The Lies We Steal The Hollow Boys 1

The forest was bleeding.

Not in the poetic way the elders spoke of when they told stories around winter fires. This was real blood-hot, metallic, pooling between frost-coated roots that had no business being white in late August. The air carried the stink of iron and pine sap, and beneath it, something softer. Something that didn't belong.

Lavender.

I was barefoot, human-form, but my wolf pressed so close to the surface my skin rippled with silver fur that refused to fully break through. My name is Elara Voss. Nineteen years old. Omega by birth, tracker by necessity. And tonight, every instinct I had was screaming that if I followed this scent trail one more step, nothing in my life would ever be the same.

I followed it anyway.

The scream that had shattered the night ten minutes ago still echoed inside my skull-high, female, cut off too sharply to be anything but fatal. Alpha Caelan had ordered the entire pack to stay within the inner perimeter after dusk. Rogue sightings. Strange tracks. Whispers of hunters armed with silver-tipped arrows. Orders were orders.

But the scream had come from the north ridge-the forbidden stretch of Blackthorn territory no one crossed unless they wanted to disappear. And the voice... I knew that voice.

I'd know it anywhere.

So here I was, slipping between ancient oaks like a ghost, heart hammering so loud I was half-convinced whatever had killed those warriors already heard me coming.

The old mill appeared through the trees like a rotting corpse. Moonlight speared through broken windows and the caved-in roof, painting the floorboards in silver and shadow. The smell hit me first-death, thick and cloying, mixed with something electric. Ozone. Like a storm trapped inside four walls.

Then I saw the bodies.

Three of them. Our warriors. Garrick, Torin, and Marcus-Beta Rowan's only son. They lay scattered across the mill floor like broken toys, chests cracked open, ribs splayed wide. Not torn. Carved. Someone had used claws with surgical precision, peeling flesh back the way a butcher separates meat from bone. Their hearts were missing.

I gagged, clamping a hand over my mouth. My wolf whined, high and panicked, pacing behind my eyes.

That's when I noticed her.

She knelt in the center of the carnage, white dress soaked crimson from hem to collar, dark hair spilling over one shoulder like spilled ink. Her back was to me, but I would know that silhouette in the dark. I'd traced it with my eyes a thousand times from across the training yard, from the omega barracks window, from every shadowed corner I'd ever hidden in just to watch her laugh.

Selene Blackthorn.

The Alpha's daughter. The future Luna of the Blackthorn Pack. The girl who had looked me in the eye two weeks ago during the full-moon feast and said, loud enough for the entire pack to hear, "An omega like you should know her place, Elara. Beneath the rest of us."

She was crying.

Not the delicate tears of a princess. These were ugly, body-shaking sobs that tore out of her throat like they were being ripped free. Her hands goddess, her hands were buried wrist-deep inside Marcus's chest cavity. When she pulled them out, something glistened between her blood-slick fingers.

A heart.

Still beating.

The world tilted. My knees buckled, but I caught myself against a splintered beam. The heart pulsed once, twice, black veins crawling across its surface like living ink. Selene brought it to her mouth.

She bit into it.

The sound wet, intimate, obscene would haunt me for the rest of my life. Blood poured down her chin, over her white dress, dripping onto the floorboards already slick with it. Her eyes rolled back, lashes fluttering, and a moan slipped from her lips that sounded disturbingly like pleasure.

"What the fuck, Selene?"

My voice cracked like a pup's first howl. I hadn't meant to speak. Hadn't meant to move. But the words tore out of me anyway.