The night Katherine ran into the forest, she did not know whether she was running toward freedom or death.
Rain hammered the trees. Mud swallowed her bare feet. Her dress was torn at the shoulder, and a bruise darkened one side of her face.
Behind her, the Conroy pack was still searching.
“Katherine!”
The shout echoed through the woods.
She froze.
For one terrible second, she considered turning back.
Then she remembered the locked cellar.
The insults.
The hands that had grabbed her.
The night she had begged them to stop.
No.
She kept running.
Far deeper in the forest, a small cabin glowed beneath the trees.
Inside, Diana was grinding herbs when she suddenly stopped.
The old healer had lived alone for twelve years. The villagers knew her as a quiet woman who treated wounds, delivered babies, and never asked questions.
They did not know she had once commanded armies.
They did not know wolves from three kingdoms had once bowed when she entered a room.
And they certainly did not know that Diana was the Wolf Queen.
Her fingers tightened around the mortar.
She had heard it.
A heartbeat.
Familiar.
“Katherine?”
Diana rushed outside.
Her daughter collapsed into her arms.
For a moment, Diana simply stared.
She saw the bruises.
The cuts.
The terror in Katherine’s eyes.
Something ancient stirred inside her.
“Who did this?”
Katherine shook her head.
“No one.”
Diana's voice became frighteningly calm.
“Look at me.”
Katherine finally did.
“They said I was powerless,” she whispered. “They said I should be grateful they let me live there.”
Diana's jaw tightened.
“I sent you there because I thought you would be safe.”
“You were wrong.”
The words struck harder than any blade.
Diana carried her daughter inside.
As she cleaned Katherine's wounds, she noticed something else.
A black mark around Katherine's wrist.
A mark Diana had not seen since the old war.
The Conroy crest.
But beneath it was another symbol.
A broken crown.
Diana stared at it.
That symbol belonged to only one man.
Lord Julius Redblood.
And Julius had been dead for fifteen years.
Diana slowly lowered Katherine's hand.
“Where did they get this?”
Katherine looked confused.
“I don't know.”
Diana looked toward the dark window.
Her peaceful life had just ended.
Because someone in the Conroy pack was carrying a secret that should have been buried with the dead.
And somehow, her daughter had become part of it.
Outside the cabin, a wolf howled three times—the ancient signal once used to summon the Wolf Queen's armies.