Page 95 of Omega Hunted

The silence settled around me, broken by the crackle of burning wood and the distant whisper of wind through the pines. Somewhere inside the house Asha slept peacefully, unaware that her papa was about to become someone who’d finally have half a chance of protecting her. I breathed in slowly and the air tasted of snow, pine resin, woodsmoke, and Cassian.

My cat stirred.

Not pacing anymore.

Waiting.

Ready to try? He asked. For years every drug they’d forced into my veins had taught my body the same lesson.

Don’t shift. Don’t change. Don’t let your cat out.

Fear had become habit, and that had become instinct. The fear was still there, but it wasn’t the strongest thing inside me anymore.

“I want this,” I whispered. The words disappeared into the cold night. “I want you.”

Something answered, but it wasn’t magic crashing through my veins or lightning splitting the sky. It was warmth deep inside my chest so small I almost missed it, sitting right next to the space where my bond with Cassian sat.

It spread with every heartbeat, slipping through muscles that had forgotten what they were capable of, into bones that suddenly seemed too solid, too fixed, too human. Pressure built beneath my skin, not painful at first, only impossible to ignore, as though every cell in my body had remembered what it had always been meant to become.

My breath hitched, and the warmth became heat, and that became fire. I doubled over with a cry as it swept through me and every muscle locked.

My spine arched hard, and pain exploded through my shoulders, my hips, my ribs, driving the air from my lungs. I dropped onto my hands, fingers digging into the snow as my body refused every shape it had known for the last eight years.

It hurt.

Goddess, it hurt.

Because I’d held it back for so long.

I heard myself crying out, the sound torn somewhere between terror and relief, while bones shifted beneath my skin with dull, grinding pops that echoed through my whole body. My arms shortened. My legs folded beneath me. My jaw ached until I thought it would split apart, and then abruptly every scent around me intensified so violently that it stole what little breath I had left.

Snow.

Pine.

Ash.

Smoke.

Rabbit.

Fox.

Cassian.

Cassian.

Cassian.

His scent wrapped around me before my eyes had even opened.

Cassian. Safe. Mine. Alpha. Protection.

I blinked.

The world had changed.

Every individual pine needle glittered beneath the moonlight. I could hear snow sliding from distant branches. The fire no longer smelled simply of smoke but of resin, sap, charred bark and the life the wood had lived before it burned, and when I looked down, I saw broad white paws. My tail swept behind me, thick and familiar and a sound escaped me. Not a sob, or a laugh, but a rough, questioning chuff I somehow knew I’d never made before.