The forest was a blur of dead wood and biting wind.
Bridget ran. She didn't feel the snow packing between the pads of her feet. She didn't feel the jagged branches whipping against her face. She felt nothing but the intoxicating, terrifying high of absolute freedom. The earth rushed beneath her in a rhythmic blur. Stride, leap, land, stride.
Her muscles, cramped and atrophied from two decades of forced humanity, stretched and snapped with brutal power. She was a ghost cutting through the dark. She leapt over fallen pine trunks that would have taken a man minutes to climb. She scrambled up steep, icy ravines without breaking her stride.
For the first hour, there was only joy. Pure, savage joy. The beast was out. The cage was broken.
But freedom had a price, and her body was demanding payment.
Somewhere deep in the Iron Valley, five miles from the castle walls, the adrenaline began to curdle. A sickening cramp seized her hind legs. Bridget stumbled, her chin plowing into a snowbank. She scrambled up, shaking her massive head, but the world tilted. A sharp, coppery taste flooded her mouth.
The wolfsbane. She had ingested enough of the toxic root to kill a horse just three hours ago, trying to suppress the full moon. Her shift had overridden the poison, temporarily burning it as fuel for her rage. But now the chemical was leaching back into her bloodstream. Her liver was failing.
Her heart hammered an erratic, panicked rhythm against her ribs. She staggered forward, her vision tunneling. The silver-black fur began to recede, shedding in thick clumps against the snow.
No, the wolf whimpered. Not back into the dark.
She had no choice. Her body was collapsing under the strain.
Bridget dragged herself beneath the sprawling roots of a massive dead oak tree, curling into a tight ball as the agonizing process of the reverse shift began. Bones cracked. Tendons snapped and reknitted. The fur melted into bare, freezing skin. It was infinitely worse than the transformation into the wolf, because this shift was returning her to a body that was dying of poison and hypothermia.
Bridget screamed, but the sound tore from a human throat.
When it was over, she lay shivering violently in the dirt. She was naked, coated in sweat that was rapidly freezing into a thin layer of ice on her skin. Her throat felt like it was packed with ground glass. Her left arm, where Corvin had grabbed her, was mottled with deep purple bruising.
She forced her eyes open. It was still night. The wind howled through the dead branches above. She was going to freeze to death before the sun came up.
Get up, a voice whispered in her head. It wasn't the wolf this time. It was the survival instinct of a bruised, battered human woman who had scrubbed floors for twenty years just to stay alive. Get up.
Bridget rolled onto her stomach, digging her raw, cracked fingers into the frozen earth. She dragged herself out from under the roots. Every movement was a negotiation with agony.
She scanned the dark woods. About fifty yards away, barely visible through the driving snow, she spotted the jagged silhouette of a trapper's lean-to. It was a crude shelter built by the castle huntsmen for waiting out winter storms.
She crawled toward it. Her knees left bloody streaks in the snow.
When she finally reached the shelter, it was empty. It smelled of old grease and wet dog. But hanging over a crossbeam was a heavy, moth-eaten wool blanket, and sitting in the corner was a pair of oversized leather boots left behind by a careless hunter.
Bridget wrapped the blanket around herself, trembling so violently her teeth chipped against each other. She shoved her feet into the boots. They were far too large, but they were dry. She found a rusted skinning knife on a small wooden stump that served as a table. She gripped the bone handle, finding a pathetic measure of comfort in the cold steel.
She huddled in the darkest corner of the lean-to, pulling the blanket over her head, trying to trap her body heat.
The silence of the woods was heavy. Too heavy.
Bridget closed her eyes, trying to focus her chaotic senses. Her hearing, still sharp from the lingering wolf traits, pushed through the sound of the wind. She heard a branch snap. Then the soft, rhythmic crunch of heavy boots on snow.
Not a pack of hounds. Not a squad of men. One man. He was tracking her, and he was fast.
Bridget clutched the rusted knife tighter to her chest. She knew that scent. Ozone and old blood, crushed pine.
Garrick. He hadn't sent his guards. He had come to execute her himself.
Garrick moved through the forest like a shadow detached from the night. He had shed his heavy armor, wearing only a thick leather tunic, hardened breeches, and his fur-lined cloak. The cold didn't bother him. His internal temperature ran high, fueled by the predator pacing just beneath his skin.
He followed the trail of blood and silver fur. The scent of her was maddening. It was a chaotic mix of absolute alpha dominance and sickening chemical rot.
As he tracked her, Garrick pieced together the horrifying truth. The faint smell of ash and bitter herbs mixed in her blood told the story. Wolfsbane. She had been poisoning herself for years, judging by the way the scent clung to her very marrow. She had deliberately destroyed her own body to suppress her nature, hiding in plain sight within the walls of the man who had slaughtered her kind.
The realization hit Garrick like a physical blow to the chest. He was a ruthless king, but he was not a monster. The sheer willpower, the unimaginable agony she must have endured to survive under his roof, commanded a strange, twisted respect.
He found the spot where she had shifted back. The snow was melted, stained with sweat, and a small pool of blood from her raw knees. He knelt, pressing his bare fingers into the earth. The ground was still warm.
He stood, his eyes narrowing as he looked toward the dense thicket of pines. He could smell the rusted iron of the trapper's lean-to. He could hear the erratic, shallow fluttering of her human heartbeat.
She was close, and she was terrified.