Sienna's POV
The hunger never went away.
I woke up the next morning still starving. Still feeling like something inside me was eating itself. The cave was empty except for me and Jade, but I could sense everything outside. Every creature. Every heartbeat. Every living thing that existed became a possibility, a meal, a solution to the emptiness that was consuming me from the inside.
"You need to eat," Jade said, handing me some bread and water we'd taken from my house.
I stared at it like she'd handed me poison. "I can't. Food doesn't help anymore."
She understood immediately. "You need to hunt then."
I nodded and we moved deeper into the forest. The transformation was still happening. My body was changing in ways that didn't make sense. I was stronger than I'd ever been. My senses were sharper. I could hear a squirrel moving through leaves a quarter mile away. I could smell water from streams I'd never seen. I could feel the pulse of life in every direction like a map inside my skull.
But I was also becoming something I didn't recognize.
A bird landed on my shoulder while we were walking. A small brown thing with bright eyes that didn't understand it should be afraid of me. Without thinking, without planning, I reached up and touched it.
The moment my skin made contact, its life force flowed into me like water into a cup. Warmth. Energy. Power. The emptiness inside me filled completely and I felt almost human again. Almost whole. Almost like I could breathe without drowning.
Then exactly four minutes passed and the hunger came roaring back.
Worse than before.
The bird flew away weak but alive. I watched it go and felt something break inside my chest. I could have taken everything from it. Could have drained it completely and left it as a husk on the ground. But I hadn't.
That had to mean something.
"Did you feel it?" Jade asked.
"I felt it," I said. "Four minutes. That's all it takes. Four minutes of feeling full and then it comes back stronger than before."
We found a deer about an hour later. It was drinking from a stream, completely unaware that we were watching from the trees. Jade looked at me with a question in her eyes.
"Can you do it?" she asked. "Can you take what you need without killing it?"
I didn't know. But I moved forward anyway.
The deer sensed me before I got close. It bolted, but not fast enough. I was faster now. Stronger now. I caught up to it without even trying and my hands reached out and made contact with its neck.
The moment I touched it, I felt everything.
Its fear. Bright and electric and overwhelming. Its heartbeat. Fast and desperate and beautiful in a way I didn't understand. Its will to survive. Primal and ancient and completely necessary. And underneath all of it, its life force. The thing that made it a deer instead of just meat.
I could take all of it. I could drain it completely and leave it dead on the forest floor and the hunger would finally, finally be satisfied.
For maybe five minutes.
But I felt the deer's panic and I remembered what it felt like to be hunted. I remembered what it felt like to run for your life. I remembered what it felt like to be desperate and terrified and completely alone.
I pulled back.
I took only what I needed. Just enough to make the hunger quiet. Just enough to feel almost human again. The deer limped away on shaking legs, alive but weakened. It would recover. It would survive. It would remember being hunted by something it didn't understand.
Just like I would remember being hunted by Kael.
"You did it," Jade said as we watched the deer disappear into the forest.
"I didn't kill it," I said.
"That's what I meant." Jade stepped closer to me. "You could have destroyed it. But you chose mercy instead. That's not what a monster does, Sienna. A monster doesn't think about anything except taking what it wants."
I wanted to believe her. I wanted to believe that the curse inside me could be controlled. That the hunger could be managed. That I could keep some version of my humanity even as the cold spread further through my body.
But every hour, I felt myself getting colder. Every hour, I felt myself caring less about things that should matter. Every hour, the ancient thing inside me got a little bit stronger.
We practiced for hours. I learned that I could drain confidence from hunters. I learned that I could pull fear from predators. I learned that I could touch almost anything and take something from it. The curse had rules, even if I didn't fully understand them yet.
And the rule seemed to be this: I could take whatever I wanted, but I could choose not to.
That choice was what kept me tethered to being Sienna.
That choice was what separated me from being just a monster.
As evening fell, Jade and I found another shelter, this one in an abandoned hunter's cabin that had probably been empty for years. We made a fire and tried to rest, but I couldn't. The bond was pulling again. Kael was getting closer. I could feel his determination like it was a physical thing, like the hunting party was moving through the forest with absolute certainty about where we were.
Because he could feel me too.
The mate bond had changed. It wasn't just connecting us anymore. It was showing him where I was. It was pulling us toward each other like gravity. Like we were two things that were supposed to crash together and I had no idea what would happen when we did.
"They're going to find us soon," I said to Jade.
"I know."
"When they do, I don't know what's going to happen. The curse wants him. The bond wants him. But I'm still angry at him and I don't know if I can be around him without losing control."
Jade was quiet for a moment. Then she said something that made my blood run cold.
"What if you're not supposed to lose control? What if that's exactly what you're supposed to do?"
I looked at her. "What do you mean?"
"I mean that maybe the curse woke up for a reason. Maybe you're supposed to be powerful now. Maybe Kael needs to understand what he did when he rejected you. Maybe he needs to see you as something he can't just dismiss or control." Jade paused. "Maybe this isn't about running anymore. Maybe it's about standing your ground."
The idea terrified me. The idea of facing Kael when I was like this. The idea of letting him see what I'd become. The idea of showing him that rejecting me had been the biggest mistake of his life.
But underneath the terror was something else.
Something that felt like anticipation.
Around midnight, I felt the bond pull so hard it nearly knocked me over. Kael was close now. Really close. Maybe an hour away. Maybe minutes. The hunting party was moving through the forest with purpose and certainty and the kind of determination that came from an Alpha who'd finally figured out what he was hunting.
I stood up and walked to the window of the cabin.
"What are you doing?" Jade asked.
"Waiting," I said. "I'm done running."
My hands were glowing now. The dark veins covered most of my body. My eyes burned when I opened them. The curse had spread so far through me that there was barely any part of me left that felt human.
And for the first time, I didn't try to fight it.
I let it flow through me. I let it settle into my bones. I let it become part of who I was now, not something invading me but something I was learning to be.
The ancient thing inside me recognized Kael coming toward us. It recognized him as something important. Something that mattered. Something that had rejected us and was now coming to answer for that rejection.
The hunger rose up inside me again, but it wasn't about food anymore.
It was about him.