Chapter 3: Chapter 3
The new scar on Jude’s shoulder was a badge he wore with a quiet, fierce pride. It ached in the best way, a constant, low-level reminder of the bond that now structured his world. For a week, they moved through the Academy like a single organism with four heads. The gossip didn’t die, but it changed, muted by the undeniable, solid fact of their unity. They were an anomaly, a problem, but not one anyone was brave enough to confront directly. Not after the way Zade had stared down Mark in the gym.
Their haven became the old library, a territory they had claimed in the most primal way. They met there most evenings, books open but mostly ignored, the space between the stacks filled with the sounds of their rediscovery of each other. The bond demanded it, a hungry thing that needed constant reinforcement.
Tonight, Ronan was on his back across an ancient, leather-topped reading table, his auburn hair fanned out like a halo. Jude was between his legs, mouth working slowly, thoroughly on Ronan’s cock, his gray eyes watching Zade and Aria over Ronan’s trembling stomach.
Zade had Aria bent over the same desk he’d taken Ronan on, her pants around her ankles. He was fucking her from behind, a steady, deep rhythm that spoke of familiarity and mutual hunger. Their Alphas clashed in a different way here—a competition of endurance, of who could make who break first. Zade’s hands gripped her hips, fingers biting into her skin, holding her still for his relentless drives.
“You gonna come for me, Alpha?” Zade grunted, the title a taunt and a compliment.
“When I feel like it,” Aria shot back, her voice strained but defiant. She pushed back against him, meeting each thrust. The slap of their bodies was a sharp counterpoint to the wet, sucking sounds from Jude’s ministrations.
Roan writhed, his fingers tangled in Jude’s hair. “Right there, fuck, Jude, don’t stop—” His plea ended in a sharp cry as Jude swallowed him down, taking him deep into his throat until his nose pressed into Ronan’s curls.
The bond was a feedback loop of sensation, each peak and trough shared, amplified. Jude felt the building tension in Ronan’s balls, the delicious friction of Zade inside Aria, the powerful clench of her muscles. It was a symphony of pleasure, and he was the conductor, attuned to every note.
Zade’s pace increased, becoming punishing. He leaned over Aria’s back, his teeth grazing the claiming mark on her neck. “Now,” he commanded.
Aria’s defiance shattered. A raw, guttural cry was torn from her as her orgasm hit, her inner walls milking Zade’s cock in violent pulses. Her climax triggered Ronan’s; he came down Jude’s throat with a broken sob, his body bowing off the table. Jude drank him down, the salty taste flooding his senses, which in turn sent a final, electric jolt through Zade.
With a roar, Zade emptied himself into Aria, his thrusts turning erratic before he stilled, collapsing over her, both of them slick with sweat.
In the heavy, panting silence that followed, the library felt like the only real place in the world. They cleaned up with a practiced ease, redressing in the dusty gloom. The walk back to the dorms was quiet, their shoulders brushing, a contented hum in the bond. The outside world, with its rules and its enemies, felt temporarily held at bay.
The enemy, however, was patient.
Her name was Selene, of the Frostveil Pack. She had hair the color of winter ash and eyes of a glacial blue that held no warmth. For years, since they were children presented at the same Alpha Gathering, Zade’s father had all but promised her a future as Luna of Crimson Moon. She had accepted it as her due, envisioning a life of power at Zade’s side. His indifference to her had been a nuisance. His binding to a mongrel pack of misfits, and specifically to that violet-eyed bitch Aria Reyes who had always laughed too easily with him, was an unforgivable insult.
She watched them from a corner table in the bustling cafeteria the next day, her fingers tightening around a delicate vial hidden in her palm. The potion was a murky, silver liquid, stolen from the forbidden archives of the Alchemy wing. It wasn’t meant to kill. It was meant to unravel. To make something loved become a source of horror and grief.
She waited until Aria was alone at their usual table, waiting for the others who were still in the lunch line. Selene moved with a serpent’s grace, sliding past, her body a brief shadow. The vial tipped, its contents spilling into Aria’s open water bottle with a silent, quick fizz before dissolving completely.
Selene was gone before Aria looked up.
Aria drank the water with her meal, tasting nothing but the faint, metallic tang of the academy’s pipes. She felt a brief, cold shiver in her gut, but it passed, dismissed as hunger.
The changes were subtle at first. Three days later, Jude frowned at her across their shared textbook in the library. “Did you get a haircut?”
Aria ran a hand through her long brown hair. “No. Why?”
“It looks… fuller. Softer. Like it did when we were first-years.” He shook his head, returning to his notes. “Must be the light.”
A week after the incident, Ronan hugged her from behind, nuzzling her neck. “You smell different,” he murmured. “Less… sharp. Sweeter. Like rain on new grass.” He couldn’t articulate it, but it was the scent of a younger wolf. Less seasoned.
Zade noticed it during their next private sparring session in the gym. Aria moved with her usual lethal grace, but her strikes lacked a fraction of their former power. Her footwork was slightly off, as if she was re-learning her own center of gravity. He pinned her to the mats, his body over hers.
“You’re holding back,” he growled, searching her face.
“I’m not,” she insisted, frustration in her violet eyes. But she was breathing harder than she should have been.
“You are. Your form’s sloppy. Like you’re fifteen again.” The words hung in the air between them, an accidental truth that felt oddly specific.
The physical regression became undeniable on the morning of the full moon run. As they stood in the forest clearing with the rest of the academy shifters, preparing to release their wolves, Aria struggled with her boots. The laces, usually tied with quick, efficient loops, felt awkward in her hands.
“My fingers feel clumsy,” she muttered to Zade.
He looked down, and his blood ran cold. Her hands, always strong and capable, looked… smaller. Delicate. The faint scar across her knuckles from a childhood fall seemed paler, as if it was healing backwards. The subtle, womanly curve of her hips beneath her running gear seemed less pronounced.
“Aria,” he said, his voice low.
“Not now,” she snapped, feeling a spike of irrational, juvenile anger. The bond throbbed with her confusion and his dawning alarm.
The run was a disaster. Her wolf, usually a sleek, powerful shadow, was smaller. Its movements were playfully erratic, lacking the focused precision of a mature Alpha. It nipped at Ronan’s heels like a pup, then cowered when a senior Alpha’s wolf barked nearby. Zade’s black wolf circled her constantly, a protective, confused gargoyle. Jude’s silver wolf watched, his analytical mind, even in this form, cataloging the terrifying discrepancies.
After the shift back, huddled and naked in the dark, the truth was inescapable. In the moonlight, Aria’s face was not that of an eighteen-year-old Alpha heir. The faint lines of sun and seriousness around her eyes were gone. Her cheeks were rounder, her jawline softer. She looked sixteen. Maybe younger.
She saw the horror in their eyes and felt it in the bond. She stumbled to a nearby stream, looking at her reflection in the black water.
The girl staring back was a stranger from her past.
“What’s happening to me?” Her voice was higher. It wavered.
Jude was already pulling clothes on, his mind racing. “It’s systemic. Metabolic. We need to get to the infirmary. Now.”
“No,” Zade and Aria said in unison. The infirmary meant officials. It meant their secret, their vulnerability, exposed.
“We can’t hide this, Zade,” Jude argued, his voice tight. “She’s aging in reverse. A year every few days, by my estimate. In a week, she’ll look like a child. In a month…” He couldn’t finish the thought.
Ronan wrapped a blanket around Aria’s shoulders. She was shivering, but not from the cold. The confident, independent Alpha was gone, replaced by a terrified girl shrinking inside a changing body. The bond ached with her fear, a sour, discordant note that drowned out everything else.
Zade’s fists clenched. This wasn’t an enemy he could fight with his fists or his will. This was a poison, a slow, malicious unraveling. And it was aimed at the heart of his pack. He looked at Aria’s young, frightened face, and the wolf in him howled with a rage so vast it threatened to swallow the world.
Someone had done this. And when he found them, there would be no library desk, no claiming bite. There would only be blood.
The silence in their dorm room was a thick, suffocating thing, broken only by the erratic tap of Aria’s fingers on her knee and her occasional, distracted hum. She was curled in Zade’s desk chair, swimming in one of his hoodies, her feet not touching the floor. She’d been trying to explain a theory about the library’s architecture, but her thoughts kept scattering like dropped marbles, her sentences trailing off into quiet, unrelated observations about the dust motes in the sunlight.
Jude watched her, his gray eyes cold with a fear no amount of analysis could dispel. “We’re out of time. We need an authority with resources we don’t have. Someone who can keep this contained.”
“There is no one,” Ronan whispered, his hand resting on Aria’s shoulder, trying to anchor her.
“There’s one,” Zade said, the words tasting like ash. He looked at Aria, her violet eyes now too large in her softening face, flicking around the room with a child’s restless energy. The bond thrummed with her fragmented awareness, a dizzying static. “My father.”
The argument was short and brutal. Jude agreed it was the only logical move. Ronan feared the repercussions. Aria just blinked, distracted by a fly buzzing against the window. “Can we get juice on the way?” she asked, her voice light and unconcerned.
Zade’s heart shattered. He took her hand. It was so small in his. “Yeah, sweetheart. We can get juice.”
He half-carried her across the academy grounds, her steps sometimes skipping, sometimes lagging. She was a kite on a fraying string, and he was the only weight holding her to the earth. He avoided the main paths, cutting through the service alleys behind the faculty buildings until they reached the private wing where Alpha Xavier Conners kept his on-campus residence.
Zade didn’t knock. He shouldered the heavy oak door open and pulled Aria inside.
His father’s study smelled of leather, old paper, and expensive whiskey. Xavier stood by the fireplace, reviewing a tablet, his posture the same rigid column of authority Zade had known his whole life. He looked up, annoyance at the intrusion flattening his features.
“Zade. This is not—”
Xavier’s words died. His eyes tracked from his son’s desperate face to the small figure clinging to his hand. The tablet slipped from his fingers, clattering on the Persian rug. His piercing green eyes, so like Zade’s, went wide with a shock so profound it stripped the Alpha mantle from him completely.
“What in the name of the moon…” He crossed the room in three long strides, ignoring Zade, and dropped to one knee in front of Aria. His voice was a hushed, horrified thing. “What’s happening to her?”
Aria stared at the shiny buttons on his blazer, her head tilting. “Your eyes are green,” she announced, as if sharing a major discovery.
Zade’s throat was tight, the words rough. “We don’t know. She’s regressing mentally as well. Her ADHD is running the show right now.” He forced the clinical terms out, though every one felt like a betrayal. “It’s not just behavioral. She’s physically… shrinking. It started after the full moon run. Maybe before.”
Xavier’s hand, large and scarred, hovered near Aria’s cheek, not daring to touch. He was seeing it now—the youthful roundness, the diminished stature. She looked about four-foot-seven, maybe eighty pounds soaking wet, a ghost of the powerful Alpha heir he’d seen just weeks prior.
“Aria,” Xavier said, his tone softening into something Zade had rarely heard. “Can you tell me how you feel?”
She rocked back on her heels, popping a joint in her jaw. “Fizzy. My brain is fizzy. And my shoes are too big.” She held up a foot swamped in her own boot, giggling.
The giggle, so utterly incongruous and young, broke something in the room. Xavier’s jaw hardened, his eyes lifting to meet Zade’s. The shock was gone, replaced by a glacial, calculating fury. This was no natural illness.
“Who have you pissed off, son?” he asked, the question a low, dangerous rumble.
“Everyone,” Zade said flatly. “But one person in particular.”
Xavier gave a single, sharp nod. He stood, his authority slamming back into place with a force that vibrated the air. “Selene Frostveil. Her family has a history with… unconventional alchemy.” He strode to his desk, yanking open a drawer. “This is a targeted attack. An assault on a bonded pack member is an assault on the pack entire.”
He pulled out an old, leather-bound journal and a sealed glass vial containing a phosphorescent blue liquid. “You will take her to the Grove of the Ancients, at the heart of the forest. There is a spring there whose waters can stabilize shifting sickness, purify corrupted bonds.” He thrust the vial and journal at Zade. “This is a catalyst. Three drops in the spring at moonrise. It will amplify the waters’ properties. The journal details the route. No one else must know.”
Zade took the items, his mind reeling. “The Grove is myth. It’s forbidden territory.”
“It is real, and it is your only chance,” Xavier snapped. His gaze fell on Aria again, who was now trying to balance a paperweight on her head. A muscle ticked in his jaw. “Her wolf is being unmade. If her body regresses past the point of her first shift, the wolf will sever entirely. She will be human, or she will be dead. Go. Now.”
The command was absolute. Zade scooped Aria up, her slight body resting easily against his chest. She nestled her head under his chin with a contented sigh, already losing interest. As he turned to leave, his father’s voice stopped him at the door.
“Zade.”
He looked back.
Xavier’s face was stone, but his eyes held a ferocity Zade had never seen directed at him. “Whoever did this dies. Not by your hand alone. By the law of the packs. You bring me proof. I will make the kill official.” He paused, his voice dropping. “Now, save your mate.”
The door shut behind them, sealing them into the cool evening air. Zade looked down at Aria’s trusting, fading face, then at the ancient journal in his hand. The path was set. The race was on.
Jude and Ronan were waiting at the forest’s edge, packs of supplies at their feet. They took one look at Aria, now drowsing in Zade’s arms, and one look at his face, and asked no questions. Jude took the journal, his eyes scanning the archaic maps under the beam of a flashlight. Ronan shouldered the extra pack, his hand giving Aria’s dangling foot a gentle squeeze.
“Lead the way, Beta,” Zade said, his voice a low growl that blended with the rising wind in the pines.
They vanished into the dark tapestry of the trees just as the first silver edge of the moon crested the distant hills. Behind them, in his study, Xavier Conners poured two fingers of whiskey but did not drink. He stared into the fire, his phone in his other hand. He selected a number from his contacts, labeled only with a snowflake icon.
The call connected. A cool, feminine voice answered. “Alpha Conners. To what do I owe the pleasure?”
Xavier’s voice was quiet, pleasant, and utterly terrifying. “Selene, my dear. We need to talk about your future.”
The forest swallowed them whole, the ancient pines closing ranks like sentinels. Jude navigated by the flashlight’s brittle beam and the older, more cryptic symbols in the leather journal. Each page rustled with a sound like dried insect wings. Zade carried Aria against his chest, her weight negligible but precious, a flickering ember in the vast dark. Her breathing had deepened into the slow rhythm of sleep, or something like it.
“The map shows a split in the trail up ahead,” Jude muttered, his voice taut. “One path dips toward a creek bed. The other climbs. The climb is faster, but it’s exposed.”
“Take the climb,” Zade said, his eyes scanning the oppressive shadows between the trees. He adjusted his grip on Aria, his hand spanning the entire width of her back. “We need speed. I can feel her… slipping.”
Ronan stayed close to Zade’s elbow, his hand a constant, gentle pressure on Aria’s leg. He was their early-warning system, his omega senses stretched thin, tasting the wind for threat. “It’s too quiet. Nothing’s hunting tonight. Or everything’s hiding.”
They took the climbing path, roots and rocks trying to twist their ankles. The air grew thinner, colder. After an hour of brutal ascent, Aria stirred with a small, confused sound. Zade stopped instantly, his whole world narrowing to her face in the moonlight.
Her violet eyes opened, glassy and unfocused. She looked at Zade, then at Jude’s worried profile, then at Ronan hovering near. A sweet, distant smile touched her lips.
“Ro-Ro?” she whispered, the name a feathery breath against Zade’s neck.
Ronan’s breath hitched. He hadn’t heard that name since they were first-year pups, all limbs and nervous laughter. “Yeah, Ari. I’m here.”
She blinked slowly, her gaze drifting to Jude. “Juju? You have the map.” Her tone was childishly approving, as if he’d been entrusted with a great treasure.
Jude froze, the journal suddenly feeling like a lead weight. The nickname was a relic, a artifact from a time before strategies and survival, when his biggest concern was outsmarting their homework. “Yeah,” he managed, his throat tight. “I’ve got it.”
Then she tilted her head back, looking up at Zade. The moon caught in her eyes. “Zadey’s got me,” she murmured, snuggling closer with complete trust. “Zadey always catches me.”
The name was a lance through Zade’s heart. Zadey. It was her secret name for him, used only in utterly private moments before they’d even understood what they were to each other. It belonged to a boy who was softer, who still believed his father’s approval was something earnable. Hearing it now, from her regressed mouth, felt like watching a ghost step out of a photograph.
“Always,” he promised, the word scraping raw from his chest. He looked over her head at Jude, his eyes reflecting a shared, panicked grief. This was worse than the physical changes. This was her mind walking backwards, leaving them behind.
They pushed on, the nicknames hanging in the air between them like mournful chimes. Aria drifted in and out, sometimes commenting on the “pretty lights” of fireflies, other times asking with sudden, sharp clarity if they were almost there before the fog rolled back in. Each time she used a childhood name, it felt like a tiny amputation.
The exposed ridge gave them a view of the endless, rolling forest, but no sign of a sacred grove. The journal’s instructions became more symbolic, less geographical. Where the stone weeps under the moon’s gaze, one line read. Jude cursed, low and fervent.
“We need to find water,” he said, closing the book. “The spring feeds the grove. It has to be near a water source.”
They descended into a gully where the sound of trickling water grew from a whisper to a conversation. The air changed, growing heavier, smelling of damp rock and something else—ozone, like after a lightning strike. The trees here were different, twisted and enormous, their bark silver in the faint light.
Aria became agitated in Zade’s arms, squirming. “Down. I want to walk.”
“It’s not safe, sweetheart,” Zade said, holding her tighter.
“Zadey, put me down.” Her voice was a petulant mimicry of her old command, but it held no real force. It was the whine of a tired child.
He reluctantly set her on her feet, keeping a firm hand on her shoulder. She took two wobbly steps, then crouched, her small fingers brushing the mossy ground. “It’s sad here,” she announced, her brow furrowed. “The trees are sad.”
Ronan knelt beside her, his presence a calm anchor. “Why are they sad, Ari?”
“They remember when it hurt,” she said, as if it were obvious. She pointed a thin arm toward a darker concentration of shadow between two giant, gnarled oaks. “The water’s that way. It’s crying.”
They followed her pointing finger. The bond, usually a stream of shared sensation, was a chaotic buzz from her direction—a jumble of infantile impressions and dizzying, depthless empathy. But beneath the static, like a clear signal buried in noise, was a pull. She was leading them.
The space between the oaks wasn't a path. It was an opening, a seam in the world. They passed through it, and the atmosphere shifted abruptly. The constant chirp of insects died. The air grew preternaturally still and warm, carrying the profound, mineral scent of deep earth and pure water.
Before them lay a small, circular clearing. In its center, a spring bubbled up from a crack in a dome of black rock, spilling into a shallow, stone basin. The water glowed with a soft, phosphorescent blue light, illuminating the grove from within. Above, the branches wove a perfect, circular window to the sky, where the moon hung, ripe and silver.
“The Grove,” Jude breathed, the journal falling slack in his hand.
Aria clapped her hands together with a giggle that echoed strangely in the sacred silence. “See? I told you, Juju.”
Zade’s relief was so potent it made his knees weak. But it was short-lived. From behind them, at the edge of the grove, came the crisp crunch of a foot on a twig. A cool, familiar voice sliced through the humid air.
“A little late for a picnic, isn’t it?”
Selene Frostveil stepped into the ring of moonlight, her ash-blonde hair a silver veil. She wasn’t alone. Two hulking forms shifted in the shadows behind her—Frostveil enforcers, their eyes already gleaming with predatory gold. She held a small, ornate dagger casually in one hand, its blade reflecting the spring’s eerie light.
She smiled, her eyes fixed on the child-sized figure of Aria. “I just came to watch the finale. The great Aria Reyes, reduced to a mewling pup.” Her gaze flicked to Zade, full of venomous triumph. “You should have chosen a real Luna, Zadey.”