I grit my teeth. “Keep going,” I tell myself.
Three days. Feels like three lifetimes. Every part of me aches, and my stomach is a hollow, gnawing void.
I stumble through the brush, head foggy and feet clumsy, when I finally spot it—the cave entrance. Relief hits hard, but exhaustion swallows it just as fast. My legs nearly buckle as I cross the threshold, damp stone and earth filling my nose.
“Well, ain’t this cozy,” I say, my voice hoarse.
I drop my backpack with a heavy thud. Finally.
I unzip it and pull out my bedroll with shaking hands. “Bet those flee bags are pissing themselves trying to find me.”
I barely get the bedroll down before my body gives out. I crawl inside, limbs heavy, every joint locked up.
“Tomorrow,” I mumble, barely able to keep my eyes open. “Tomorrow, we explore. And eat.”
My stomach growls in protest, but sleep pulls me under before I can think too hard about it.
4
Mo
You don’t notice it at first. It creeps in slow and quiet, easy to ignore if you stay busy enough—if you keep moving, keep hunting, keep telling yourself this is what freedom looks like.
But there are cracks. And they’re getting wider.
It’s the nights that get me. The days I can handle. There’s always something to do. Firewood to chop. Traps to set. A perimeter to check. But once the sun goes down and the fire burns low and there’s nothing left to do but sit there, that’s when it hits.
The silence.
Not the peaceful kind. Not the silence of a forest at rest. This is the other kind. The kind that presses in on you. The kind that makes you realize you haven’t heard another voice in weeks. That the last conversation you had was with a stick man named Charly.
I talk to him daily. I know how that sounds. But when you go long enough without hearing another person’s voice, your brain starts to fill in the gaps. You start needing something, anything, to talk to. So you pick up a stick that vaguely looks like a person, give it a name, and tell it about your day. After a while, it doesn’t even feel weird anymore.
That’s the part that scares me.
Some nights I dream of voices and laughter. The feeling of someone sitting next to me. Nothing specific, just the presence of another person. Warmth that isn’t a fire. A hand that isn’t mine.
I wake up angry. I blame myself for wanting it. For being weak enough to need something, I decided a long time ago I couldn’t have.
Connection. Trust. Those are luxuries I can’t afford. Not as an omega. Not after what happened to Sophie.
I caught myself doing something dumb last month. Almost as dumb as what I did yesterday. I’d found a campsite with two hikers, a man and a woman, probably in their thirties. They’d set up a small camp by the river, cooking dinner on a portable stove, talking and laughing.
I should’ve just taken what I needed and left. That’s the rule. Get in, get out, don’t linger.
But this time, I didn’t.
I sat in the trees and watched them for hours like some pathetic creep—two strangers eating, sharing wine, arguing about which trail to take in the morning.
I stayed until they fell asleep. Then I took a can of beans and a lighter from their supply bag and cried the whole walk back to my cave with my fist stuffed in my mouth so nothing in the forest could hear me.
Because that’s the thing nobody tells you about freedom: it isn’t free. You pay for it. Every cold night. Every silent morning.Every meal you eat alone on the ground with dirt under your nails and no one to talk to.
No one owns me. No one controls me. No alpha can put his hands on me or lock me in a cell, or sell me off. I can go wherever I want, do whatever I want. I answer to no one.
And it’s killing me.
My wolf feels it too. She’s restless, pacing inside me at all hours. She wants a pack. Warmth. Bodies pressed close—the feeling of belonging somewhere. Omega wolves aren’t built for this. We’re built for connection, for closeness, for being surrounded by people who give a shit whether we live or die.