BLOOD OF THE FORGOTTEN

Cold wakes Lyra before the bell does.

It always does. Her room sits at the end of the servants' hall, the last door before the stone gives way to bare rock, and the wind finds every crack in the wall like it's looking for her on purpose. She pulls the thin blanket tighter and stares up at the ceiling, watching her own breath curl into the dark.

Somewhere above her, the rest of Blackthorn Keep is still asleep. Warriors in their warm beds. Healers in rooms with real fireplaces.

The Alpha, high up in the Moon Tower, wrapped in furs thick enough to swallow a person whole. Lyra used to imagine what that felt like, waking up warm. She doesn't anymore. There's no use aching for something she'll never have.

She is an Omega. The lowest rank in the pack, lower than lowest, really, because at least the other low ranks get looked at once in a while. Lyra gets looked through.

She has learned to move through the Keep like smoke, quiet and gray and easy to forget, because the alternative is worse. Omegas who draw attention get hurt. Omegas who stay invisible get to keep breathing.

The bell rings, harsh and metallic, echoing down through the stone halls. Lyra is already up.

She dresses fast in the dark - a plain grey tunic, boots with a hole starting in the left heel, hair yanked back into a knot at the base of her neck before it can fall into her face. She catches her reflection for half a second in the cracked piece of glass propped against her wall.

Amber eyes stare back at her, tired, sharp, wary. Raven-black hair, a face too thin from meals that come last and smallest. She doesn't linger on it. There's nothing there worth admiring, and even if there were, nobody else would bother to look.

By the time she reaches the kitchens, the ovens are already roaring and the air smells like burned porridge and wet stone. Cook barely glances at her as she shoves a chipped bowl into Lyra's hands.

"Scraps today," Cook says. "Warriors ate heavy last night. Eat quick, you're on laundry before the sun's even up proper."

Lyra doesn't argue. She never argues. She eats standing at the edge of the kitchen, the porridge thin and lukewarm, and she watches the pack move around her like she's part of the furniture.

A group of young warriors laughs too loud near the hearth. A healer's apprentice hurries past with an armful of bandages. None of them look at her. None of them ever do.

It didn't used to sting this much. She's had eighteen years of practice not caring.

But some mornings - mornings like this one, cold and grey and empty - the loneliness sits heavier in her chest than usual, and she has to remind herself, again, that alone is safer than the alternative. Alone means nobody can leave her. Nobody can already be gone by the time she wakes up to find it out.

Her mother taught her that lesson without meaning to. Lyra was six. One day there was a mother, and the next there wasn't, and nobody in the pack ever gave her a straight answer about where she went or why.

She left, they told her, like it was that simple. Like a mother just walks away from her own daughter for no reason at all. Her father believed it too, or maybe he just needed to believe it, because after that he stopped being much of a father at all. He was there, technically. His body stayed in the Keep.

The rest of him went wherever her mother went, and he never came looking for either of them.

So Lyra raised herself. She learned early that trusting people just gives them one more way to hurt you, and she has never once let herself forget it.

The laundry room is already steaming by the time she gets there, three other Omegas bent over tubs of grey water, arms red to the elbow. Nobody greets her.

She takes her place at the end of the row and gets to work, and for a while there's nothing but the slosh of water and the ache building in her shoulders and the low murmur of pack gossip drifting from the warriors' side of the courtyard through the open window.

"...heard the Elders talking again," one of the older Omegas mutters to another, not bothering to lower her voice much, because who's going to repeat anything an Omega says. "About the old prophecy. Something's got them spooked."

"It's just a story," the other one says. "My grandmother used to tell it to scare pups into behaving. A wolf whose blood wakes something buried. Nothing ever comes of stories like that."

Lyra keeps scrubbing, but something in her chest tightens anyway. She's heard fragments of that prophecy her whole life, whispered in corners, dismissed as nonsense the second anyone official is in earshot.

She's never understood why it bothers her as much as it does. Maybe because she's spent her whole life being the thing nobody bothers looking at twice, and some small, stubborn part of her wants to believe that somewhere, something buried might actually matter. Might actually be real.

She doesn't say any of that out loud. She never says what she's actually thinking out loud. It's safer that way.

Punishment finds her before midday.

She trips carrying a stack of linens past the Great Hall - exhaustion catching up with her, one bad step - and the whole armful goes sprawling across the stone floor in front of three warriors and, worse, Ronan Ash, the Head Warrior himself, broad-shouldered and scowling, a scar running pale down the side of his neck.

"Watch yourself," he snaps, not even looking at her properly, already moving on. But one of the linens has landed in a puddle of mud near the door, and that's enough.

That's always enough.

She's sent to the old archives as punishment. Nobody's cleaned that room in years, they tell her, like she should be grateful for the extra work instead of furious. She isn't grateful. She isn't furious either, not really. She's just tired, the kind of tired that sits in her bones and doesn't leave no matter how much she sleeps.

The archive room is buried in the lower levels of the Keep, past the kitchens, down a narrow stair that gets darker with every step. The door groans when she pushes it open, and dust rises in a thick cloud that catches the light from her single candle and hangs there, slow and glittering.

Shelves line every wall, sagging under the weight of scrolls and ledgers nobody's touched in decades. The air smells like old paper and something colder underneath it, something that makes the hair on her arms stand up even though there's no wind down here.

She starts at the nearest shelf, wiping dust off in long grey streaks, and for a while it's almost peaceful. Nobody down here ignored her. Nobody is watching. Just her and the silence and the small, steady sound of her own breathing.

Then her hand catches on something that isn't quite like the rest.

It's tucked behind a row of ledgers, half falling apart, the edges gone soft and brown with age. A scrap of parchment, torn clean across the middle, like someone ripped it in half a long time ago and only bothered hiding one piece. She pulls it free carefully, heart beating a little faster than it should for something so small.

It's a map. Or part of one.

Lines drawn in faded ink, curling and branching underneath a rough sketch of the Keep itself - tunnels, she realizes, tunnels running beneath the stone she's standing on right now. One line is marked with a small symbol she doesn't recognize, a shape like a closed eye, right where the tunnels seem to end at a room that isn't marked on any map she's ever seen of this place.

Her pulse picks up. She doesn't know why. It's just old paper, just a torn scrap someone forgot to burn. But something about it feels the way her mother's face used to feel in the fragments of memory she still has - like something important that got taken from her before she was old enough to understand what it meant.

She folds the map carefully and tucks it into her sleeve before she can talk herself out of it. It isn't hers to take. She takes it anyway.

That night, sleep comes fast and hard, and it drags her somewhere she's never been before.

She's standing in a forest, except this forest is burning, orange light licking up through the black branches overhead, smoke thick enough to taste.

Stone walls rise around her that she half-recognizes, carved with figures of wolves running in a circle, chasing something or someone she can't quite see. And there's a woman standing in the middle of the fire, untouched by it, watching Lyra with a face that makes her chest ache before she even understands why.

It's her own face. Her own amber eyes, staring back at her out of a woman she has never met and somehow already knows.

"They forgot us on purpose," the woman says, and her voice doesn't sound like it's coming from her mouth so much as from the stones themselves, low and old and impossibly sad. "They wanted you erased before you ever had a chance to remember."

Lyra tries to speak and nothing comes out. The fire creeps closer. Her whole body goes rigid with a fear she doesn't understand, sharp and ancient, like it belongs to someone else entirely and just happens to be living in her chest tonight.

Then, underneath the fear, something else stirs. Something low and powerful, curling awake in her stomach like it's been sleeping there her whole life and has finally decided it's had enough rest.

She wakes with a gasp, drenched in sweat, her heart slamming against her ribs. For one disorienting second her eyes don't feel like her own - there's a strange silver-white light bleeding into the edges of her vision before it fades, before the world settles back into the familiar grey dark of her tiny room.

She sits up slowly, breathing hard, and looks down at her own hands like they might belong to a stranger.

Something is different. She can't say what, not yet. But for the first time in as long as she can remember, Lyra Veyne doesn't feel invisible.

She feels like something inside her has finally started waking up - and whatever it is, she has the sudden, bone-deep certainty that once it's fully awake, nothing about her small, quiet, forgotten life is ever going back to the way it was.

Outside her window, far off toward the Moon Tower, a wolf howls into the dark. And for reasons she can't explain, Lyra's whole body answers it, a pull deep in her chest that feels less like fear now and more like recognition.

Something is coming. She can feel it in her blood.

Lyra doesn't sleep again that night.

She lies in the dark with the torn map pressed flat under her mattress, and every time she closes her eyes she sees the burning forest, the woman with her own face, the words that won't leave her alone.

They wanted you erased before you ever had a chance to remember.

By the time the bell rings for morning chores, she has already made up her mind.

She waits until the Keep goes quiet in the afternoon, that dead hour when the warriors are training in the yard and the kitchen staff take their break and nobody bothers checking where an Omega has gotten to.

She slips down past the kitchens, past the archive room she was sent to punish, and finds the narrow stair behind it that the map showed her - a stair she's walked past a hundred times without ever once noticing it went anywhere.

Her candle shakes a little in her hand as she starts down.

The air changes almost right away. Colder. Older, somehow, in a way she doesn't have words for. The walls press close on either side, rough stone slick with damp, and the only sound is her own breathing and the soft scrape of her boots on the steps.

"This is stupid," she whispers to herself, voice small and swallowed up by the dark. "This is really stupid, Lyra."

She keeps walking anyway.

The tunnel splits twice, and both times the map in her hand tells her which way to go, the faded ink lining up with turns in the stone like it was drawn by someone who walked this exact path a hundred times before her. The deeper she goes, the more it feels like the walls are watching her. She tells herself that's nonsense. Stone doesn't watch anything.

Then she hears it. A whisper, so faint she almost mistakes it for her own breath.

She freezes. "Hello?"

Nothing answers. Just the drip of water somewhere far off, and her own heartbeat, loud in her ears. She keeps moving, faster now, candle flame throwing shaking shadows against the walls.

The whisper comes again, closer this time, and this time she can almost make out words, though none of them mean anything to her - a language older than any she's heard spoken in the Keep. It doesn't feel threatening exactly. It feels like something calling her by a name she doesn't remember having.

"I don't understand you," she says, and her voice cracks a little on the last word. "What do you want from me?"

The whisper doesn't answer that either. It just seems to move ahead of her, drawing her forward, until the tunnel opens into a small round chamber and her candlelight lands on a door unlike anything else she's seen in this place.

The door is made of pale, silver-streaked wood, and it doesn't belong down here at all - it looks like something that should be standing in a grand hall somewhere, not buried under a mountain of forgotten stone. There's no handle.

No lock that she can see. Just a symbol carved into the center, the same closed-eye shape marked on her torn map.

Lyra reaches out and touches it, and the second her skin makes contact, the wood grows warm under her palm.

"What-" She snatches her hand back, staring at it like it's betrayed her.

A thin line of light traces itself along the crack of the door, following the shape of her palm print, and then, with a groan like something waking after a very long sleep, the door swings inward on its own.

Her breath catches. Part of her wants to run right back up the stairs and forget this ever happened.

The bigger part of her, the part that's spent eighteen years wanting one honest answer about her own life, steps through instead.

The room inside is small and round, its walls lined with shelves of scrolls that look impossibly old, some of them crumbling at the edges just from being looked at too hard. In the center sits a stone pedestal, and on it, a single scroll, untouched by dust, like it's been waiting.

Her hands shake as she unrolls it.

The words swim in front of her eyes at first, her heart pounding too loud to let her focus. Then they settle, and she reads.

The Veyne bloodline. First rulers of this land, before the pack councils, before the Alphas as they stand now. Overthrown. Erased from record by order of the ruling council, all trace of their existence to be destroyed, all who remember to be silenced.

Lyra reads it twice. Three times. Her own name, staring back at her from a scroll centuries old.

"That's not-" She shakes her head, like she can argue with paper. "That's not possible. I'm nobody. I'm an Omega. I clean linens."

But her hands keep turning the scroll, and further down, in different ink, added later, in a hand that looks almost rushed -

The last Veyne bloodline was believed extinguished. One survivor confirmed in a recent generation. Mother eliminated by order of Seraphine Dray to prevent further exposure. Cause of death recorded falsely as departure from pack lands.

The candle nearly slips out of Lyra's hand.

"No." The word comes out of her broken, barely a whisper. "No, she left. She left us. Everyone said-"

She has to sit down. Her legs simply stop holding her up, and she sinks onto the cold stone floor with the scroll clutched against her chest, and for a moment all she can do is breathe, fast and shallow, while eighteen years of grief rearrange themselves into something sharper. Something with a shape. Something with a name.

Seraphine Dray. The Elder who smiles at her sometimes in the halls. The Elder who once told her, almost kindly, that Omegas who work hard enough sometimes rise in the world.

"She killed her," Lyra says out loud, testing the words, feeling how wrong and how true they both sound at once. "She killed my mother, and she let me grow up thinking she just - left me."

Something inside her chest cracks open.

It doesn't feel like grief anymore. It feels hot, and huge, and it rises up through her so fast she doesn't have time to brace for it. Her skin prickles all over. Her vision blurs at the edges, tinted with something silver and strange, and a low sound builds in her throat that isn't quite human.

"What's happening to me-"

She doesn't remember standing up. She doesn't remember walking out of the chamber, back through the tunnels, the whispers rising around her now instead of leading her, louder, faster, like they know something is about to happen and they're eager for it.

She emerges into the Great Hall just as the sun is dipping low outside, gold light slanting through the tall windows, and she isn't alone.

Kael Ardyn stands near the long table, deep in conversation with two of his warriors, and he turns the moment she stumbles in, some instinct in him reacting to her before his eyes even find her face.

"Lyra?" His voice sharpens instantly, worry cutting through the usual iron calm he carries. "What happened to you? Are you hurt?"

She opens her mouth to answer him. Nothing comes out but that same low sound from before, and this time it doesn't stop.

The change takes her standing up.

It isn't like the stories describe it, painful and violent and slow. It's fast, and strangely gentle, like her human shape was only ever a thin layer over something much older waiting underneath. Bones shift.

Fur rushes across her skin like water. In the space of a few frightened heartbeats, Lyra Veyne isn't standing in the Great Hall anymore.

A wolf is.

She's massive - bigger than any wolf Kael has ever seen, silver-white fur catching the last of the sunlight, and her eyes, when she lifts her head to look at him, burn a bright, unnatural silver.

Nobody in the Hall moves. Nobody breathes.

Kael takes one slow step forward, hand raised, palm open. "Easy," he says, low, careful, like he's talking to something that might shatter or might tear his throat out, and he genuinely doesn't know which. "Nobody's going to hurt you. I promise you that."

From the doorway behind him, a new voice cuts through the silence, smooth and cold as ice over deep water.

"Well," Seraphine Dray says, stepping into the Hall with her silver-blonde hair catching the light, her pale green eyes fixed on Lyra with an expression that isn't quite fear and isn't quite triumph, but something twisted between the two. "I did wonder when this day would come."

Lyra's wolf-head snaps toward her. A growl builds low in her chest, rumbling out into the quiet Hall, and every warrior present takes an involuntary step back.

"You knew," Kael says slowly, looking between the two of them, understanding dawning hard and fast across his face. "You knew what she was."

"I knew what her mother was," Seraphine says, and there isn't a trace of guilt in her voice, only a kind of tired resignation, like she's discussing an old inconvenience finally come due. "I did what needed doing to protect this pack. I'd hoped it would be enough."

The growl in Lyra's chest turns into something else, something raw and furious, and every instinct in her screams to attack, to make Seraphine answer for what she took. But underneath the fury, fear claws up faster.

Too many eyes. Too many wolves who could turn on her the second they decide what she is matters more than who she's always been.

She doesn't choose to run. Her body chooses for her.

She bolts past Kael, past the stunned warriors, out through the huge open doors of the Hall and into the courtyard beyond, and nobody moves fast enough to stop her.

"Lyra, wait!" Kael's voice chases after her, raw with something that sounds almost like panic. "Lyra!"

She doesn't stop. She can't. The forest swallows her whole a moment later, trees blurring past in a silver rush, and behind her the Keep grows smaller and smaller until it disappears completely.

All she can hear is her own heartbeat, and the whispers from the tunnels, still following her, still calling her by that name she doesn't remember earning.

Run, they seem to say. Run, and remember who you really are.

And for the first time in her whole forgotten life, Lyra runs toward something instead of away from it - toward whatever truth is still waiting for her, somewhere out past the trees.

Lyra runs until her body simply won't anymore.

The forest blurs past in streaks of black and silver, branches tearing at her fur, roots catching her paws, and still she doesn't stop, because stopping means thinking, and thinking means feeling everything that happened in that Hall all at once. Better to run.

Better to let her legs burn and her lungs scream and her mind go blank and white with effort.

She killed her. She killed my mother.

The thought keeps surfacing anyway, no matter how fast she runs from it.

By the time the trees thin out and the ground turns rocky and strange under her paws, she's shaking with exhaustion, her wolf form trembling at the edges like it might give out. She doesn't know how long she's been running. She doesn't know where she is. She only knows she can't take another step - and then, quite suddenly, she can't.

Her legs fold under her. The forest floor rushes up, and everything goes dark.

She wakes to firelight and the smell of woodsmoke, and for one terrified second she thinks she's back in the Keep, back in that Hall with every eye on her. Then she blinks, and the ceiling above her is canvas, not stone, and the fire is small and close, and a woman she's never seen before kneels nearby, watching her with careful, guarded eyes.

Lyra tries to sit up too fast and instantly regrets it. Pain lances through every muscle she owns.

"Easy." The woman's voice is rough, not unkind. Short dark hair.

A jagged scar along one cheekbone. The kind of stillness that only comes from years of watching your own back. "You've been out the better part of a day. Your body needs a minute before it decides to move again."

"Where-" Lyra's voice comes out cracked, barely there. "Where am I?"

"Rogue Lands.

The woman says it plainly, like it should mean something. When Lyra just stares at her, she adds, "Past Blackthorn territory. Past the mountains they say guard it. You ran a long way for someone who looks like she's never left the Keep before in her life."

"I hadn't." Lyra pulls the thin blanket tighter around her shoulders. Human again, she realizes now. Human and freezing and completely exposed. "I didn't even know this place was real."

"Most pack wolves don't." The woman settles back on her heels, studying her with an expression Lyra can't quite read. "I'm Elara. And you, judging by the state you showed up in, are in a lot more trouble than you understand yet."

Lyra swallows hard. "What do you mean?"

"I mean a wolf doesn't shift for the first time at your age unless something's been holding that shift back on purpose."

Elara's eyes narrow slightly. "And a wolf built like you, a coat that color - I've heard stories. Old ones. Didn't think I'd ever actually see one standing in front of me."

"See what?" Lyra's heart starts pounding again. "What am I?"

Elara doesn't answer right away. She reaches over instead, feeds another piece of wood into the fire, watches the flames catch before she finally speaks.

"That's not really my story to tell you," she says. "But I'll tell you this much. Whatever you are, it's the kind of thing certain wolves have spent a long time trying to make sure never woke up."

Lyra's throat tightens. "They already tried. They killed my mother to stop it."

Something shifts in Elara's face, something that might be sympathy, though she doesn't let it linger. "Then I'd say it's a good thing you're a hard one to keep down."

Lyra stays three days in Elara's small camp, and in that time, something in her chest that's been clenched tight her whole life starts, slowly, to loosen.

Elara doesn't push her to talk. She doesn't push her to explain the fire in her blood, or the whispers she still hears at the edge of sleep, or the reason her eyes flash silver when her feelings run too high.

She just lets Lyra exist beside her, teaches her small things - how to build a fire that won't smoke, how to read tracks in the dirt, how to sit still long enough to hear her own wolf instead of running from it.

"You flinch every time it stirs," Elara says on the second night, watching Lyra go rigid as the fire pops loudly nearby. "Like it's something trying to hurt you."

"Isn't it?" Lyra pulls her knees to her chest. "Everyone always talked about wolves like Omegas barely have one worth mentioning. Now mine wants out every time I get upset, and I don't know how to stop it."

"Maybe stop trying to stop it." Elara shrugs, tossing a stick into the flames. "You've spent your whole life making yourself small so nobody notices you. Your wolf's not interested in small. Fighting it just means fighting yourself."

Lyra doesn't answer that, but she thinks about it long after Elara's gone quiet, long into the night.

"Can I ask you something?" she says finally. "Why help me? You don't know me. I could be nothing but trouble for you."

Elara considers that, turning a strip of dried meat over the fire. "I was pack once too. A long time ago. Got cast out for a crime I didn't commit, and nobody bothered checking the facts before they threw me out past the mountains."

She shrugs, like it costs her nothing to say it, though something in her voice says otherwise. "So when I find a wolf running scared through my territory, half-starved and clearly running from something that isn't her fault, I tend to take it personally."

"I'm sorry that happened to you."

"Don't be sorry. Be useful instead." Elara almost smiles. "Whatever you are, Lyra Veyne, don't let them make you small again once you're back among them. You already spent long enough being invisible."

Lyra holds onto those words tighter than she expects to.

On the third morning, the peace breaks.

Lyra hears them before she sees them. Boots on rocky ground, too many, too coordinated to be anything but trouble. Elara's on her feet in an instant, every trace of softness gone from her face.

"Hunters," she says, low and fast. "Pack hunters, from the smell of it. Get behind me."

"They found me?" Lyra's stomach drops. "How?"

"Doesn't matter how. Move."

But there isn't time. Three wolves burst from the treeline before Lyra can even shift, and one of them slams into Elara before she can raise a hand, sending her sprawling hard into the dirt. Lyra screams, more animal than human, and tries to shift, but panic locks her body in place, and rough hands close around her arms before her wolf can answer the call.

"Let go of me!" She thrashes, fighting with everything she has, but there are three of them and one of her, and within seconds she's pinned, wrists bound tight, dragged toward the trees while Elara struggles to rise, blood running from a cut above her eye.

"Lyra!" Elara's voice chases after her, raw with fury. "Lyra, hold on-"

They drag her fast through the forest, no gentleness in it, and Lyra's mind spins with pure animal terror, thinking of Seraphine's cold, satisfied face, thinking this is it, this is how it ends - dragged back to the Keep to be silenced the same way her mother was.

Then, ahead of them, a shadow drops down from the trees.

It happens fast, too fast for her to track properly - a massive black wolf slamming into the lead hunter, jaws locking hard, a sound like a growl tearing straight out of the earth.

The other two hunters let go of her instantly, spinning to defend themselves, and Lyra staggers back, wrists still bound, watching in stunned silence as the black wolf tears through them with a fury that doesn't look calculated at all. It looks personal.

The black wolf shifts mid-fight, and by the time the last hunter falls, it's Kael standing there, chest heaving, blood on his hands that isn't his own.

"Kael?" Her voice comes out barely above a whisper.

He turns, and for a moment the cold, controlled Alpha she met days ago is nowhere in his face. What's there instead is raw, frightened, and furious all at once.

"You're alive." He crosses the distance between them fast, hands coming up to check her for injuries before he seems to catch himself, stopping just short of touching her. "I thought-" His voice cracks, actually cracks, and he has to stop and start again.

"I've been searching for three days. I didn't know if you were even still-"

"Why?" Lyra cuts him off, still shaking, still furious, still not sure she trusts a word out of his mouth. "Why do you even care? Your family destroyed mine."

"I didn't know." His jaw tightens, guilt written plain across his face. "I swear to you, I didn't know what Seraphine did. But I know now. And I am not letting anyone drag you back there to finish what she started."

Elara limps up behind them, one hand pressed to the cut above her eye, watching the two of them with sharp, assessing eyes.

"You're the Alpha," she says to Kael. Not quite a question.

"I am."

"Then you'll understand why I don't particularly trust you to keep her safe."

"I don't need you to trust me." Kael doesn't look away from Lyra as he says it, something fierce and steady settling into his face. "I need her alive. Everything else, we figure out after."

Lyra looks between them, exhausted, aching, wrists still raw from the rope, something in her chest warring between the urge to run again and a strange, unfamiliar pull toward the man standing in front of her, blood on his hands, spent from three days searching for a girl his own family tried to erase.

"If I come back with you," she says slowly, "it's not because I forgive any of it. It's not because I trust you."

"I know." Kael holds her gaze, steady, unflinching. "I'm not asking you to. I'm asking you to let me protect you while you figure out the rest."

Finally, Lyra nods, just once.

"Fine," she says. "But the second you lie to me, Kael Ardyn, I'm gone. And this time, nobody's finding me."

Something that might almost be relief passes over his face. "Fair enough."

They start back through the trees toward Blackthorn together, and Lyra doesn't look back - not at Elara, not at the bodies left behind in the dirt. She's too tired, too raw, too full of everything that's happened to look anywhere but forward.

She doesn't see the way Elara's face changes the moment their backs are turned. Doesn't hear her mutter, low enough that the wind almost swallows it whole, "Three hunters. For one Omega." A pause, her eyes narrowing at the retreating shapes of Lyra and Kael. "Somebody wanted her to stop badly