Lila moved with the silent, desperate stealth of a cat burglar who has only ever practiced by reading thrillers. She was not a warrior; she was a reader. But in this terrifying world, the difference was academic—she knew the plot, and the plot said run.
The moment she turned her back on the established Southern Pass and began navigating the treacherous, unmarked path toward the Black River Falls, her terror morphed into a cold, focused adrenaline rush. The forest here was dense, ancient, and unforgiving. The low-hanging mist, combined with the pre-dawn gloom, made every gnarled root look like a crouching Beta guard.
Lila gripped Elara's cryptic note like a talisman. South-West to the Black River Falls. Abandoned Watch Tower. Wait for the signal. It was a lifeline of hope woven into the fabric of absolute despair.
Her main advantage was her Beta Supply Unit training. She knew the Southern Peaks were riddled with Alpha patrol routes. She kept her eyes on the ground, reading the faint signs of disturbed moss and broken twigs, navigating by memory of the one topographical map she'd skimmed. Never take the high ridge, Alphas prefer the clear sightlines.
She stopped to take a careful drink of water and quickly retrieve the remaining supplies from her pack. She felt a slight metallic taste in her mouth and a dizzying rush.
The scent.
Even miles away, Adrian's Aura—raw with possessive territoriality after the ambush—was subtly clinging to the mountain air. She might have put distance between them, but she hadn't erased the True Blood's trace. Every Alpha within five miles would be able to track her residual fear scent, compounded by Adrian's specific pheromone signature that had clung to her clothes during the PPUED night. She was a moving, highly perfumed beacon of True Blood property.
She remembered the Pheromone Neutralizer.
The dark, squat bottle Elara had brought to the stables was crushed by Adrian. But Elara, bless her terrified, brilliant soul, had packaged the supplies.
Lila ripped open the emergency medical kit. Inside the gauze and antiseptic, tucked into a small, sealed plastic bag, was a tiny, clear vial—a sample-sized Field-Grade Scent Concealer. Not the full bottle, but enough for emergency application.
"Elara," Lila whispered, tears of profound relief welling up. "You are my true hero."
She unscrewed the top. The Concealer wasn't odorless, it smelled aggressively of wet earth and wintergreen—a Beta-standard camouflage scent designed to mimic neutral forest ground cover.
Lila doused herself liberally, prioritizing her hair, the collar of her jacket, and her boots. She smelled less like the "aggressive fragrance of a desperate socialite" and more like a highly motivated, slightly medicinal pine tree. Take that, surveillance system!
She was moving quickly along a narrow, rocky ledge when she heard it, the heavy, rhythmic thud of boots on the stone trail above. Alpha Patrol.
Lila immediately threw herself flat against a dense patch of thorny undergrowth, pulling her dark cloak over her head. Her heart pounded a frantic rhythm against the cold stone.
Two Academy guards—Betas, thankfully, not full Alphas—passed within twenty feet of her hiding spot. They were scanning the ground, clipboards in hand, clearly following the standard search pattern for "Missing Asset, Omega Blackwood."
"He says she's heading back to the main roads," the first Beta muttered, his voice strained. "But the True Blood's pheromones are all over the air here. It's confusing the tracking hounds."
The second Beta sighed heavily. "He's radiating a high-grade possessiveness scent. It's making the entire mountain volatile. He's furious she disobeyed the Do Not Move order. Said he's going to flay her alive for the 'deviation in the data point'."
Lila clenched her jaw. Deviation in the data point. That was her love language with Adrian.
She held her breath, the wintergreen scent of the Concealer mixing with the bitter taste of fear. The Betas paused right next to her, inspecting a broken twig. Lila pressed her face into the cold dirt, convinced they could hear her racing heartbeat.
"Wait," the first Beta said, sniffing the air. "Do you smell that?"
Lila froze. Oh, Moon Goddess, did the Concealer fail?
The Beta took another deep, investigative sniff. "It smells like... an overstock of Moroccan Mint Tea and moss. Maybe she stopped for a picnic?"
The second Beta snorted. "Don't be an idiot. It's just local flora. Let's stick to the route. We don't want to be the next data point the Alpha 'strips of privilege'."
They moved on, their footsteps fading into the distance.
Lila sagged with relief. The Concealer hadn't hidden her entirely, but it had scrambled the data. Adrian's potent, lingering pheromone signature—which had stained her clothes after the cave intimacy—was clashing with the Concealer, confusing the scent hounds and Beta noses. It was the olfactory equivalent of a glitch in the Matrix.
Lila continued her desperate journey, relying entirely on Elara's vague directions. The Black River Falls route was brutal, forcing her to scramble over slick rocks and through dense, thorny thickets that tore at her expensive riding gear.
She was exhausted, but strangely, the mundane physical difficulty was a welcome distraction from the psychological torment of Adrian.
Around mid-morning, she reached a point where the path split into three, one clearly marked trail (a false sense of security), one thicket (impassable), and a third, narrow ravine that looked like a dead end.
Lila paused, chewing on a dried energy bar. The map Elara had given her was useless here, this path wasn't on it.
Think, Ava. Where would a non-Alpha hide?
She remembered a line from a military fantasy novel about counter-surveillance, The safest route is always the path that appears impossible and requires the most physical cost.
The ravine. It was dark, steep, and required a clumsy, near-vertical climb down a slick rock face.
Lila started the descent. It was terrifying and undignified. She slid, scraped, and swore under her breath, a comedy of errors performed for an audience of pines.
Midway down, she noticed something odd—a faint, deliberately placed marker on the slick stone. Not a rune, or a symbol, but a simple line drawn in chalk, too precise to be accidental.
She spotted another one ten feet down, then another—a series of tiny, coded marks placed only where the true path was hidden.
This isn't Elara, Lila realized. Elara is kind, not a cryptographer.
The marks were complex, almost mathematical. Lila stared at the chalk line and the subtle, accompanying scratch marks. Her internal monologue, the Reader part of her brain, kicked into high gear.
This looks like the Beta-grade maintenance cipher used by the Academy's ancient texts restoration unit. Wait... that's Harry's specialty!
Harry Westwell, the kind, sincere Alpha hero—her original crush, the one Chloe was obsessed with—had studied under the ancient texts unit. He had the knowledge to create these coded markers.
But why? Was Harry, concerned about the unclaimed Omega, secretly providing her with an escape route? Or was this a trap, leading her to his control, rather than Adrian's?
Lila looked down the dark, steep ravine, then back at the Academy looming in the distance. Either way, it was a path away from Adrian.
She took a deep breath, adjusted the wintergreen-scented collar, and continued her terrifying descent, following the cryptic marks left by the kind Alpha hero. The mountain was full of mysteries, and her survival now depended entirely on which hero she could trust—the honest one, or the one she had just betrayed.