Day three of being buried alive was when I hit the bottom. It wasn't soft. It was cold, hard rock. And when I hit it, something inside me didn't just break. It stopped falling.

  My leg, once a source of agony, had subsided into a dull, throbbing bass line of misery. The unnatural healing was working, knitting bone and sinew back together with a slow, agonizing itch, but the concrete slab was a stubborn, unmoving god. I was healing into the shape of my tomb.

  On day four, I got free. Not with a heroic burst of strength. It was slower than that. Uglier. I let the monster out, not with a roar, but with a quiet click. Let the bones shift. With the wolf's strength, I pushed. For hours. Claws scraping. Muscles screaming. The slab groaned, shifted an inch. It was enough.

  I dragged myself out, my newly reformed leg a mangled, twisted thing that trailed behind me like a broken toy. The transformation receded, leaving me shivering and human in the suffocating dark. I was free. Free to lie in a different part of my grave.

  I made it back to the lab sometime on day five. The journey was a hazy, surreal nightmare of crawling through rubble and dragging my useless leg behind me. The world was a blur of pain and exhaustion. The Kennel, once a dusty shelter, now felt like a mausoleum. The silence was a monument to my failure.

  I stared at the stranger in the glass. Ravage was still out there, angrier than ever. Failure. Pandora was looking for me now. Failure. And the look on Tessa and Cody’s faces... a smoking crater where my life used to be. Failure.

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  I was physically and emotionally broken. A shattered thing, huddled in the ruins of my uncle’s forgotten lab.

  I caught my reflection in a large, jagged piece of broken glass leaning against a workbench. The girl who stared back at me was a stranger. Her face was gaunt, her eyes two dark, hollow pits in a face that was all sharp angles and pale skin. The faint pink scar on my cheek from my first encounter with Ravage was a stark, ugly line. I looked… feral. Hunted.

  A weapon that hurts everyone it touches.

  The thought wasn't an accusation anymore. It was a simple statement of fact. I had tried to be a hero, and I had buried myself alive. I had tried to protect my friends, and I had turned them into witnesses of a horror show. Everything I touched, I broke. My family, my friends, myself. I was a walking, talking catastrophe.

  And what about Ravage? Hark Hale? The man I had tried to save, the ghost I had tried to reason with? I had only made him worse. I hadn’t reached the man; I had only enraged the beast. I was just as lost, just as feral, as he was. We were two sides of the same monstrous coin, minted in the fires of Pandora’s ambition. And we were doomed to destroy each other, and everything around us.

  I looked at my reflection. At the hollow-eyed stranger. The anger, the guilt, the fear... they were gone. There was nothing left to feel. Just a quiet, static hum where my hope used to be.

  I was done.