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Chapter 19

Summary: As an omega who has spent her entire life rejecting biology, destiny, and every alpha who thinks softness is something owed, you’ve built yourself out of spite and survival. You don’t believe in belonging. You don’t believe in bonds. You don’t believe love means anything if fate gets to choose it for you first. But then, Valko walks into your life: an alpha who might challenge every single thing you’ve ever believed about fate, freedom, and love. Do you dare follow?

Word Count: 5.4k

Cn: 18+ MDNI! Omegaverse, Alpha/Omega dynamics, Bunny Hybrid Reader, Alpha!Valko, Enemies to friends to lovers, Fated mates, Angst

An: VALKO IS FINALLY HERE AND SO IS THE ANGST YAY

Chapter List | Fact Sheet | Valko Masterlist | Read on AO3

An abandoned factory district sat on the edge of Linkon for Tuesday’s mission. From above, it looked less like a neighborhood and more like a graveyard made of corrugated metal, rusted roofs, broken skylights, skeletal walkways, and long-dead smokestacks standing against the night. The buildings were packed close together in uneven blocks, some tall and rectangular with shattered windows, others low and wide with garage doors warped by weather and neglect. Wind dragged loose sheets of metal against their frames in slow, whining scrapes. Old signs creaked over loading docks. Somewhere below, rainwater dripped steadily from a broken gutter into a puddle black enough to reflect nothing.

You crouched on the edge of a rooftop with one gloved hand braced against the cold concrete lip and watched three men move through the alley below. They were dressed too similarly to be random. Black jackets. Black pants. Boots meant for running, not working. Caps pulled low. No visible affiliation marks, no insignia, nothing that would make them easy to identify if someone caught a security image of them slipping between dead factories after midnight. They kept their heads down, but not like frightened men. Like men who knew they were somewhere they shouldn’t be and trusted the dark to keep its mouth shut.

Your intel had been ugly and thin in the way half-useful tips usually were. Rumors of an illegal Protocore operation running out of one of the abandoned factories. No exact address. No owner attached to the property. No clean shipment trail. Just whispers about black-market handlers moving something through the district after hours, something valuable enough for people to get quiet about it when Hunter Association questions started circling. So here you were, stalking three men through a maze of rust and broken glass because one of them had been stupid enough to show up twice on a traffic camera near a restricted protocore checkpoint.

You didn’t need them arrested yet. You needed them followed. You needed the factory. The exact building. The exact door. You needed enough proof to bring back to Jenna without turning this into another report full of speculation and blood pressure problems. You had been careful for the last twenty minutes, keeping distance, moving roof to roof when the gaps allowed and dropping to ground level only when the buildings forced you down. Your boots landed softly. Your breathing stayed even. Your scent blocker sat thoroughly spread and chemical against your own skin.

Then, somewhere far ahead, metal screamed. You froze. The sound rolled through the factory district in a violent crash, too loud to be a settling building and too sharp to be wind. It came again a second later, a massive clang that echoed off the walls, followed by the shriek of something heavy dragging across concrete. The three men below stopped too. One of them turned his head toward it. Another reached under his jacket.

“What the fuck was that?” You whispered.

Your bracelet answered before the night could. It buzzed hard against your wrist, lighting up in a pale warning pulse. Wanderers nearby.

“Of course,” you breathed, teeth gritting, “lucky me…”

For one vicious second, your focus split clean down the middle. The men were still moving, and if you lost them now, you might lose the only lead to the factory actually being used. But if a civilian had wandered into this dead district and gotten cornered by a wanderer attack, you couldn’t just keep shadowing suspects while someone was torn apart three buildings over. Then the men started heading toward the noise. That decided it for you. You followed.

They moved faster now, no longer bothering with subtlety as they cut through a narrow access lane between two metal buildings. You dropped down from the roof after them, landing in a crouch behind a stack of rotting pallets, then slipped along the side wall with both pistols low on your hips. The crashing grew louder with every step. So did the deep, grinding rumble that came with wanderers, that wrong pressure in the air like the world itself was rejecting the shape of them.

The alley opened into a wider yard littered with trash cans, broken machinery, and a half-collapsed loading bay, washed over by red lighting. You stopped behind the corner of a building just as the three men fanned out ahead of you. Three large wanderers crowded the center of the yard. And one unmasked man stood in front of them alone. For half a heartbeat, your brain refused to understand what you were seeing. He wasn’t wearing hunter gear. He wasn’t in a squad formation. No partner covered his flank. No civilian was cowering behind him. He stood there like he had arrived before everyone else and was mildly annoyed the night had become crowded. One of the men in black pulled a gun. Your eyes snapped to the movement. His arm rose, not toward the wanderers, but toward the unaffiliated man standing with his wide back half-turned.

“God damn it,” you hissed, already bringing your own gun up, “why now??”

You weren’t fast enough. The shot cracked through the yard, and it wasn’t yours. A warning died soundlessly in your throat. Your finger tightened on your trigger, but before the bullet could hit the back of the lone man’s head, the building beside him moved. No. Not the building. A metal beam jutting from the broken wall twisted. It morphed in a liquid-smooth flash, reshaping itself into a broad panel that snapped across the back of his head just in time to catch the bullet with a bright, ringing spark. The impact punched a dent into the metal. The man didn’t even flinch. The panel withdrew a second later, melting back into the beam so quickly you almost could’ve convinced yourself you imagined it. Almost.

The man turned his head. Then he laughed. It was amused. Warm. Deep in his chest. The kind of laugh that belonged to someone who had just watched an enemy make a very entertaining mistake. What the fuck kind of evol magic trick did you just watch? You slipped behind a closer wall, heart beating harder now, and angled yourself for a better view without fully exposing your body. The three men had abandoned all pretense. They were running straight at him.

“Keep shooting, keep shooting!” One of them shouted.

“D’awww,” the man called back, and your body went cold before your mind knew why.

His voice was deep and hearty, threaded with a familiar cockiness that scraped along your nerves. Playful. Casual. Entertained. Used to this.

“Did you guys come here to play fetch and think I wouldn’t hear about it?” He said, then his voice lowered, “c’mon…Get real.”

Bullets fired again. You jerked your head back behind the wall, clutching your gun tight, forcing your breathing to stay controlled while the shots cracked across the yard. One. Two. Three. A pause. You counted two silent beats before you dared to look again.

From closer now, you could make him out through the dirty wash of the yard lights. He was quite tall. Muscular. Ridiculously so. Monstrous compared to the three men closing in on him, built with the kind of strength that made the human body look unfairly designed. He wore a black sleeveless turtleneck that showed the hard cut of his arms, black gloves, black pants, and combat boots planted like the ground belonged to him. His hair was red, short and pushed back from his forehead, catching the seedy light in dark auburn flashes. You couldn’t see his face clearly yet. You didn’t know why that made your pulse worse.

The closest man lunged. The redhead vanished. Your breath caught. He didn’t run. He didn’t duck. He was simply gone from where he’d been standing, and a second later he was at the left wall with one of the men gripped by the neck, lifting him clean off his feet. The man choked once before the redhead slammed him backward so hard the metal garage door behind him folded inward with a thunderous crash. The man dropped into a puddle like his bones had forgotten how to hold him up.

“Aaand, down you go,” the redhead dusted off his gloved hands casually.

A wanderer charged from his blind side. The man didn’t even look irritated, much less afraid. He pivoted with a leap and roundhouse kicked the beast in the face hard enough to send it flying backward into the other two men. They shouted as it crashed into them, bodies and limbs tangling with the creature’s shadowy mass. The remaining two wanderers surged forward, claws scraping sparks from the concrete.

You used the chaos to move. Keeping low, you slipped to the next building with both guns ready, your shoulder scraping rusted metal as you pressed close to the wall and found a new angle. From there, you could see the two men scrambling back to their feet, firing wildly at the wanderers while the redhead watched them with one hand on his hip. He looked delighted. Not tense. Not worried. Delighted. Then a phone rang. Your stare went flat.

He pulled it from his pocket and answered it, “hello?”

“You have to be kidding me,” you whispered.

Everything in you wanted to go in hard and loud. Men with guns. Wanderers loose. Some criminal-looking redhead playing with both sides like he had personally arranged the night for his own plucky amusement. Your instincts screamed to end the fight before it spread, but the logical part of you forced you still. There were too many moving pieces. Too many unknowns. You needed thirty more seconds of watching before you turned the yard into a gunfight with yourself in the middle of it.

“Family reunion?” The redhead asked, amused.

The wanderer he had kicked away came charging back for more.

“Pass,” he said casually into the phone.

He didn’t even turn fully toward it. He shifted his weight, caught the creature’s momentum at the last second, and redirected it with brutal, effortless precision. The wanderer slammed into the other two beasts just as the men were trying to get clear, and all three creatures went tumbling into a loud stack of trash cans. The crash was so violent you jumped despite yourself.

“Tell auntie, cous, and grandma I say hi,” he continued, raising his voice over all the noise.

You moved closer again. And the closer you got, the worse that feeling became. His face was still half-shadowed, but something about him looked familiar. The shape of him. The way he moved. The way danger seemed to gather around him and then obey. His voice bothered you most of all. It reached some part of your body before it reached your memory, scraping a cold line down your spine. Fear raced vertebra by vertebra until your heart started pounding like it was trying to outrun the answer. One of the men charged him from behind. The redhead jumped unnaturally high, catching a loose metal ladder bolted near the roofline. His weight ripped it down with a shrieking snap of rusted brackets. He used the falling ladder like a weapon, swinging it across the man’s body so hard he flew sideways with a shout of agony, hit the wall with a wet crunch, and collapsed into another puddle.

“Tell them I’m busy,” the redhead said into the phone, smiling like he was happily preoccupied with his conversation.

Then he moved so quickly you barely caught it. His boot slammed down. A round metal plate popped loose from the ground as if the yard itself had tossed it to him. He caught it in one large hand just as the third man came at him with a knife. The redhead swung the plate at the man’s head with casual force, and the man folded immediately, dropping at his feet.

“Help,” the man rasped.

The redhead set his boot on him and forced him flat against the wet concrete without looking away from the wanderers rising across the yard.

“What, you thought I wouldn’t settle the score?” He taunted the man momentarily. Then his gaze lifted again to the three wanderers coming straight at him. His voice shifted back toward the phone, louder and cheerfully unconcerned, “wasn’t talking to ya!”

That was your cue. The men were down. The only threats still standing were wanderers, and those were your problem whether you liked the redhead or not. You pushed off the wall and charged into the yard with both guns raised. Your first shots hit the nearest wanderer center mass. The impacts flashed against its shadowy chest, staggering it as it turned toward you with a roar that scraped through your skull. You kept moving, firing three times in tight succession until the beast’s core cracked bright through its ribs. It collapsed forward, slid across the wet concrete, and broke apart into dust before it reached your boots.

One down. Another came at you from the side. You spun and fired into its exposed flank, then its throat, then the glowing fault line splitting down its chest. It stumbled, claws tearing up the ground, and you emptied two more rounds into it until the structure of its body failed and scattered into ash. Two. Where the hell was the third? You looked up too late. It was already in front of you, too close, lunging through the space between you with its claws spread wide. You gasped and swung both guns toward it, sprinting sideways as you fired upward, but its shadow swallowed the light before your body could clear the strike.

Then the redhead flew into the space between you. He came out of nowhere, still holding his phone to his ear, and drove a kick straight into the wanderer’s side before it could reach you, “I’m entertaining a—…”

He looked at you. Everything slowed. At that close distance, under the filthy yard lights and silver wash of moonlight cutting between the buildings, you saw the color of his eyes. Gold. Just like the werewolf in the forest. Your breath stopped. It was the first time you’d seen his whole face without the metal mask of a snarling wolf covering the lower half of it. No armored ears. No hood. No massive auburn tail cutting through the moonlight behind him. Just the red hair, fanged teeth, the dimpled edges of his wide smile, the strength carved into his jaw, and those bright, terrible eyes. You realized exactly who he was. And in real time, you watched him realize who you were too. His smile widened.

Still on the phone, he finished smoothly, “…Friend.”

His kick landed. The wanderer went flying into another metal garage door with a crash so loud the ground shuddered under your boots. You didn’t watch it fall. Rage flooded you too fast for thought. It came up from somewhere deep and animal, hotter than fear, sharper than reason. Lykos Forest flashed behind your eyes. Moonlight. Gunfire. A wolf mask. A huge body moving through trees like the dark had made room for him. The way he called you silly rabbit and laughed at your terror. The memory snapped through you hard enough to turn your hands steady.

You ran at him. Both guns came up. You fired straight into his chest as he landed. Metal answered. A plate snapped between your bullets and his heart, blooming over him like a shield dragged from the bones of him himself. Your shots sparked against it, useless, exactly as useless as they had been in the forest. His smirk began to form. You saw the flash of fang. That was enough. You shoved your guns back into their holsters as you dashed towards him because they were dead weight against the werewolf, crossed the last stretch of concrete, and drove your fist straight into his face with every bit of strength and speed your body could give you as your evol answered your plea.

Your fist collided with his jaw so hard pain burst white through your knuckles. For one raw second, you weren’t sure whether the crack you felt belonged to him or you. Your evol had rushed into your arm on instinct, flooding muscle and bone with borrowed violence until your punch hit like something more than human, more than omega, more than reasonable. His head snapped sideways. His heavy body followed half a breath later, the sheer force of the blow knocking him off balance and sending him skidding across the wet concrete with his boots dragging sparks through a shallow puddle.

“Eat this!” You roared.

He barely had time to catch himself before you were on him again, fury carrying you faster than thought.

Your other fist drew back, shoulder burning as you launched it toward him with everything you had left, “how’s that rabbit stew now, motherfucker?!”

His hand shot up. He caught your fist. Caught it completely. His palm swallowed yours so easily the sight of it almost made the anger stumble into something colder. His fingers wrapped around your knuckles, over your glove, around the hard line of your clenched hand like your whole fist was nothing but a small, breakable thing he had chosen not to crush. You felt the strength there. Felt how much of it he was holding back. Felt the terrible, effortless restraint in the way his grip locked without grinding your bones together.

But you were fast too. You used your other arm as a bar and drove your forearm straight into his thick throat. The impact hit with a dull, brutal sound. His breath cut off. His gold eyes flashed wide, and then his back slammed into the ground with your weight riding him down. Concrete thudded beneath his shoulder. Water splashed up cold against your thighs. You didn’t give him room to breathe, didn’t give him room to think, didn’t give him room to turn that awful strength on you. Your knee came down between his legs with every ounce of force you could channel through your body and you pinned his nuts.

This time, the pain got him. His upper body jerked up, breath hitching hard through his teeth, the sound sharp and involuntary enough to satisfy some vicious, wounded part of you, “fff!”

But before he could knock you off the width of his hips, your forearm shoved him back down by the throat. His body hit the concrete again, and you leaned your weight into him, pinning him there beneath you with your pulse roaring in your ears and your rage shaking through every place fear had once lived. Then he smiled. He fucking smiled. Not bright. Not mocking exactly. Worse than that. It was small and edged with pain, but there was something alive in it, something thrilled despite the situation, like the challenge itself had sparked through him. Like you choking him against the ground wasn’t a threat, not an insult, but a language he understood too well.

Your vision went red. Your free hand latched over the fist of your bracing arm, and you shoved down harder, turning the pressure at his throat into a choke. His smile flickered, finally thinning beneath the strain as his breathing hitched again. The tendons in his neck stood out against the black collar of his sleeveless turtleneck. His hands came up, but not to tear you off. Not yet. One gripped your wrist. The other pressed against the ground as if he was forcing himself to remember the rules of a fight you had never agreed to give him.

“Explain yourself now!” You screamed down at him.

His face changed. It was tiny. So tiny you might have missed it if you had not been staring straight at him with murder in your blood. A faint break in the set of his thick brows. A small, confused pull at the corner of his mouth. His lashes fluttered once, and through the pain and the choke and the wet scrape of his boots against concrete, he inhaled. He sniffed the air. Your stomach dropped.

“What are you doing out here?!” You snapped, pressing harder, “who the hell are you and what are you doing—”

Your words died. His hand moved. It covered both of your fists at once, large enough that for one nightmare second you couldn’t see your own hands beneath his. He didn’t wrench them away. Didn’t break your hold. He turned his face into them. His crooked nose pressed against your wrist and nostrils flared. He breathed you in. The whole world went cold.

“W-what the fuck?” The words slipped out of you broken and shaky before you could stop them. Your heart slammed once, twice, too hard against your ribs, your fear itself blurting fast and breathless out of your mouth, “c-can you actually smell me??”

You had scent blocker on. You knew you did. You had rubbed yourself down before the mission, bitter chemical sharpness layered over your skin, your pulse points, the inside of your wrists, neck, and elbows. You had taken every precaution because you always took every precaution. Because you weren’t fucking stupid. Because being an omega in the field meant understanding that your body could become evidence, bait, invitation, target. No alpha should’ve been able to smell you through it. No one. But his nostrils flared against your wrist again. His brows drew together harder, not with hunger, not with disgust, but with something like recognition crashing through confusion. His eyes lifted to yours, gold blown wide and bright in the dirty light, and fear struck you so cleanly your strength vanished.

Prey instinct found the crack in you. It didn’t ask permission. It didn’t care that you were a deepspace hunter, that you had killed wanderers, that you had survived The Nest, that you had beaten a hybrid alpha half to death under arena lights while hundreds watched. Your body knew what was beneath you before your mind could name it. Alpha. Werewolf. Stronger. Faster. Too close. Too much. Your muscles went loose in a sudden, horrifying failure. Your hands weakened at his throat and inside his large grip. He pushed himself up on one arm. You should’ve moved. You should’ve shot him. You should’ve bitten, kicked, screamed, done anything other than freeze there with your knee still braced against him and your heart trying to tear itself apart behind your ribs. His face came toward your neck. His breath touched your skin. Your lip trembled. You couldn’t even flinch.

Terror held you open and motionless as his nose brushed the side of your throat, just below your jaw, where your pulse was thrashing like something trapped. Your whole life flashed behind your eyes in broken, violent images. And then, Lykos Forest. The wolf mask. The massive shape blocking the moon. His laugh. His metal claws. His deep, cocky voice curling around “silly rabbit” like your fear had amused him. You thought, with a kind of distant, silent horror, that this was how you died after all. Not in the arena. Not in the N109 zone. Not under Rafayel’s mistakes or Sylus’s gaze. Here, in a dead factory yard, in the hands of an alpha werewolf who had already proven he could let you live only because it entertained him.

Then your face hit his neck. You didn’t mean to do it. You didn’t choose it. His body had shifted up closer beneath yours, and your balance had gone weak, trembling hands bracing strong shoulders, and suddenly your mouth was pressed against the black fabric at his collar while your nose brushed the warm skin just above it. You breathed. Everything stopped. His scent filled your lungs. It should’ve been wrong. It should’ve been violence. It should’ve been rank alpha dominance, something heavy and invasive, something that crawled down your throat and demanded surrender from every omega instinct you had spent your whole life hating.

…It wasn’t. It was deep like woods after rain, old trees and damp earth and bark warmed by afternoon sun. It was sweet like chocolate melting on your tongue, rich and dark and impossible to separate from comfort. It was warm as a crackling campfire under a starry night sky, the kind of warmth that held smoke and sugar and toasted marshmallow at its edges. S’mores. Embers. Wool blankets. Laughter low in the chest. It was books on endless shelves, pages worn soft from hands that had loved them, dust lit gold in a window, the hush of somewhere safe enough to stay.

Strong. Hearty. Plucky. Pure. It didn’t feel like scent. It felt like memory. Not yours. Not exactly. Something older than you and still somehow recognized by the roots of you. A flash of huge, playful hands holding your face, palms warm as sunlight, thumbs swallowing your puffed cheeks and jiggling them until laughter spilled bright and gleeful out of you. A mouth smiling against your temple. A heartbeat beneath your cheek. A hand finding yours in another life, another place, another century, another world where you had known the shape of him before you ever knew his name.

Your body softened with a betrayal so, so devastatingly complete. You breathed him in again, deeper this time, before horror could catch up. Your nose pressed into his turtleneck. His pulse hammered against your mouth through fabric and skin and all that impossible warmth, and for one devastating second, you wanted to bury yourself there. You wanted to get him inside your lungs. You wanted to crawl into that scent and shut the world behind you. You wanted it with a depth that didn’t feel like desire so much as recognition, as if every locked door in your body had opened at once and something ancient had stepped through saying, there you are.

No. No, no, no. Your mind came back screaming. You knew what it was before you could explain it. You knew with the same awful certainty you knew your own name, your own face, the weight of your guns, the burn of your suppressants. Fated mates were real. Fated mates were possible. No one on earth was exempt from being unlucky. God had no mercy, but he did have a cruel sense of humor. This man…The werewolf from Lykos Forest…This man was your fated mate.

“No!!” You shrieked.

The sound tore out of you so violently it hurt your throat. Tears spilled before you felt them gather, hot and humiliating and immediate, blurring his face as you shoved both hands against his hard chest and slammed him back down into the concrete. Your whole soul seemed to split down the middle, one half howling toward him with gleeful recognition while the other clawed backward in horror. He looked up at you with wide gold eyes. You didn’t let yourself see more than that as his mouth almost formed a word. You pulled your gun and aimed straight at his chest. Then you fired. The shot cracked through the yard at point-blank range.

For half a heartbeat, your mind expected metal. Expected the same blooming shield, the same infuriating answer, the same proof that even your bullets couldn’t touch him. But no panel snapped over his heart. No metal rose between you. Instead, his hand had hit your wrist and shoved your aim sideways before you noticed it. The bullet burned across his forearm. Blood flashed red. Smoke curled from torn skin. The shot scored a line through him that could have been avoided so easily you understood the truth of it a second too late.

He had redirected your aim and taken the hit. Not to protect himself. To protect you. If he had let your gun fire directly into metal at that distance, the ricochet could’ve torn through your hand. If he had warped the gun shut, the pressure could’ve broken your fingers. If he had answered you the way he had answered every attack so far, you would have paid for your own panic in blood and bone. So he bled instead. You reeled off him as if his blood had practically burned you. He reached for you.

“Wait!” His voice broke out of him, and it was wrong now. Not playful. Not warm with arrogance. Not entertained. The cockiness had vanished so completely it left something raw behind, “what—wait!”

“Get the fuck away from me!” You shouted.

You grabbed your other gun with both hands and aimed at his head. He stopped. He had risen too quickly, faster than anything shaped like a man had any right to move, and the speed alone made your arms tremble. Tears streamed down your face through the drizzle as it strengthened over you both. Your teeth started to chatter. You backed away step by step, your boots slipping slightly in puddled water, the muzzle of your gun shaking between his eyes.

“No, no, no, no, no,” you gasped, voice splintering around each word, “back the fuck up! Back the fuck up right now or I’ll shoot!”

Some distant, rational part of your mind knew shooting him was useless. The rest of you didn’t care. The rest of you was twelve different kinds of terrified at once. Terrified that he was your fated mate. Terrified that you had a fated mate at all. Terrified that your life had already begun ending without your consent. Terrified that the other end of your soul had been tied to an alpha, to a werewolf, to the same man who had hunted you through moonlit trees and laughed while you ran. Terrified most of all because some unforgivable part of you could still taste his scent in the back of your throat and wanted it back.

“Wait a sec…Hey,” he raised both hands slowly, wide palms open in surrender.

You saw the blood on one forearm. Saw the way it ran down toward his glove. Saw how little he seemed to care about it compared to you; or even notice it. He halted himself, but every line of him looked ready to move. Not attack. Move. Reach. Close the space. Stop you from leaving. His legs flexed like instinct had him by the spine and he was fighting it with everything he had.

“Relax,” he said carefully, “I’m not gonna hurt you, I swear. I just—behind!”

You turned halfway. Too late. The wanderer he had kicked earlier hadn’t died. You hadn’t seen it rise. He hadn’t either. You had both been too distracted, too cracked open, too trapped in the impossible horror between you. It lunged at your back with its jaw split wide, claws slashing down toward your head.

You barely got your gun around. The redhead’s face changed. For one instant, whatever softness had broken through him disappeared, and something severe and lethal took its place. His fist drove past your head with terrifying precision and speed. Metal raced down his arm in a liquid sheen, forming into a blade along his hand as he punched straight through the wanderer’s forehead between its eyes. The beast disintegrated inches behind you. Dust burst outward, raining over your shoulder, catching in your hair, clinging to your wet cheeks with the salt of your tears. You stood frozen as the ash scattered around you, your mind still trying to process that you should have been dead and weren’t. He barely looked at the thing he had killed.

“Wait, I just wanna talk,” he said. His attention came back to you so completely it was almost unbearable. Only you registered. Not the dying sparks. Not the fallen men. Not the ruined yard. His gold eyes locked down onto yours with devastating caution, pupils still sharpened from the violence of protecting you, his voice lower now, desperate at the edges, “please, I just wanna—”

“—No!” You screamed over him.

He reached toward you, and you slapped his injured arm away before his fingers could brush your sleeve. The movement made fresh blood slide down his skin, but he didn’t even flinch. That made it worse. Everything made it worse.

“I said get the fuck away from me!” You backed up again, gun raised, chest heaving so hard it hurt, “you don’t know me! You never saw my face! We never ran into each other! You hear me?!”

His expression shifted. You didn’t let it stop you.

“If you follow me, chase me, or stalk me, I’ll kill you,” you said, voice shaking harder with every word, “I-I’d rather you die if it means I don’t have to be fated to some alpha werewolf from hell itself!”

Oh. That hurt. You felt it before you saw it. It slammed through your chest so suddenly you almost dropped the gun. Not guilt. Not fear. Something stranger. Deeper. A wound that wasn’t yours and still somehow opened inside you. It was as if your words had struck him in the ribs, split him down the center, and the crack of it had traveled through the invisible thing between you until it reached your own bones.

His face went still. Not blank. Devastated. The word was too small for what happened to him. His gold eyes lost their light so quickly it looked physical, like something inside him had gone dark all at once. His mouth parted, but no sound came out. The broad, impossible strength of him seemed to empty where he stood, all that playful confidence and brutal certainty collapsing into a silence so awful you couldn’t bear to look at it. You gasped, because you could feel him breaking, and because feeling it broke you too.

“N-no,” you whispered, but you didn’t know who you were talking to. Him. Yourself. Fate. The cruel universe that had taken the one thing you had sworn would never own you and tied it to the very shape of your fear, “no, no, no…”

This had to be a nightmare. A hallucination. A trick of pheromones and adrenaline and exhaustion. There was no world where this was real. There was no world where your soul could betray you so easily. There was no world where the man your body recognized as warmth was also the man your mind remembered as teeth.

But flight won. You ran. You turned and tore yourself out of the yard so fast the world blurred around you. Metal walls streaked past. Broken windows flashed silver above. Your boots splashed through puddles and scattered ash and old rainwater, and the night air shredded against your throat as you forced yourself faster, faster, faster. Your lungs burned. Your vision blurred. You didn’t look back. You couldn’t. If you looked back and he was following, you would scream. If you looked back and he wasn’t, something even worse inside you might turn around. So you ran until the factory yard vanished behind you, running from the werewolf yet again.

You never saw what your words did to him after you left. You never saw the shock root him in place so completely that even his instincts couldn’t move him. You never saw his hand hang uselessly in the air where it had been reaching for you, fingers slightly curled around the space you had refused to let him touch. You never saw the blood drip from his forearm onto the concrete, one slow drop after another, ignored because pain meant nothing compared to the shape of your absence. You never saw his knees give out. He went down hard in the wreckage of the abandoned yard, surrounded by bent metal, dying ash, and the unconscious bodies of men who suddenly mattered less than nothing. The wet concrete soaked through his pants. His hands braced against his knees, broad shoulders bowed beneath a weight no fight had ever managed to put on him.

For the first time that night, he didn’t laugh. He didn’t chase. He didn’t even say your name, because he didn’t know it. He only stared at the empty alley where you had disappeared, abandoned so completely by someone who was supposed to be fate that the bond had barely finished waking before it learned what rejection felt like. And under the bright moon, in a dead factory district that smelled of rust, rain, blood, and the fading dust of wanderers, the lone wolf stayed on his knees.

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