Chapter 12

She turned her gaze toward me briefly, catching my eye, and gave me a faint nod. I returned the gesture, though I couldn’t suppress the unease that had settled deep in my chest since the day Dante returned.

In the forest beyond Talon Pack’s borders, nightfall shrouded the trees in shadows, but I didn’t need light to navigate. This land had once been my home, and I knew it as intimately as I knew the wolves who had cast me out.

Talon Pack had always claimed loyalty as its greatest strength, but loyalty was nothing without power to back it. I had tried to show them that, to make them understand. They hadn’t listened. Instead, they’d branded me a threat and banished me, as if my vision for strength and dominance was something to fear.

The memory of Marcus’s judgment was as sharp as ever.

“Your ambition blinds you to the needs of the pack,” he had said.

My ambition? No, it had been their lack of vision that doomed them. They couldn’t see that diplomacy and peace would make them weak, that their so-called unity was a crutch. I had wanted to make Talon Pack a force to be reckoned with—a pack other wolves would bow to, not out of respect, but out of fear.

They hadn’t seen it. So I had built my own pack from the wolves the others had cast aside: the fighters, the rogues, those who had been too strong, too aggressive for their soft-hearted leaders. I had forged something real, something unbreakable. And still, the sting of Talon Pack’s rejection burned. They had taken everything I’d wanted and handed it to someone else—a young, untested Alpha named Elara.