Chapter 2

Let me tell you how a girl disappears inside a house full of wolves.

Slowly. Then all at once.

Month one, I still fought.

I caught my mother outside her greenhouse and made my voice light. "Mom. Can we do our Saturday run? Just us. The creek trail, then pancakes."

Since I was six, Saturdays were ours. Even though I couldn't shift, she'd run beside me in human form, laughing. She wrote everything about me in little notebooks. My favorite colors. My songs. My silly opinions. That's how she knew I hated pink.

"I'm busy," she said, and walked away.

I asked her eleven times in three months. I kept count in my phone, because I'm the kind of broken that keeps receipts.

Then she stopped answering at all.

Month two, I gave up on my brothers.

Wyatt said, "Not now." Jesse said, "Patrol, kid." And Cole, who taught me to throw a punch, who let me sleep on his floor during thunderstorms until I was twelve, put both hands on my shoulders and moved me out of a doorway like furniture.

Month three, the pack's training master stopped teaching me.

"Orders, Miss Blackwood," he mumbled at his boots.

Miss Blackwood. He'd called me Pup since I was five.

Month four, I moved out.

There's an old ranger cabin at the edge of our territory. One room, a woodstove, a window facing nothing but pine trees. I swept it out, dragged in a mattress, and stole a kettle nobody would miss.

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

Spoiler: I lived there eight months.

Nobody noticed my closet emptying, one shirt at a time.

I got very good at being invisible. Nobody warns you it's also a wound.

The night I finally broke was my father's birthday feast.

I wore my best dress. I sat at the long table. My father raised his glass and said, "To my children. My blood."

Then he named three.

Wyatt. Jesse. Cole.

The fourth chair was full. The fourth child was holding a fork.

I walked outside and threw up in my mother's roses.

That was the night I opened the Pack Book.

Every Alpha keeps one. Leather, older than the packhouse, locked in his office. Every pup's whole life is written there in the Alpha's own hand.

I'd known the code since I was ten. My mother's birthday. Of course.

My page was near the back. Last entry, in my father's handwriting, dated the night of my rejection.

N. Turned 18. Bond rejected by Thorne. Removed from link. No further action.

That was it.

Not she's smart. Not she aced every exam. Not our daughter was shattered in front of the whole pack and we did nothing.

No further action.

I sat on my father's floor holding those words. And I finally understood. I wasn't a daughter anymore. I was a line in a book.

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

Nobody answered. Nobody had in months.

So I went back to my cabin, opened my laptop, and typed a name wolves only ever say quietly.

The Moon Court.

Every pack in North America answers to the Alpha Council. And the Council answers to one man.

Dorian Vale. The Lycan King. Twenty-eight years old. They say he's never lost a fight, and his wolf is the size of a truck. When two packs are about to go to war, his Wardens walk in and walk out with peace instead of funerals.

Twelve recruits a year. Anonymous tests. And they never, ever take wolfless girls.

So I didn't tell them.

I applied under my grandmother's maiden name. N. Wilde.

I stayed up eleven nights taking their tests. Pack law. Memory. Tracking. Impossible choices about which wolf lives.

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

Eleven days later, the black envelope came.

Tell no one.

I laughed out loud in my empty cabin.

Who exactly did they think I had left to tell?