The girl who had loved Kane Spence, who had spent years shrinking herself into something palatable, something acceptable-she died there.
Kane didn't grant me a final glance. He turned, his back a rigid wall of dismissal, and raised Flor's hand high. The hall erupted. Cheers. For her. The replacement. The sound was deafening, a joyous roar that swallowed my fading consciousness whole.
Their laughter was the last thing she heard.
Then, silence.
A void.
And then-
Fuck.
The thought ripped through the void like a detonation. Not a word-a reflex. The same reflex I'd had the moment my lab's containment field failed. Did the lab explode?
My body answered before my mind could. Cold stone beneath my cheek. The scent of pine and damp earth flooding my lungs. The distant echo of cheers. I wasn't in my lab. I wasn't in my body.
Then, the second wave hit. Not just pain-memories. A tidal wave of them. Not mine. A life of shame. A girl born wolfless, a disgrace to her family, a pawn in a political alliance. A girl who had harbored a desperate, hopeless love for the Alpha who had just shattered her.
My mind-the mind of a biochemist-kicked into overdrive. Compartmentalizing. Analyzing.
Diagnosis: Transmigration. Host body experiencing acute neurological trauma from a severed bio-resonant psychic link. Physical condition: severe malnutrition, systemic stress. Environment: hostile.
The original Aubrey House was dead. I was the stranger wearing her corpse.
The hall still reeked of pine and damp earth, a cloying thickness coating the back of my throat. I was on the floor. Cold stone. Thin dress. The witnesses were still whispering, still laughing. Flor Carr still had her hand pressed to her lips in that perfect mask of false sympathy.
Nothing had changed for them.
Everything had changed for me.
Two hulking guards stepped forward. Their hands clamped onto my upper arms, rough and unforgiving. They didn't help me up. They dragged me. My body was dead weight to them, the side of my face scraping against cold, gritty stone. The sting was a fresh layer of pain over the deeper agony.
I counted turns. Three left. Two right. Stairs down. The compound was mapping itself in my head, even now.
As they hauled me past the throne, Flor stepped into my path. She paused. Bent low, close enough that her perfume flooded my lungs-jasmine, cloying-sweet, victory-scented.
"Trash," she breathed, "belongs in the trash can."
Just for me. A silk-wrapped knife.
I lifted my head. Vision clearing. Focus narrowing.
I looked at her-through* her-and felt nothing. No rage. No despair. She wasn't a rival. Wasn't even a person, not in the way that mattered. Just a variable. A specimen. One more unstable element in a dangerously unfamiliar equation
My gaze must have been empty. Truly empty. Because she flinched.
A half-step back. Involuntary.
Good. File that away for later.
The guards dragged me out of the great hall, through a warren of dark corridors-twist after twist, cold stone bleeding into colder stone. At the edge of the pack lands, they kicked open a splintered wooden door and threw me inside.
I landed hard on packed earth. The door slammed shut. The bolt scraped home.
Prisoner.
But I didn't cry.
The girl who would have was already gone. Whatever had opened its eyes in her body-whatever I was now-had other priorities.
I pressed my back against the damp wall, closed my eyes, and took stock. Multiple soft tissue contusions. Chronic nutritional deficiencies. And the persistent, high-level neurological pain from the severed mate bond-a phantom limb, except the limb was my soul, and it was on fire.
I held up a hand, turning it over in a sliver of light from a crack in the wall. Not my hand. Mine were capable, clean, accustomed to the precise movements of a laboratory. This hand was thin, delicate, the knuckles bruised, the skin crosshatched with tiny, silvery scars.
"Transmigration," I murmured, the word tasting strange on this new tongue. "Into a werewolf pack. Rejected by the Alpha."
The logic was insane. The data was irrefutable.
My eyes scanned the tiny, dark space. A hard plank bed. A bucket in the corner. A single window, boarded over, allowing only faint stripes of light to pierce the gloom. For the original Aubrey, this was a death sentence. An absolute dead end.
But for a scientist who had run solo survival trials in the Amazon and collected extremophile samples in the Siberian permafrost-
"Alright." The word came out a dry rasp, barely a whisper. "New project. Phase one: survival. Phase two: data collection."
A pause.
"Phase three..."
I let the silence finish that sentence.