Chapter 2

Let me tell you how a girl disappears inside a packhouse holding two hundred wolves.

Slowly. Then all at once.

Month one, I still fought.

I ambushed my mother in the corridor outside her study and made my voice bright and easy, the way she likes it.

"Mom. Can we do our Sunday? Just us. Terrible movies, that greasy diner you pretend you hate."

Since I was nine, one day a week belonged only to me. She used to write down everything I said. Every color, every song, every stupid opinion I ever had. That's how she knew about the indigo.

"I'm busy," she said, already walking. "I don't have time."

I asked her every week for three months. Ten times. Twelve. I have the exact count in my phone, because I'm the kind of broken that keeps receipts.

"I'm busy." "Not today." "Wren, please."

Then she stopped answering at all.

Month two, I gave up on my brothers.

Kaden: not now. Rhys: swamped, kid. Soren didn't lift his eyes from his screen. Gideon — Gideon who taught me to fight dirty, who let me sleep on his floor after nightmares — Gideon physically moved me out of a doorway with two hands on my shoulders, like furniture, and kept walking.

Month three, my training stopped. Our Beta stopped showing up to spar, and when I asked him why, he looked at the floor and said, "Orders, Miss Thorne."

Miss Thorne.

He'd called me Little Wren since I was six.

Month four, I found the lodge.

An old hunting cabin on the far northern edge of our land, half-swallowed by ivy. One room, a woodstove, a window looking at nothing but lake. I swept it out. Dragged a mattress in. Stole a kettle from a pantry nobody inventories.

"Let's see how long it takes them to notice," I told the empty room.

Spoiler: I lived there eight months.

Eight months, and nobody knocked on my bedroom door in the main house. Nobody wondered why my closet emptied one hanger at a time. I'd sneak up to my own bathroom to shower, wipe down every surface, and leave like a burglar in my own home.

I got very good at being invisible. It's a skill.

Nobody warns you it's also a wound.

The night I broke was the Alliance dinner.

I put on the green dress my mother bought me. I sat down at the table. My father raised his glass and said, "To my children—"

And then he named six.

Six.

Kaden. Rhys. Soren. Gideon. Emory. Theo.

The seventh chair was occupied. The seventh child was holding a fork.

I got up, walked out, and threw up in a hedge in a two-thousand-dollar dress.

That was the night I went down to the archive.

Every wolf born to a ruling line has a file. Births, first shifts, matches, blood-debts, the whole obscene ledger. Mine was in the third cabinet. Thin as a napkin.

I opened it under a dying bulb at two in the morning.

Last entry. My father's handwriting. Dated my seventeenth birthday.

W. turned seventeen today.

That's it. That's the whole sentence.

Not she's brilliant. Not she runs the kitchens. Not she outscored her brothers. Not her mate rejected her in front of four hundred wolves and she didn't cry until she got upstairs.

W. turned seventeen today.

I sat on that concrete floor holding four words, and I understood — finally, completely — that I was a line item.

"Do I really mean that little to you?" I whispered.

Nobody answered. Nobody had in months.

So I took the file and walked out with it under my jacket, and no one stopped me, because no one saw me, because I wasn't there.

Back at the lodge, I opened my laptop and typed the name wolves in our world only ever whisper.

The Bloodguard.

Every pack on this continent bows to one crown — the Solaris line — and the Crown keeps something that isn't an army. Spies. Trackers. Arbitrators. The ones who walk into a war between two packs and walk out with a signature instead of a body count.

They take fifty applicants a year. They take them at eighteen. They do not take Thornes, because Thornes have never needed anyone.

I sat up eleven straight nights doing their assessments. Logic. Memory. Language. Threat modeling. Ethics scenarios designed to make you choose which stranger dies.

Then I hit submit and waited to be rejected. Again.

Eleven days later, the black envelope came.

Applicant W. Thorne: accepted.

Report on your eighteenth birthday.

Tell no one.

I laughed out loud in an empty cabin.

Tell no one.

Who exactly did they think I had left?