.

"My hair," I whispered. "It is silver."

Awe moved through me before the horror followed it back in. I looked like my mother. Like the photographs my father had kept hidden, the ones I was not supposed to have. I looked like the thing they had killed.

I stared at the water stain in the corner of the ceiling and held very still, wondering whether the Moon Goddess was finally done with me.

Or whether she was only just getting started.