The absolute whiteness of Alberta was no longer a shroud draped over me; it was the stomach of a beast sworn to swallow me whole. Carried on Varg's shoulders, leaving behind the silence of a shattered army, I was being hauled into the very lungs of the darkness.
As the snow whipped against my face like a barrage of frozen needles, my mind kept drifting back to the world I had left behind—the world of internet forum "ship" wars, late-night scrolling, and the tasteless yet oddly comforting school cafeteria pasta.
What was home?
In the world of wolves, home was a hidden fortress within the forest, a place of mud and fur and hierarchy. It was building shacks among the ancient trees, far from the reach of human law. Was home the freedom to chase prey until your lungs burned? Or did it simply mean belonging to a pack that viewed you as a breeding vessel?
I didn't know. The home I possessed was woven from different threads. It was sitting in a dimly lit diner after school, eating cheap, greasy hamburgers. It was biting into cold, tasteless fries that were stuck together like twins, trying to dip them into a single puddle of ketchup. Home was the chaotic, beautiful noise of Dominic and Melanie bickering over the last packet of Ranch sauce.
I was rarely allowed to stray far from the pack house, but those few nights I'd spent at Chloe's were my true sanctuary.
We had opened cheap wine, lit scented candles that smelled like vanilla, and slurped market noodles while gossiping about boys who would never understand us. I had never tasted anything sweeter in my life. Wrapped in soft, floral sheets while wearing my favorite oversized pajamas, with the scent of cheap teenage perfume lingering in the air... the world was mine then.
That was my luxury. Those were my ordinary human days, a life where I wasn't forced to endure this jagged wolf destiny.
A single, hot tear escaped my eye and splattered onto Varg's cold, leather-clad shoulder. I wondered if he felt it. I wondered if a monster like him—a High Alpha who seemed to have forgotten the warmth of a hearth—could even recognize the weight of a human sorrow.
Varg stopped abruptly before the tangled, skeletal roots of an uprooted spruce tree. The hollow beneath it looked as if it had been gouged out by the claws of a titan. His voice was grating and relentless, a sound like a heavy headstone scraping against the frozen earth.
"Get in there," he commanded, his finger pointing toward the dark, yawning void. "The storm is upon us. We'll spend the night in this den, sheltered from the snow."
A laugh escaped my lips—a dry, jagged sound that carried more of the tone of despair than the cold. "A den?" I said, staring at that damp, cramped little burrow. "You mean that small, moist hole in the ground? You honestly expect me to crawl in there like some common animal? To sleep in the dirt like a worm?"
Varg's patience was a frayed wire, as fresh and searing as the blood still seeping from the claw marks I'd left on his face. He loomed over me like an eclipse, his breath a potent cocktail of fresh prey and vintage whisky.
"Damn it!" he roared, his voice echoing with a primal power that seemed to vibrate through my very marrow.
"Just get inside and shift! Curl up and sleep. Your body heat is the only thing that will keep you alive through this blizzard, freak. Your 'human' fragility is a death sentence out here."
I looked at him with the dignified rage of a parasite—with that poisonous hybridity that circulated through my veins like a genetic error. I wasn't going to give him the satisfaction of seeing me break, even as the frost began to crust my eyelashes.
"I use blankets and a bed to sleep, Varg. In fact, I use double pillows. I hug one and rest my head on the other," I said, my voice hardening from a sob into a sharp challenge.
"Furthermore... I never shift. The wolf inside me never woke up; it's just a silent wreckage left to me from my mother's dead womb. I'm just that 'fucking mistake,' remember? You can't ask a ghost to haunt a house it doesn't own. I have no fur to keep me warm, no beast to shield me from the ice."
The frail Omega instincts inside me were weeping, trembling under this savage man's oppressive authority, but the ice-cold composure granted by my dead vampire venom kept me standing. I was pushing my luck, I knew that.
If I annoyed him enough, he could end me right here—tear my throat out and leave my blood to steam in the snow.
He was uncanny, unlike any Alpha ben encountered. Kael's allies were stern, but they had a veneer of civilization.
But Varg? Varg felt like something unearthed from an ancient, violent era. He was a vandal, a relic of a time when wolves were nothing but teeth and hunger.
I knew of Alphas who lived in their wolf forms for years, slowly losing their humanity until they became nothing but feral shadows. Varg felt as if he had lived in that darkness for decades, his soul replaced by the relentless drive of a predator.
"Rotten seed," Varg muttered, his eyes flashing with a brief, unreadable spark before he turned his back on me. He strode into the gathering gloom of the forest, his boots crunching rhythmically against the ice. The blizzard was intensifying, turning the air into a wall of white static.
"Hey!" I bellowed, my voice sounding small and brittle against the roar of the wind. "Don't you dare leave me here! I am your 'key,' remember? You can't unlock your hell if I'm a frozen corpse!"
"What will you do?" Varg's voice drifted back, disembodied and cruel. "Try dying; maybe you'll finally be good at something, little freak. Or maybe the cold will do what your father couldn't—cleanse the world of a parasite."
"I'll go home!" I shouted, the fury in my chest providing a fleeting, burning warmth. "I'll testify as an Omega kidnapped from her borders! A war will start, Kael will find you, and you'll lose everything, Alpha!"
"I repeat, little freak." Varg's voice was barely a whisper now, fading into the rhythmic howl of the storm.
"You'll only have tried dying a little further away from your precious borders. Nature doesn't care about your testimonies, and your prince is currently face-down in the mud, weeping for his lost toy."
He disappeared into the shadows, leaving me alone with the oppressive silence of the trees and the growing, terrifying numbness in my fingers. I stood there, a paradox in a soaked sweater, staring at the dark hole in the ground and the infinite, freezing darkness that surrounded it.
My "human" pride was a flickering candle in a hurricane, and for the first time, the cold felt like it was winning—seeping into my bones, whispering that perhaps Varg was right.
Perhaps it was time to finally be good at something. Perhaps it was time to die.