Claimed by the scarred Alpha

LUCIAN

The front of my car missed the truck’s grille by inches. The rear didn’t. The impact spun me like a top, the world becoming a blur of green, brown and sky. I felt the tires leave earth, felt gravity release its hold for one infinite moment.

Then I was in the trees.

Branches shattered against the windshield, against the roof, against my arms as I raised them to protect my face. The car plowed through undergrowth, saplings bending and breaking against the momentum.

I couldn’t see.

The canopy blocked the rising sun, and turned everything into shadow, motion and noise.

I fought the wheel, trying to find the path of least resistance, but the forest was too dense. The car struck something solid, bounced, and struck again.

My head snapped forward, the seatbelt cutting into my chest hard enough to bruise ribs. The airbag deployed in a white explosion of powder and fabric, blinding me completely.

I ripped it away with one hand, still steering with the other, still trying to find purchase, find space, and survival. The trees were everywhere, trunks sliding past in brown streaks, and I realized with sudden clarity that I wasn’t in control anymore. The car had become a projectile, physics taking over where skill ended.

Then I saw the oak.

It stood directly ahead. A massive, ancient, and immovable thing. The trunk filled the windshield, the bark details suddenly sharp and distinct. There was no time to brake. No time to turn. I had maybe half a second between recognition and impact.

So I moved.

My fingers found the seatbelt release. My shoulder hit the door. I threw myself sideways,my arms covering my head,as I tucked into the roll I’d learned in combat training eons ago.

The world became noise and motion, with grass, dirt and sky rotating around me.

I felt the heat of the engine block as the car’s front end crumpled against the tree. I even felt the shockwave travel through the chassis.

I landed hard, shoulder first, then my back, followed by my skull.

Pain exploded behind my eyes, bright and white and everywhere. I rolled twice more before fetching up against a stump.

My breath was gone and my vision swimming.

For a moment, I lay still. The forest was silent except for the ticking of cooling metal, and the hiss of ruptured hoses.

Steam rose from the wreckage, white against the green canopy. I tasted blood, copper and salt, and spat onto the moss beside my head.

Then I heard engines.

Distant, but approaching.

The survivors were regrouping, and following the trail I’d carved through the undergrowth.

I had minutes, maybe less.

I forced myself upright, head spinning, and assessed the damage. My left arm hung wrong, dislocated at the shoulder. My ribs screamed with every breath. Something warm trickled down my temple, into my stubble.

I looked at the car.

The front end was wrapped around the oak like a lover, it’s metal folded into bark. The cabin was somehow intact but unreachable.

My clothes were in there. My backup pieces. My phone too. Everything that marked me as civilized.

The engines grew louder and that was my cue to fucking go.

I moved toward the wreck on instinct first, my every step sending fire through my joints.

I reached the driver’s side that was still hanging open, and grabbed my jacket from the seat. Then a fresh shirt and pants. I gathered them in one arm, the injured one, biting back a scream as the shoulder moved wrong.

I rubbed them all over my body and blood, removed the ones that I had one too and then threw the whole bundle back into the car, arranging it roughly in the shape of a body under the deployed airbag.

It was a trick. They would hope it was a corpse

And that would give me a few seconds of confusion while they verified the corpse wasn’t me.

It wouldn’t hold, but I didn’t need it to hold. I just needed it to slow them down.

The first shouts reached me through the trees. "Check the wreck!" "Secure the perimeter!" "Find the body!"

I ran.

Naked, bleeding, and even with one useless arm.

I plunged deeper into the forest.

Branches whipped against bare skin, leaving red lines across my chest, my back, my thighs. The ground was soft with fallen leaves, then hard with roots, then soft again with mud. I didn’t feel it. I didn’t feel anything except the need to move, to escape, to survive.

"Isabelle," I gasped between breaths, the name becoming a curse, a prayer, a fucking rhythm. "Isabelle, you fucking bitch. Isabelle, I’ll kill you. Isabelle, I’ll—"

But then what she said came to mind. The idea that she was already dead. The letter said so. Dead by her own hand or someone else’s, but gone nonetheless and leaving me to clean up the mess she’d made for me, to face the consequences she’d escaped.

The unfairness of it burned hotter than the pain in my shoulder.

I heard those dogs behind me. By dogs, I meant Elite tracking shifters brought in to finish what vehicles couldn’t. They’d find my scent on the car, on the clothes, follow me until I dropped or until I changed.

I had no choice anymore.

I found a clearing, small, ringed with birch, the ground covered in ferns that brushed my knees. I stopped, chest heaving, and let the change take me.

It hurt more than usual, the trauma of the crash translating into the transformation, bones grinding and shifting, muscles tearing and reforming. I screamed through it, the sound becoming a howl as my throat changed shape, as my humanity peeled away like old skin.

Fur erupted across my back, silver and black, the markings of my tainted bloodline. My injured shoulder snapped back into place with a wet crack, healed temporarily by adrenaline and the blessing of the shift. My senses expanded, the forest becoming a web of scent and sound, the hounds behind me suddenly became individual presences I could note.

I looked back once, human thought flickering in the wolf’s mind.

The car was distant now, a thin column of smoke rising above the trees. I could hear the sentinels shouting, confused by the empty clothes, and the lack of a body in the driver’s seat.

I turned and ran.

Four legs carried me faster than two ever could. I threaded through undergrowth that would have snagged human feet, leaped fallen logs, splashed through streams to break my scent trail. The forest opened before me like a map, every trail clear, every hiding spot obvious, every danger marked in the language of wind and spoor.

The hounds bayed behind me, but they were slow.

I was going to survive this.

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