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Prologue
KOR
Time existed outside of the pain. I was aware of that, once. I was aware that the very act of breathing was once a mark of freedom of power, that it didn’t cause pinpricks of pain rippling over my skin with each push and pull of my lungs. I was aware that my limbs, now an atrophied, trembling mess of skin and bones, once held the very core of my power.
The capture, the torture, the experiments didn’t change any of that, but like Sampson, they had carved out my eyes and cut my hair. My power lay somewhere deep in the recesses of my mind, in shadows I could no longer access.
And yet, I was still here. Tortured, but alive.
In spite of the humans carving away at me, in spite of the toxins they pushed through IVs and the chemical smoke blinding my eyes, somewhere, my freedom still existed—just out of my reach, but I had hope.
I was Alpha.
I was a Wolf.
But I was no animal.
Chapter One
KOR
Very little changed for me in the days since my capture. At the very least, the humans were routine about their torments. They weren’t always the same, and I was not always affected the same way, but they never ceased to remind me why we were at war with them.
I was a boy when the rebellion began. Life before the Great Reveal was more of a myth—a story told in the textbooks of the Wolf-only schools my siblings and I had been shuffled off to. There were champions amongst the humans, those who believed that people like us deserved basic rights. But there weren’t enough of them—or, if there had been, the opposition had been louder, with strength to yell longer, and eventually the other humans fell in line.
By the time I was old enough to retain actual memory, we were already segregated from most humans. Wolves were separated from their packs, families torn apart, spread across thousands of miles. They couldn’t take our language or our bonds, but they could take everything else.
I wasn’t born to be an Alpha, and it wasn’t something I ever thought would happen to me. My father was an Alpha, but he went missing long before I had any solid memories of him, and from the stories my mother would tell, I was nothing like him. But I think she wanted it that way.
She wanted us to lay low—to be complicit. “We must not stand out, Korin,” she would tell me in her soft, melodic tones. “We must never stand out.”
I didn’t understand why. At least, not until my aunt and uncle were dragged from their homes. They weren’t blood relations—not even the same species of wolf—but they were as close to family as I had ever known. I was fifteen, and they were publicly executed in Paris, France on the fourteenth of July.
It was symbolism, my mother said in hushed tones. The humans were sending a message that they saw us as more than the enemy. They saw us as capable of using our power over them to stomp them down. My aunt and uncle had been arrested and executed for sedition—for publications exposing human factories using Wolf children as free labor.
A violation of global humanitarian laws that the governments would later argue didn’t apply to us. We were not, after all, human.
And that moment was the spark that ignited the first attack. The President’s son cut down in an SUV on his way home from a game of golf. The third in line to the English throne ripped from his bed, only parts left behind.
The violence churned my stomach at that age, but it wasn’t long before I grew calloused to the sight of blood, torture, and death. We did what we had to in order to survive. We thwarted genetic conditioning, our own DNA re-wiring and forming pack bonds with new species.
The sparking yellow Alpha eyes returned, and with them strength, agility, and power. And then the flashing orange of the Omegas with their ability to balance and heal. The soft blue flare of the Betas remained—who we had all been before the war started, the backbone of people.
I was three days past eighteen when I woke fresh from battle with glowing yellow eyes and a power I did not know how to control. But the other shifters sensed it about me. They took a knee, they bared their necks, they accepted my leadership.
And for thirteen long years, we fought.
Thirteen years with little rest, with little victory and great loss. But the humans suffered just as much. And perhaps it was the massive losses on both sides, and the humans realizing that in spite of outnumbering us five to one, we could win the war.
They proposed peace—a treaty between leadership in a neutral city. They chose a Wolf capital because neutrality didn’t exist anywhere in the human world—and there were protests from our kind because none of us wanted to trust them. But our world leaders locked the doors behind them, leaving out the media circus.
It was noon on a Thursday when we got word that those of us still fighting were being disbanded. The humans retreated first, and the Alpha Generals were left to clean up the mess as we sent home those who had served under us for years.
It was supposed to be good. There was supposed to be peace for all of us.
Little did we know what those in power had agreed to in order to achieve their so-called peace.
I was cut down the day after the Equinox Treaty. I was still out there—on the abandoned battlefield—making sure nothing and no one had been left behind. It was carnage, and the scent on the air was heavy copper with blood and sour from rot. Our people were celebrating in the city, and I was left to pick among the bones for proof of who would never see a free sky above us.
