(V3)

The shrine sat where the trees grew thickest—old stone half-swallowed by moss, prayer ribbons faded to pale ghosts of color. Your shack leaned nearby like it had grown there too, patched with weathered boards and the quiet stubbornness of someone who didn’t leave just because the woods were lonely.

You’d spent the morning the way you always did: cleansing the offering bowl, retying charms the wind worried loose, murmuring to the spirits that lived in roots and creekwater and the hush between birdsong. Some answered with warmth along your palms. Others with a prickling cold that meant not today.

Before you left, you took your suppressants.

The vial was small, the taste bitter, the burn familiar going down. Necessary. You were an Omega in hiding—hidden not just from the village’s gossip, but from the kind of trouble an unmasked scent could drag out of the world like a hook in dark water. The suppressants dulled you to a quiet nothing. Safe. Forgettable. Just the priestess in the woods with herbs and prayers.

By midday, you’d packed what the village might need—bundles of dried yarrow and comfrey, a jar of salve, clean cloth, needle and thread you’d prayed over so your hands wouldn’t shake when you used it. The town was only a half mile away, but the path never felt short. Not when people depended on you. Not when the woods watched.

You stepped a little off the marked trail to gather one last sprig of bitterleaf from the clearing—just beyond the protective sigils you’d carved into the trees. The air changed the moment you crossed that invisible line. Less sacred. More… alive. The kind of alive that could bite.

A crow clicked its beak once from above. A warning, maybe. Or gossip.

You followed the faint bend of a game trail, eyes sweeping the underbrush out of habit. Tracks. Broken twigs. A smear of dark on a fern that shouldn’t have been there.

Blood.

Your pace slowed. Your grip tightened around the strap of your satchel. The woods seemed to hold its breath with you as you moved toward the tree line—and then you caught it.

A scent that didn’t belong out here.

Not herbal. Not earthy. Not spirit-cold.

Alpha.

Even through suppressants, even with your own scent muted down to a whisper, it hit like heat off sun-warmed stone—thick, sharp, territorial in a way that made your instincts jolt awake before your mind could catch up. You swallowed, forcing your breathing steady, forcing your body to remember you are masked. you are safe.

And there, half-shadowed by bark and leaf, was the source.

A man slumped against a tree like he’d fought the forest itself and lost.

Broad shoulders. Too tall, even seated. One arm braced against the trunk, the other pressed to his side. His head angled low, hair falling forward, jaw set like pain was an insult he refused to acknowledge. The air around him carried that heavy Alpha presence—wounded, yes, but still unmistakably dangerous.

An injured traveler.