Irina’s POV

I told myself not to look back.

I looked back anyway.

The cloak was already over my shoulders. The bag was already on my back — barely anything inside, just a change of clothes and a crumpled handful of cash I’d squirreled away over the past weeks. My boots were already tied. My hand was already on the doorframe.

And I still turned around.

Nicholas was asleep on the bed.

He lay on his back, one arm stretched loose at his side, breathing slowly. The room was dark — just that thin blade of moonlight slicing through the curtain gap, landing across the lower half of his face. He looked almost peaceful. The hard line of his jaw relaxed. That permanent furrow between his brows, gone.

He almost looked like a normal person.

My chest ached so badly I had to press my lips together to keep quiet.

*Go,* I told myself. *You’ve already decided. Go.*

I counted to three.

One.

He’d given me blood yesterday — no, my blood had gone to him. My hand still had the bandage on it. He was alive because of me, and I was leaving because of me, and none of this made any sense, and all of it made perfect sense at the same time.

Two.

The last time he’d said my name, it had been soft. Not a command. Just — soft. Like I was something he was still figuring out how to hold without breaking.

Three.

I turned around and walked out.

---

The palace at this hour was completely silent.

Not the kind of silence that feels empty. The kind that feels like something enormous is holding its breath. The chandeliers in the corridor were dimmed to almost nothing. My footsteps were soft on the marble — I’d practiced this, in my head, a hundred times. I knew which stretch of hallway echoed and which didn’t. I knew where the night guards rotated and how long their loops were.

Old survival habits. They’d never really left.

I moved through the east corridor, down the back stairway, past the kitchen, out through the small courtyard door. The hinge didn’t make a sound. I’d taken care of that two days ago — without even knowing why at the time. Or maybe I had known. Maybe some part of me had been planning this longer than I admitted to myself.

The cold hit me the moment I was outside.

Sharp and deep, the kind of cold that lives in the air just before dawn. I pulled the cloak tighter and started moving.

---

Sofia was gone.

I’d checked her room first — an hour ago, before I’d gone back for my bag. The door had been unlocked. The room was empty. Not abandoned-empty, not like she’d left in a hurry. Stripped clean. Like someone had come in while she was sleeping and removed her, quietly, professionally.

Roman’s people.

My stomach dropped all over again just thinking about it.

If they had Sofia, they had the poison. If they had the poison, they had a thread. And if Roman pulled that thread — and Roman always pulled the thread — it led straight back to me. And Alexei was already in that cell, already furious, already with every reason in the world to tell them everything.

*She poisoned him. Irina. Your luna.*

My feet moved faster.

The route I’d chosen wound through the back edge of the property — staying clear of the cameras, moving through the dead zone where the tree overgrowth blocked the signal. I’d noted it weeks ago on one of my walks, told myself it was just curiosity, told myself I was just mapping the grounds. I’d lied to myself about a lot of things.

I hit the tree line and broke into a run.

---

Running through the dark felt different than I remembered.

The last time I’d run like this, I’d been terrified in the simplest, most animal way — run or be caught, run or be destroyed. No thoughts. Just legs and lungs and the desperate prayer that the border would be close enough.

This time, my head wouldn’t shut up.

*He’s going to wake up and I’ll be gone.*

I knew what would happen. He’d wake up — the blood I’d given him was already working when I left, the color creeping back into his face — and he’d reach out, and I wouldn’t be there. And then Roman would walk in with the evidence, and Nicholas would know.

I wondered if it would hurt him.

Not the betrayal. I already knew that would devastate him in the particular way that only Irina, his marked mate, who he’d dragged out of a pit and brought home and actually let inside — only she could hurt him like that. I meant the other thing. The underneath thing.

I pressed my hand against my stomach, automatic, running.

There was a baby growing in there.

His baby. Ours.

Against all odds, against everything wrong with my body and my history and my circumstances — there was a life starting in there, quiet and stubborn and determined, the same way I’d always been quiet and stubborn and determined to survive. The doctors had been surprised. I hadn’t been. It felt right, somehow. Like the one thing that made sense.

I wanted this baby. I’d decided that in a hospital bed with Sofia’s warm presence next to me in the dark, and nothing that had happened since had changed my mind.

But I couldn’t raise this child in a cage. I couldn’t bring a baby into a palace where its mother was one interrogation away from execution. I couldn’t let my child’s first breath happen inside four walls that belonged to someone who had every right to be furious with me.

I wasn’t going back to be a prisoner again. I’d done that once. I’d survived that once.

I wouldn’t do it again. Not with a baby. Not for anyone.

Even him.

*Even though you love him.*

I shoved that thought down and ran harder.

---

The border zone appeared ahead of me without much warning.

The tree line thinned. The ground flattened. Then — open land, just a wide stretch of it, pale gray in the last darkness before dawn. No wall, no fence, no gate. Just a line in the air that every wolf could feel, a pressure shift, a change in the weight of the world.

On one side: pack law, alpha authority, mate bonds pulling like hooks in the chest, and a palace where people were probably already looking for me.

On the other side: the human world. Small and ordinary and completely indifferent to what I was or what I’d done.

I didn’t slow down.

I hit the line at a full sprint.

One step across.

Then another.

And I was through.

The pressure released. Just like that — something that had been squeezing around me from all sides let go at once. The air tasted different. Cleaner, simpler, without that constant undercurrent of pack energy that had been humming against my skin for so long I’d stopped noticing it.

Human ground.

I stopped running. Just for a second. Bent forward with my hands on my knees, catching my breath, shaking — from the cold or the exertion or just everything, I wasn’t sure. The sky to the east had gone a shade lighter. Still black, but the deep, velvet black of three hours before dawn had softened slightly at the edges.

I straightened up.

I was going to keep moving. Find a road, find a town, find a bus stop. Get as far from this border as possible before daylight. I had a plan, sort of. Enough of one.

I made myself start walking.

And that’s when I heard it.

Behind me. Far behind me — back across the border, back in the dark, somewhere in the direction I’d come from.

A single wolf howl.