I can't.
I can't.
Not Cameran.
Please Goddess not Cameran.
The words repeat in my head like a broken prayer, slamming into me again and again until they lose all meaning and become nothing but sound and pain. She can't be gone. She can't. Cameran has always been there—loud, swearing, laughing, grounding me when the world tilted too far. She was the one who made space for me when I didn't know how to take it. The one who stayed when everyone else eventually left.
She's been my only constant.
"Please please please! I beg her. Don't leave me. Please don't leave me" I whisper into a cold ear.
My hands clutch at her shirt like if I hold tight enough, reality will tear instead of her. Like the universe might decide it made a mistake if I just refuse to accept it.
The pain in my chest is overbearing.
It's not sharp—it's crushing. A weight so heavy it caves my ribs inward, steals the air from my lungs. I try to breathe and can't. My body forgets how.
I'm suffocating in this grief.
It's everywhere. In my mouth. My throat. My veins. It pours over me like an endless ocean, cold and relentless, dragging me under, pulling me farther from the surface no matter how hard I fight.
Why.
Goddess why!?
My vision blurs, tears spilling unchecked, soaking Cameran's hair, her shoulder, her collarbone. She's still warm. That's the cruelest part. Warm enough that my heart keeps lying to me, whispering maybe—maybe—
I DIDN'T ASK TO BE QUEEN!
The thought explodes out of me, raw and hysterical.
I don't want to. I can't pay this payment!
This is the price. I see it now. Every crown comes with blood, and the Goddess decided mine would be soaked in the people I love most. I didn't agree to this bargain. I never would have.
"Please."
The word comes out broken, childlike.
I whimper.
"Please, Cameran—please!" I beg her again, voice cracking, shattering, dissolving into nothing. Maybe if I keep begging the Moon Goddess will return Cam to me. Maybe if I humiliate myself enough, break myself enough, she'll take pity on me.
I know it's futile.
I know.
And that knowledge doesn't make it hurt less—it makes it unbearable.
Emma is silent.
So silent I'm afraid she's gone too.
The absence is terrifying. Emma is never quiet. She rages, snaps, snarls—protects. Her silence feels like standing in a burned-out house where something once lived and now there's only ash and echoes.
"I can't do this without you!"
The words tear out of me, ugly and desperate. I don't care who hears. I don't care if this makes me weak. I am weak right now. I am breaking in half with her body in my arms.
That's when I see Dirge stumble forward.
My vision tunnels.
Everything in me recoils.
Anger surges so fast it nearly blacks me out, a violent counterpoint to the grief—hot where the grief is cold.
"NO!" I scream.
The word rips my throat raw.
"You did this!"
"You killed your own daughter out of false vengeance!"
Each word is a blade. I throw them at him because if I don't, I will collapse completely.
"I didn't know!" He sobs, collapsing to the ground. "I didn't mean to! Ginny—Ginny, what have I done to our baby girl?"
The sound of his grief doesn't move me.
It doesn't soften anything.
It only makes the hatred sharper.
"Aunt Ginny would hate you," I say, and my voice is no longer mine. It's flat. Deadly. Hollowed of anything resembling mercy. "If she's seeing this now, just know—when you die…"
My hatred for the man I once thought of as a father blooms full force, poisonous and absolute.
"And you will—by my hands—Ginny will be glad to know you're burning in hell."
"Samant—"
"F*CK YOU," I interrupt him.
The words explode out of me, fueled by years of buried pain, betrayal, and love twisted into something unrecognizable. How dare he say my name. How dare he exist after what he's done. It should have been him to die.
Pure rage blooms, grief overshadowing me completely.
They will all pay.
They will all face judgment.
Heat coils in my belly, tight and volatile, like a living thing trying to claw its way out of my skin. It hurts. It burns. My veins feel like molten metal.
Emma stirs.
The sensation is faint at first—fear brushing against my mind like trembling hands. Not rage. Not hunger.
Fear.
The heat spreads all around my body, licking up my spine, across my shoulders, down my arms. The air grows thick, heavy, vibrating with power I don't remember inviting.
They killed her.
They killed Enoch and Cameran.
They killed my parents and Aunt Ginny.
The list stacks up in my head, each name another crack in the dam barely holding me together.
I hate them all.
I hate their corruption.
Their selfish, rotten way of thinking.
Their arrogance.
They made so many wolves suffer. Generations of fear. Generations of silence. They killed a whole generation of wolves. A whole lineage. White Wolves erased because a handful of monsters wanted more power than they were ever meant to hold.
Power.
That is what I feel now.
It thrums through me, vast and uncontrollable, ancient and furious, answering my grief with something far worse.
'Sam—' Emma's voice finally breaks through, not sharp, not commanding—terrified.
Emma doesn't roar.
That's the first thing that terrifies me.
She doesn't snarl or bare her teeth or surge forward looking for blood. She curls inward around my heart like a shield made of shaking bones, her presence tight and frantic, claws digging into the inside of my ribs as if she's trying to physically hold me together.
'Sam—Sam, listen to me.'
Her voice isn't sharp. It isn't commanding.
It's breaking.
'You're slipping. I can feel it. You're not just angry—you're dissolving. This isn't a fight response, this is collapse. Goddess, Sam, breathe. You have to breathe.'
She presses herself against my consciousness, forcing images at me—my hands, my knees in the dirt, the weight of Cameran in my arms, the sound of my own heartbeat thundering out of control.
'Feel your body. Feel me. Feel the ground. Don't leave me alone in here.'
Her fear bleeds through me, raw and unfiltered. Emma has never been afraid of death. Never been afraid of enemies. Never been afraid of pain.
But she is afraid of me right now.
'If you let this power loose like this, it won't stop where you want it to. It doesn't know the difference between guilty and innocent—not when it's fed grief this deep. Sam, please. I can't protect anyone from you if you break like this. I can't protect you.'
She wraps tighter, like arms around my spine, like teeth sinking into my soul to keep it anchored.
'You're not alone. I'm still here. I'm not gone. Don't turn away from me. Don't turn into something that can't feel us anymore.'
Her voice drops to a whisper, small and panicked.
'I need you. Please don't make me watch you disappear.'
'Sam, stop. Please. You're losing control!'
Her fear hits me harder than any blow.
Somewhere, deep beneath the rage and the fire and the grief that is swallowing me whole, a part of me realizes—
If I let this go any further…
I won't just burn them.
I will burn everything.
Maybe everything deserves to burn.
Maybe everything does deserve to burn. Burn for their sins.
The thought doesn't scare me.
That's what scares me.
It settles in my chest with a horrible, seductive calm, like the answer to a question I've been screaming into the void my entire life. If everything is ash, nothing can be taken from me again. No friends. No parents. No mates. No children dragged screaming into the dark because monsters decided power mattered more than lives.
Fire doesn't discriminate.
Fire doesn't hesitate.
Fire doesn't feel this pain.
My fingers curl into the dirt, and the ground beneath my palms is warm now—too warm. I can feel the forest reacting, roots shuddering, air thickening, the night holding its breath. The world knows something is wrong. The world knows I am wrong.
I feel Emma shaking.
Not recoiling.
Shaking.
She clings to me like she's afraid I'll tear myself apart from the inside out, like if she loosens her grip for even a second, there will be nothing left of either of us.
'Sam, she pleads again, weaker now, like her voice is cracking under the strain. You don't want this ending. You think you do—but you don't. You still feel love. You still feel her. That means you're not gone yet.'
Her words stab deeper than rage ever could.
Love.
Cameran's laugh flashes through my mind—too loud, too inappropriate, echoing through hallways like she owned them. The way she swore when she was nervous. The way she always stood half a step in front of me when things got ugly, like her body alone could shield me from the world.
She would hate this.
The thought nearly breaks me in two.
She would hate seeing me like this—unmoored, reckless, ready to scorch everything just so the pain would stop. She'd grab my face, force me to look at her, and say something crude and sharp and devastatingly honest.
Don't you dare become what killed us, she'd say. I didn't die for that.
My throat tightens.
The fire surges again, furious at the hesitation, furious at the doubt.
Emma whimpers.
'Please, she whispers. If you destroy everything, there will be nothing left for you to protect. And you were never meant to be destruction alone.'
I squeeze my eyes shut, a broken sound tearing out of me as the pressure crescendos—grief clawing one way, power clawing the other.
I don't know how to be Queen Alpha like this.
I don't know how to carry a crown made of bones and loss.
But somewhere beneath the fire, beneath the hatred, beneath the devastation that wants to swallow me whole, there is still a pulse.
Still a thread.
Still a promise I made long before tonight.
I will protect them.
Even from myself.
And that—more than rage, more than grief, more than fire—is the hardest choice I have ever had to make.