Chapter 1: The Night They Called Me Cursed

Selena

I was six years old the first time someone called me cursed to my face.

One of the older kitchen maids, Ressa, pulled me aside near the pantry. She bent down like she was about to tell me a secret meant to comfort me.

“You know your mother didn’t have to die,” she whispered. “The priests said the moon took her instead of you.”

I frowned at her. “Why would the moon want her?”

“It didn’t.” She smoothed her apron with nervous hands. “It wanted you. She was just in the way.”

I remember staring at her for a long moment before walking back to the east wing. I sat on the floor beside my bed and thought about her words for three days straight.

Then I decided I didn’t believe them.

That was the first decision I ever truly made for myself.

I still stand by it.

The Valez mansion never needed to prove its power. It sat high on the northern ridge of Moonscar territory, all dark stone and cold windows, watching the mountains like it owned them.

Maybe it did.

I grew up in the east wing, far from my father’s study and farther still from the rooms where real conversations happened. Alliances. Decisions. Plans for the future of the pack.

None of those things ever included me.

No one explained why I lived so far away from everyone else.

They didn’t need to.

I understood.

I was twelve the first time I walked into my father’s study without permission.

Alpha Hector Valez looked up from his desk when I entered. Our eyes met for exactly one second before he looked back down at his papers.

I stayed there in silence.

One.

Two.

Three.

I counted to eleven before leaving the room.

We never spoke about it afterward.

“You’re doing it again.”

Petra stood in the doorway of my room with a breakfast tray balanced carefully in her hands.

I looked away from the window. “Doing what?”

“That thing where you go completely still.” She crossed the room and placed the tray on the table. “Like somebody turned you into stone.”

“I wasn’t aware I was frightening.”

“You frighten the younger maids constantly.”

“Good,” I said calmly. “Maybe they’ll stop wandering into my rooms.”

Petra gave me the same tired look she always did.

She had been my maid since I was fourteen. Which also meant she had seen more than most people in this house. More than she ever admitted aloud.

That was why I trusted her.

“The messenger came again this morning,” she said carefully.

“I know.”

“Your father wants—”

“I know that too.”

She hesitated. “The ceremony is in seven days.”

“I’m aware.”

Another pause.

Then, quieter this time: “Are you scared?”

I turned back toward the window before answering.

Outside, the mountain wind bent the pine trees in long slow movements.

“No,” I said.

My hands trembled slightly at my sides.

Neither of us mentioned it.

My name is Selena Valez.

I am twenty-two years old, the only child of Alpha Hector Valez, and I have never shifted into my wolf.

In our pack, that wasn’t just strange.

It was dangerous.

People treated me like a wound that never healed properly. Something uncomfortable they had learned to live around.

The elders always spoke gently about it, which somehow made everything worse.

“Some wolves awaken later than others,” Elder Cain once told my father when I was sixteen. They thought I couldn’t hear them through the corridor wall. “Her bloodline is powerful. The shift may simply take longer.”

“And if it doesn’t?” my father asked.

Silence followed.

Heavy silence.

Then Elder Cain sighed softly.

“Then we handle the matter accordingly.”

I remember pressing myself against the cold stone wall, barely breathing as their footsteps faded away.

Handle the matter accordingly.

I thought about those words almost every day after that.

The fire started five years ago.

At first it was only a candle beside my bed. One moment unlit. The next burning black at the edges without anyone touching it.

I panicked and smothered it immediately.

I told no one.

Since then, it had happened eleven times.

Nine accidents.

Two intentional.

Heat rising beneath my skin whenever fear became too strong. Dark flames curling around my fingertips before vanishing again.

The second time I did it on purpose, I held the fire in my bare palm for fourteen seconds.

It never burned me.

“You look exhausted,” Petra said the next morning while pouring tea into my cup.

“I slept badly.”

“You always sleep badly.”

She adjusted the pillows on my bed, then paused.

“There’s a scorch mark on your pillowcase.”

I slowly looked up at her.

She looked back at me.

Neither of us spoke.

A few seconds later she removed the pillowcase and replaced it with a fresh one.

She never mentioned it again.

That, more than anything, was why I trusted her.

The morning my father summoned me, the message came through his assistant instead.

Aldric.

Young. Nervous. Incapable of meeting my eyes for longer than half a second.

“The Alpha requests your presence,” he said stiffly, staring somewhere near my shoulder. “You are to attend the Moon Claiming Ceremony. The council will be present.”

“Is that all?”

“Yes, my lady.”

“He couldn’t tell me himself?”

Aldric’s jaw tightened.

“The Alpha is very busy.”

“Of course he is.”

I stepped back from the doorway. “Thank you, Aldric.”

After he left, I sat at the edge of my bed and examined my situation with painful honesty.

Twenty-two years old.

Never courted.

Never chosen.

Never once felt the pull of a mating bond.

And now only seven days remained until the ceremony that would quietly decide what became of me.

No one said it openly, but everyone understood.

If no bond formed… I would become a problem the pack could no longer ignore.

Petra entered later carrying clean linens.

“Well?” she asked immediately.

“Seven days,” I replied.

Her face softened. “Selena—”

“Don’t.”

“You aren’t fine.”

“I didn’t say I was.”

She fell silent for a moment before speaking again.

“What happens if no one chooses you?”

I stared out at the pines bending beneath the mountain wind.

“I don’t know,” I admitted quietly. “But I think my father does.”

I never sleep properly when the moon is visible.

Usually I read until my eyes ache. Sometimes I make lists in my head just to keep myself grounded.

Things I know.

Things I can prove.

Things that are real.

Tonight none of it helps.

The dream comes anyway.

It always starts with fire.

But not mine.

She stands inside a place that doesn’t feel entirely real. The shadows fall wrong. The light feels twisted somehow.

And she looks exactly like me.

My face. My hair. My eyes.

Only sharper.

Older somehow.

Stronger.

A crown of black fire rests on her head, though I cannot explain how I know it is a crown at all.

When her eyes meet mine, I try to speak.

No sound comes out.

She watches me struggle for a moment before smiling.

Not kindly.

Not cruelly either.

It is the smile of someone finally seeing a truth they have known for a very long time.

I wake with a gasp.

Heat rushes through my body.

My hands press hard against the sheets and I realize immediately—

They are burning.

Not the usual hidden warmth I’ve learned to control.

Real fire.

I jerk upright.

My palms are untouched.

The sheets are not.

Two blackened handprints stain the fabric beneath me, dark and perfect, every curve of my fingers burned clearly into the cloth.

Even the slight bend in my left palm from an old childhood fracture.

I stare at them without moving.

Then Petra’s voice breaks through the silence outside my door.

“Selena? I heard something.”

“I’m fine,” I call back quickly.

A pause.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. Go back to sleep.”

Silence follows.

Then retreating footsteps.

I fold the sheet carefully so the marks are hidden before lying back down again.

The woman from my dream stands frozen in my mind.

My face.

My eyes.

Her crown made of black fire.

Behind her sat a throne built from dragon bones.

But that wasn’t the part that frightened me most.

No.

The frightening part was this—

Her expression didn’t feel unfamiliar.

It felt like mine.

Like something buried deep inside me had finally lifted its head.

I press my unburned palms together in the darkness.

Something is coming.

Something that has known my name for a very long time.

Something patient.

I close my eyes slowly.

So have I.