The thick, black mud of the lowlands swallowed Eva's boots with every panicked stride.

Freezing rain slithered down the back of her neck, soaking through her torn canvas supply pack.

The storm was a wall of solid water, tearing through the dense canopy of the ancient woods.

Lightning fractured the sky above, throwing sharp, jagged white light across the rotting floor of the forest.

Eva kept her head down.

Her lungs burned with a dull, persistent agony, a physical remnant of the snapped soul-bond.

The rejection had left her biological core weak, her limbs heavy, her muscles trembling under the sheer weight of her own exhaustion.

But her mind remained clear.

Unforgiving.

Analytical.

Her INTJ brain bypassed the physical signals of failure, treating her body as nothing more than a machine running on a limited reserve of fuel.

She counted her steps.

She calculated the wind resistance.

She measured the viscosity of the mud sliding beneath her thin soles.

Behind her, a sound cut through the steady roar of the thunder.

A long, rhythmic, terrifying hunting howl.

The elite enforcers of the Blackwood pack had crossed the inner perimeter.

The sound vibrated through the damp earth, a low-frequency frequency that made the loose shale on the slopes rattle.

They were drawing closer.

Much faster than her calculations had initially predicted.

Eva locked her teeth together, her fingers curling tightly around the heavy silver token inside her wet apron pocket.

Pure predator-prey survival mode.

She wasn't a victim fleeing a pack house anymore.

She was a ghost navigating a grid.

Her internal fire—the cold, electric current humming beneath her ribs—surged again, numbing the pain in her knees.

She scanned the dark tree line ahead, her deep grey eyes mapping the terrain in fractions of a second.

The main path was a death trap.

The vanguard warriors knew every boulder, every ditch, every hidden game trail on the eastern ridge.

She needed an anomaly.

An unmapped route that defied their tracking logic.

CRACK.

Another hunting howl erupted, this time from the left flank, barely two hundred yards away.

The hounds were catching her scent despite the torrential downpour.

They were tracking the traces of her blood—the residual iron she had vomited onto the Grand Hall floor.

Eva turned sharply to the right, abandoning the old logging trail completely.

She threw her body into the thick briars, the sharp thorns tearing through the fabric of her sleeve, carving thin red lines across her forearms.

She didn't feel the cuts.

She kept her focus locked onto the elevation lines of the terrain.

According to her mental layout of the territory, the border cliff lay exactly seven hundred meters ahead.

A vertical drop into the unmapped dead-zone.

If she reached the edge, the pack’s legal authority evaporated under ancestral law.

BOOM.

A massive stroke of lightning struck an ancient, lightning-scarred pine tree fifty yards ahead.

The trunk split down the center with a deafening, metallic rip, exploding into a shower of white sparks and burning pitch.

The massive top half of the tree collapsed forward, crashing through the undergrowth with a heavy, concussive thud.

The burning timber fell directly across her path, pointing like a charred, glowing finger toward the jagged rocks of the Forbidden territory.

The smoke from the wet wood billowed out, thick and grey, masking her heat signature from the tracking hounds.

"A path," Eva whispered, her breath hitching in her throat.

She scrambled over the smoking trunk, her leather palms burning as she pressed into the hot ash.

She dropped down into the deep ravine on the other side.

The mud here was thicker, a black soup that rose past her ankles, forcing her to drag her legs forward with sheer mechanical force.

The hunting howls behind her suddenly changed pitch.

A sharp, synchronized baying that meant they had found her tracks on the log.

They were onto the anomaly.

Eva reached the base of the final incline, the steep rock face of the border cliff rising through the grey mist above.

The cliff edge was a jagged tooth of granite, hanging over a black abyss of unmapped wilderness.

Twenty yards.

Ten yards.

Suddenly, the wind behind her stopped blowing.

The heavy rain seemed to freeze mid-air, the ambient pressure in the ravine spiking violently as a suffocating predatory aura dropped over the slope.

A shadow broke through the grey wall of water.

A massive golden streak leaped over the muddy briars, clearing thirty feet of open ground in a single, kinetic arc.

The great beast landed heavily on the granite shelf directly ahead of her.

Blocking the cliff edge completely.

Killian Vance.

The giant golden wolf stood over six feet tall at the shoulder, his thick fur matted with black mud and fresh rainwater.

His upper lip was pulled back completely, revealing three inches of white, lethal incisors dripping with hot saliva.

His dark gold eyes burned through the dark, his pupils contracted into two razor-thin black slits.

Thorin let out a low, guttural vibration from deep inside his chest-core.

A sound that shook the loose pebbles near Eva’s boots.

Eva stopped her advance five feet from his massive front paws.

Her body was spent, her chest rising and falling in rapid, shallow gasps, her lungs screaming for oxygen.

But her eyes didn't drop.

She looked straight into the fiery gold of his stare, her face settling back into that cold, unyielding Scorpio ice.

The golden wolf didn't lunge.

He stood there, a solid barrier of purebred muscle and dominant authority, his chest heaving as he locked her in place.

Behind them, the torches of the elite enforcers began to flicker through the trees.

The hunt was over.

The trap had closed.

Eva slowly took her right hand out of her apron pocket, her fingers loosening from her silver token.

She raised her chin, her deep grey eyes locking onto his with the precision of a sniper, waiting for the first move.