Chapter 3

I gave them one last chance.

My grandmother used to say you knock on a door one more time before you close it forever.

So on my last night, I put on a clean white shirt and walked into the packhouse dining room for the first time in four months.

Here's the part that finished me.

Our cook set a plate in front of me and wasn't even surprised. Not a blink. Like a ghost showing up to dinner was a normal Tuesday.

My father walked in. My mother carried in a stack of fat folders. My brothers came in arguing about lanterns, of all things. Silver or gold.

Then all three went quiet at the same time.

Their eyes went glassy.

The pack link.

They were talking inside their heads. Right in front of me. Five wolves at one table, laughing and nodding at words I couldn't hear.

Because they'd locked me out. And now they didn't even speak out loud when I was in the room.

Talking around me. Over me. About me, maybe.

Never to me.

I ate every bite on my plate. I wanted to say I gave them the whole hour.

At minute fifty-eight, my mother looked up.

Right at me. One full second.

My stupid, starving heart lifted off the ground.

Then she said, "Wyatt, tell your father the lake lodge is ready," and looked back at her folder.

I stood up before dessert.

Nobody asked where I was going.

I packed in nine minutes. Everything I owned fit in one duffel bag. A girl who's been erased learns to travel light.

I left three things behind.

My grandmother's moonstone necklace, on my mother's dresser.

My pack ring, on my father's desk, right on top of his leather book.

And a note on my mother's pillow.

I waited a year. Don't come looking. — N.

Then I drove south.

At 12:14 a.m., I crossed the outer border of Ridgeback territory on my nineteenth birthday.

And I felt it.

A thin thread inside my chest. The last tiny piece of pack bond they couldn't block. The thing that makes a wolf a wolf, even a wolf with no wolf.

It snapped.

It didn't hurt the way Caleb's rejection hurt. It was quieter than that. It was like a door closing softly in a house where nobody was home.

I pulled onto the shoulder of the highway and pressed my forehead against the steering wheel.

I did not cry.

I lied. I cried so hard a trucker knocked on my window to check if I was okay.

"Never better," I told him.

Then I checked my phone. Five hours gone. Surely by now someone had gone to the cabin. Surely someone had seen the ring.

No texts. No calls. Nothing.

I laughed until my ribs hurt.

I pulled the SIM card out, threw the phone in a gas station trash can, and slid the card into my wallet behind my license.

Don't ask why I kept it. You already know.

Some pathetic part of me still wanted to know the day they noticed.

At a diner in Wyoming, I ordered pancakes for my birthday. The waitress stuck a candle in them without being asked. I guess I looked like I needed it.

"Make a wish, honey."

I closed my eyes.

I wish somebody would come looking for me.

Then I blew it out. I was nineteen now, and I knew better.

Behind me, in a house with thirty glowing windows, my family went to bed without saying goodnight.

The next morning, nobody noticed my empty chair.

Or the morning after.

It took nine days.

On the ninth day, my mother walked across the meadow to my cabin carrying a small wrapped box. She opened the door and found a bare mattress and a cold stove.

The guards told me later that the sound she made wasn't human.

She shifted right there on the porch. She stood on the steps and howled my name into the pines until every wolf in Ridgeback came running.

I was already six hundred miles away. I was standing at the silver gates of the Moon Court.

And I had no idea that the reason my family destroyed me was the only thing keeping me alive.