Chapter 1

Three hundred and sixty-five days ago, my mate rejected me in front of four hundred wolves.

My family rejected me quieter.

Tonight, I'm rejecting all of them back.

I rolled my bike down the gravel with the engine dead, past the gatehouse, past the sentries who never once looked up, and at the bottom of the drive I stopped and turned around to look at the house I was born in.

Thornhall. Forty-one rooms. Every window burning gold.

Not one of them looking for me.

"Goodbye," I whispered. "You won't miss me. I'll miss you anyway. That's the part that makes me pathetic."

Then I kicked the engine awake and let it scream.

My name is Wren Thorne. Seventh child and only daughter of Alpha Damien Thorne, who rules two thousand wolves across four territories, and Luna Isolde Thorne, who once spent four months planning a party for a girl who hates parties — and got every single detail right.

Indigo and oxblood, because I refuse to wear pink. Black candles. Her mother's silver.

"Wren. Outside. Now," my brother Kaden said that night, grinning like a kid.

I screamed when I saw it. A matte-black bike with my initials on the tank. Armored boots, because Mom got a vote, and Mom always wins.

"Don't ride it until Kaden teaches you," my father said. "Promise me."

"I promise," I said, straight-faced.

I'd been stealing Kaden's bike for six months.

I hugged all seven of them that night and thought: nobody in the world is this lucky.

Two hours later, the Vane pack arrived for the alliance ceremony.

And Caspian Vane walked into my mother's ballroom, stopped dead ten feet from me, and his eyes went black the way they only go when a wolf finds the one person the Moon made for him.

Four hundred people saw it. Four hundred people gasped.

Then he said, in a voice like a door closing:

"I, Caspian Vane, heir of the Vane pack, reject Wren Thorne as my mate."

I waited for my father to speak.

My father looked at the floor.

I waited for my mother.

My mother set down her glass, turned, and walked out of the room.

Here's the thing nobody tells you about a rejection: it's not the humiliation that kills you. It's the four seconds afterward when you look around a room full of your own blood, and every one of them has found something else to look at.

I woke up the next morning and the house had stopped speaking to me.

Not cold. Cold would've been a relationship. I mean I walked into the kitchen and my mother looked straight through my forehead like I was a window with a decent view.

"Morning, Mom."

Nothing.

"Dad, do you need me at the six o'clock?"

His office door closed.

I told myself it was a bad day. Everyone gets a bad day.

Then it was a bad week. Then it was a bad month, and I stopped counting the mornings I ate breakfast alone at a table set for nine.

I got louder. I got quieter. I got better — top of my class, top of my scores, three languages, and I ran the packhouse kitchens for two hundred wolves single-handed at sixteen while my mother walked past the dining hall without turning her head.

I dropped a mug at my father's feet once. On purpose. Just to see if he'd look up.

He stepped over the pieces.

That was the night I stopped being their daughter and became an observer in their house. And an observer sees everything. I know which stairwell has no camera. I know every patrol rotation on this territory. I know the exact minute the gate guard changes shift — which is how I'm crossing the county line right now at eighty-two miles an hour with everything I own strapped to my back.

I'm not running away.

I'm reporting for duty.

Eleven days ago, a black envelope arrived at a P.O. box my family doesn't know I have. Silver crown on the flap. Three lines inside that changed my life.

And four nights ago, something else happened. Something I still can't explain.

A voice woke me at 11:03 p.m. Singing. Inside my skull.

"Happy birthday, Wren," she said.

"You're a week early," I told her.

She laughed. "No, sweetheart. You were born a week late. They've been celebrating the wrong day your entire life."

By sunrise, my family will have a house with an empty room in it.

It'll take them eight days to notice.