Get It 30

Richard moves first. He crosses the space between the front row and Hope in three strides, and the air shifts—a man staring at the woman he married like he’s meeting a stranger wearing her face.

“Callum died at the Eastern Ridge.” Richard’s voice doesn’t shake—it fractures, clean and dry. “I held his body, Hope. I carried him home and buried my friend—so you’re going to explain what you just said, and you’re going to do it now.”

“Callum died at the Eastern Ridge. That part is true.” Hope stands the way she always stands—composed, chin level, arranged for maximum effect. “But he went to that fight already weakened.”

The implication spreads through the hall, slow and corrosive. She didn’t drive the blade—she ensured it would find a man too depleted to survive.

My legs fold and Max’s hand tightens around mine, dragging me back to vertical. The pendant burns cold against my sternum—Dad’s cord, Dad’s tooth, the last piece of a man who tried to save his daughter and was sent somewhere he couldn’t return from.

“He found out about the suppression.” Hope’s voice doesn’t waver, doesn’t crack—clinical, measured. “He threatened to expose me, to take Kylie and leave.”

“So you killed him.” Richard’s voice is barely a voice anymore. “You sent Callum to die on a ridge I defended beside him because he was inconvenient.”

“I sent a man who would have destroyed his own child by dragging her into the open.” Hope’s chin lifts, defiant even now, even cornered. “I made a choice—the same one I’ve made every day since.”

“A choice.” Richard’s fist presses against his own chest, the knuckles drained white. “You stand in my hall and you call my friend’s murder a choice.”

“And what would you have done?” Hope pivots to address the room, her voice pitched to carry. “A dangerous child in a pack that slaughters anything it doesn’t understand—would you have let him expose her?”

“Don’t you dare use him to justify this.” Richard’s voice drops to something barely audible, and the wolves nearest him lean away like his proximity alone could scorch. “Don’t you dare—take his name out of your mouth, you don’t deserve to mourn him.”

Mina’s voice cuts through before the silence can settle, high and serrated, aimed like something she’s been sharpening all evening. “What are you? What kind of creature lies for thirteen years and calls it love?”

“I don’t owe you an answer, girl.” The seams in Hope’s composure are showing now—threads pulling loose under Mina’s aim, the performance fraying at its edges. “You have no idea what I’ve sacrificed.”

“Sacrifice.” Mina throws the word back like something rotten she found on her plate. “Is that what you’re calling it?”

“Enough.” Richard steps closer to Hope, and every wolf in the front three rows draws back from the space between them.

“Are you a wolf, Hope?” His voice is stripped to bone now, nothing left in it but the question. “Answer me. Right now, in front of this pack.”

The hall contracts around the question. Two hundred wolves and not a single exhale between them, and the candle flames are the only things still moving.

Hope’s mouth opens—and her glamour flickers. Not a gradual fade but a rupture, a glitch in thirteen years of borrowed belonging, and the wolf scent she’s worn like a second skin vanishes.

Where warmth was—packmate, family—there’s nothing but absence, a void so complete every wolf in the room registers it at once. Heads turn, nostrils flare on empty air, and confusion curdles into something worse.

The word starts in the third row and reaches the back wall before anyone can catch it: witch.

My ribcage splits open in two directions at once. I didn’t kill my father—air rushes into spaces that have been sealed since I was eight, thirteen years of blood on small hands dissolving into what it always was. A lie fed to a child who loved her mother enough to swallow it.

But my mother killed him instead. She took the one person who tried to save me and arranged his death with the same steady hands that held my face while she planted the memory. Acquitted and orphaned in the same sixty seconds.

Something snaps. Not the slow fracture I’ve been managing for weeks—not the leak, not the crack. My wolf doesn’t break through the suppression; she erases it.

The shift takes me and it is nothing controlled, nothing graceful. My bones reshape and a sound tears from my throat that I don’t recognize as mine, and beneath the blinding white-hot there’s a power I’ve never touched—vast, ancient, something that is wolf and something far older.

The nearest wolves stagger backward with wide eyes, bared throats, their bodies obeying instinct before their minds can intervene. The recognition of something they have no category for—no name, no protocol, no way to process what they’re seeing.

My vision floods gold—then shifts, deepens into something else. The hall drops silent, even the enforcers frozen mid-stance, every body oriented toward a creature none of them can name.

New body, same gift for making every room I enter catastrophically weird. If there’s a rank below omega for whatever I just became, the pack will invent it by morning.

Inside this form I am drowning. Every muscle points one direction—toward Hope, toward the woman fifteen feet away who fed me my father’s death as a bedtime story and called it protection. Three strides, maybe two, and the geometry is so simple my body barely needs to calculate.

“Stand down.” An enforcer’s voice, shaking hard enough to betray every instinct telling him to run. “Not a step.” Max, low and absolute, and the enforcer’s mouth closes.

That’s the part that sends my pulse into my teeth—not the wanting, but how close I am to becoming the exact monster she spent thirteen years convincing me I already was.

Max steps between us. Not beside me, not behind—directly in front, his chest filling my entire field of vision, his hands rising slow and deliberate until his palms press against my face.

“Kylie.”

Not a command. Not the alpha voice that bends rooms and drops gazes. Just my name—quiet, steady, the way he said it through the bathroom door while steam blurred everything, the way he said it in the dark with his forehead pressed to mine.

Every nerve in this body screams toward Hope, every tendon wound for the lunge that would close the distance. But his palms hold me, and the bond hums between us at a frequency only we can hear—and the current bends, pulled off course by his hands and the certainty behind them.

I breathe. In, through lungs shaped wrong, a chest too large for what I remember being. Out, through a mouth that isn’t mine but somehow knows how to match the rhythm his heartbeat is setting.

I stay.

Someone in the crowd—a whisper barely louder than breath, carrying through the silence like a crack spreading across glass: “What is she?”

Nobody answers. The hall holds its breath, two hundred wolves and a question that will outlast this room, this night, this version of the world where the pack knew what it was and who belonged inside it. Nobody answers, because nobody can.

To be continued…

P.S. Author’s note:

Dear readers, my biggest thanks to you for accompanying me on this journey! It’s very important to me, and I genuinely hope that this was entertaining for you. But don’t rush to look for something new to read, because this story is not over yet! The new chapters are already cooking, so I hope to see you back here soon!