CHOSEN LAST

Sages’s POV

The flowers came again this morning.

White roses, dozens of them, tied with the same silver ribbon someone uses every single year. They sat on our porch before I even opened my eyes and I already knew what today was without checking a calendar. I didn’t need to. My body always knows before my mind catches up. There’s a heaviness that settles into the air a full day before the date arrives, like the whole pack territory holds its breath together.

Five years. Five years since my sister died and the whole pack decided her death deserved its own holiday.

I stepped over the flowers instead of picking them up. My mother would deal with them later, arrange them just right in the vase we keep for this exact day, the one that lives in the closet the other eleven months of the year, wrapped in old newspaper so it doesn’t collect dust.

Redhollow Pack doesn’t do quiet grief. We do public grief, the kind with a ceremony and a bonfire and speeches from the Alpha about sacrifice and love and the kind of person Vanessa was. I used to go every year, sitting near my parents, nodding along at the right moments. I stopped three years ago, after I caught Mrs. Whitfield staring at me across the crowd with that look people get when they’re doing math they think you can’t see. The math of who should have died instead. I didn’t need to hear her say it out loud. I had  been doing that same math myself since I was seventeen.

I made myself coffee and didn’t bother turning on the kitchen lights. Some habits you keep because the dark is easier to sit in than the light. In the dark, nobody’s face gives anything away. Not even your own, reflected back at you in the window over the sink.

My mother found me there around seven, already dressed for the ceremony in pale blue Vanessa used to like. She didn’t say good morning. She never does on this day.

“You’re not coming,” she said. It wasn’t a question.

“No.”

She nodded like she expected that, which almost hurt more than if she had tried to convince me otherwise. There was a time, right after it happened, when she used to at least pretend she wanted me there beside her. That pretending stopped somewhere around year two.

“Your father wants you to at least show your face at the gathering tonight,” she said, smoothing down a wrinkle in her dress that wasn’t really there. “It doesn’t have to be the ceremony. Just the gathering after.”

The pack gathering happened every year on this night too, separate from the ceremony itself. People called it a celebration of life, but it always felt more like an audit. Everyone checking who showed up, who cried the loudest, who looked appropriately sad and who didn’t look sad enough. I had learned a long time ago that grief in Redhollow came with a scoresheet and I always failed it.

“Fine,” I said, because saying no twice in one morning to my mother on this particular day felt like more trouble than it was worth. Some battles I didn’t have the strength for before I had even had breakfast.

She left without another word. That’s how most of our conversations go now. Short. Careful. Like we’re both walking around a hole in the floor that neither of us wants to mention out loud, afraid that naming it might make us fall in.

I spent the day the way I spend most days, at the pack clinic, changing bandages, restocking supplies, keeping my hands busy so my head doesn’t wander somewhere it shouldn’t. Dr. Jasmine let me leave early without asking questions, just a small squeeze of my shoulder on my way out the door. She’s one of maybe three people in this pack who still talks to me like I’m a person and not a headline everyone’s already read the ending to.

By the time I got home, the flowers had disappeared from the porch, moved wherever they get moved to and the vase was likely already out and full. My mother’s bedroom door was shut. My father’s truck wasn’t in the driveway, which meant he had already left for the ceremony grounds to help set up chairs, like he does every year, like it’s the least he can do for a daughter he lost and one he still has but doesn’t quite know how to look at anymore.

I got ready for the gathering slowly. Not because I wanted to look nice. I stopped caring what I looked like at pack events a long time ago but because slow felt safer than fast tonight. Fast meant arriving with a crowd, all eyes catching me at once. Slow meant slipping in quietly, standing near the back and slipping back out the same way, unnoticed, the way I preferred it.

The gathering was already loud by the time I got there. Torches lit up the clearing behind the pack house and half of Redhollow’s wolves were gathered in little clusters, drinks in hand, that particular kind of solemn-but-social energy that only happens at events like this. Someone had hung a banner with Vanessa’s photo on it, the same photo they use every year. Her laughing, sunlight catching her hair, looking like exactly the kind of person a pack builds a legend around.

I found a spot near the tree line, half in shadow, and let myself disappear into it. From here I could watch without being watched. It was the only way I knew how to survive nights like this.

That’s when I felt it.

A pull, sharp and sudden, right in the center of my chest, like something inside me had been asleep for twenty-two years and had just woken up all at once. My skin went warm, then cold, then warm again. My wolf, usually quiet and easy to ignore, sat up inside me like she had been struck by lightning.

I knew what this feeling was. Every wolf in Redhollow grows up hearing about it, dreaming about it, waiting for it their whole lives.

My mate was here. Tonight. At my sister’s memorial.