My Mate Tried to Bury Me Alive After Rejecting Me

By the second afternoon, the fever hit.

My mouth tasted like copper and dead grass. The wolfsbane painted on the baseboards had seeped deep into my skin, turning my veins into lines of fire. My thoughts kept blurring, trying to dissolve into black static.

I wouldn't let them.

I dragged myself up against the damp foundation stones, digging my fingernails into the rough mortar until the sting anchored me. Then, in the pitch-black cellar, I began to recite the facts.

"August twelfth," I whispered, my voice a dry rasp against the stone. "Forty thousand gallons of emergency fuel funneled south to Saige Hughes’s border. October third. Seven tons of reserve grain marked as spoilage, shipped to the same pack. November twenty-eighth. The mind-link logs proving Gage promised her my title."

My inner wolf stirred. She didn't whimper. She pushed against my ribs, heavy and hot.

"December bonfire," I continued, forcing my swollen tongue around every syllable. "Faith Weaver stole my mother’s moonstone relics to collar a rogue. Tribunal convened without a quorum of elders. Three Delta guards bribed with forgiven debts. Imprisoned without pack council sanction."

Every time I named their crimes, the pressure in my chest spiked. It wasn't panic anymore. It was pure, architectural fury. It beat through my blood, pushing back the toxic fog of the wolfsbane. My wolf paced back and forth behind my ribs, gigantic and relentless, feeding on every word.

By the third night, the rain started.

I heard it hammering the ground level above me. Cold drafts trickled through the tiny, dirt-crusted window set high into the foundation wall. Water dripped down the concrete, pooling near my bare feet.

I knew Gage’s timetable. He gave people three days to break. In the morning, he would return with the Luna Accord waiver and two guards, ready to hold my hand to the paper.

I wasn't going to be here.

I pulled myself onto my feet. My knees wobbled, shaking violently from dehydration, but I forced my weight onto them. In the dark, my fingers searched the recessed alcove where the pack elders used to store ceremonial tools.

My knuckles brushed cold metal. The heavy silver candlestick. Solid, thick, and nearly two feet long.

I ripped a long strip of denim from my torn hem and wound it tight around my palm so the silver wouldn't burn my skin. I gripped the base, lined myself up beneath the small foundation window, and stepped onto the rusted water pipe.

I swung with everything I had.

*Crack.*

The candlestick shattered the thick pane. Heavy shards of glass exploded outward into the mud. I struck it again, splintering the rotten wooden frame and gouging out the mortar around the iron grate.

Cold, wet Oregon air rushed into my face.

It hit my scorched lungs like ice water. I reached up, caught the sill with both hands, and hauled my body upward. The jagged glass sliced through my jacket, biting into my ribs.

I kicked through the opening, desperate to clear the frame. My boot caught the twisted iron edge. As my weight dragged me forward, the metal snapped my lower leg back with a sickening, wet crunch.

Pain exploded through my fibula. A white-hot flare blinded me, and I tumbled headfirst into the freezing mud outside.

The agony should have knocked me unconscious. The broken bone, the three days of starvation, the wolfsbane poisoning my blood—it should have killed an Omega.

Instead, something inside me detonated.

My body locked rigid in the mud. My spine arched, every muscle tearing itself apart as my joints cracked and expanded. The dormant shell that had trapped me for ten years shattered like thin ice. The moonstone relics were gone; nothing was left to suppress what I was.

My bones lengthened, snapping and reforming in seconds with thunderous cracks. Silver-white fur ripped through my skin, thick and dense, glowing with a soft, ethereal light under the rain.

I opened my jaws and let out a roar.

It wasn't a dog’s yelp. It was an earth-shattering bellow that tore the air apart. The sheer concussive force of my aura blew outward in a visible wave, smashing the rotten foundation wall behind me into flying stone and splinters.

Alarms wailed across the compound. Floodlights blinked on, washing the mud in harsh yellow glare.

Dozens of pack members spilled out of the back doors into the downpour.

"Rogue breach!" someone yelled.

Three Delta guards sprinted toward the cellar breach, shifting halfway into their grey wolf forms.

I rose.

I stood twice the height of any Delta, my shoulders broad and powerful, rain hissing into steam the moment it touched my silver-white fur. The aura rolling off my body hit the yard like a physical wall of gravity.

The three charging Deltas froze mid-stride. Their wolves whimpered inside their heads, their legs buckling under an instinctual, biological terror they had never felt before. They dropped belly-down into the red mud, their throats bared in involuntary submission.

The entire yard went dead silent. Nobody moved. Nobody breathed.

I dragged my fractured hind leg forward, the broken bone already knitting beneath thick muscle, leaving a trail of crushed grass behind me. I turned my head toward the pack house porch.

Gage stood at the top of the steps, caught in the beam of the porch light.

His coat was unbuttoned, his hair plastered to his forehead by the storm. He stared down at me, his eyes wide, his hands limp at his sides.

For ten years, Gage had lived on the calculation that I was weak. That I was a broken thing he could quietly discard when a better offer came along.

Now, his face was completely blank. His smooth, arrogant composure hadn't cracked into rage. It had frozen into the hollow shock of a man watching the very ground fall out from beneath his feet.

I didn't give him the satisfaction of a second glance.

I turned, leaped the outer boundary fence in a single, effortless bound, and vanished into the black timberline.