4

On the last day of finals, my mother called out of nowhere.

"Aurora, what day are you coming home?"

"I'm not."

Two seconds of silence.

"You didn't come back for Founding Day either. Now you're skipping the Winter Rite too?"

"I'm at a critical stage with a formula I'm developing. My advisor wants me to stay and run some experiments."

There was no formula.

And Nathan hadn't asked me to stay.

My mother sounded a little disappointed. "But I haven't seen you in so long, and the Winter Rite is the most important day of the year for the pack.

"Could you talk to your advisor about it?"

"This formula is important. It directly affects my grade."

"All right, then."

My mother sighed. "I'll say a blessing for you at home."

I didn't answer.

Even if I had gone home, they would have looked right through me.

Next to Leanna, I'd never even catch their eye.

After finals, most of the campus emptied out.

Mia went home too, and the room was mine alone.

But I liked the quiet.

No comparisons. No being overlooked. No suffocating reminders of how differently they treated us.

The day Leanna got home, my mother posted a photo in our family chat.

The table was covered with roast venison, moonfruit bone broth, honeyed berry tarts, and a whole platter of roasted snow-hare legs. All Leanna's favorites.

Leanna replied with a heart-hands emoji.

"It feels so good to be home!"

My father added a message.

"A rare day with the whole family together!"

The whole family together.

A group with four people in it, messages from three, and a table with no place set for me.

To them, the whole family was already there.

I sat in the empty dorm room with a bowl of instant noodles in front of me.

When I finished eating, the messages were still coming.

My mother tagged my father.

"Reid, where did you go? Come back. We need a picture of our family of three. I want to post it on my page."

Family of three.

I stared at that message for an hour, but not one of them questioned it.

I took a deep breath and opened my contacts.

Scrolled to my father's name.

Pressed and held.

Delete contact.

Scrolled to my mother's name.

Pressed and held.

Delete contact.

I scrolled to Leanna's name and hesitated.

Then I deleted her anyway.

After that, I left the family chat and the pack chat, one right after the other.

I silenced the crystal and pushed it under my pillow.

Every so often, distant cheers from the town's celebration drifted into the room.

As I lay there, I suddenly thought back to when I was five.

At the Winter Rite that year, Leanna sensed her wolf.

Nothing like it had happened in the pack's history. A five-year-old, already able to feel her wolf.

Everyone was stunned. They all came to see the prodigy.

I was pushed into a corner and knocked against the living room cabinet, breaking a vase.

My mother tore into me in front of all of them.

But Leanna ran over, crouched beside me, and helped me pick up the pieces.

She said, "Don't cry, Aurora. I'm here."

That was the last moment of genuine kindness from Leanna that I could remember.

After that?

After that, Leanna's light grew more blinding, and our parents felt justified in favoring her.

And she got used to everyone revolving around her.

Maybe she didn't overlook me on purpose.

She just didn't understand that someone standing in the sun can never see into the shadows.

A huge purple firework went off outside and lit up the whole southern sky.

It wasn't for me.

From that day on, I had no home.

At that same moment, back at the Alpha's house in the Moonshadow Pack, Aurora's mother, Evelyn Hale, opened the family chat on her comm crystal.

She was about to tag Aurora and ask why she hadn't said a word all day.

But to her surprise, the group had gone from four members to three.

She tapped Aurora's old profile picture and sent a message demanding an explanation.

But all she got back was a cold line of small text:

"This user is not accepting your messages. You are not on this user's contact list. Please send a new contact request."

Evelyn froze.