Chapter 1 — You Should Go

He hadn’t smoked in five years.

Not since the first time he noticed me flinch at the smell. Not since he stubbed the cigarette out and said, with a faint, surprised frown, *I didn’t know it bothered you.*

So when I stepped onto the balcony and saw the cigarette dangling between Alpha Daire Vhaloren’s fingers, I knew I was already being erased.

Night air bit at my bare arms. Frostveil Manor sprawled out below us—white stone, black glass, and cold lights—his kingdom spread like a map. He didn’t turn to look at me. He just watched the city lights and said, "Flat and Final,"

“You should go.”

The words slid past my skin and into the old places, the ones carved out by *be good, be quiet, and be grateful*. My lungs forgot how to work for a beat.

He still didn’t turn, but the hand with the cigarette shook once, ash spilling over the balcony rail and scattering into the night.

I didn’t move. Obedience was a habit that had kept me breathing this long, but it hadn’t caught up to the part of me that still believed I belonged here.

“Daire,” I said. It came out too soft. Not Luna-soft. Not wife-soft. Kept-woman soft. “What’s—”

“You should go, Elowen.” He added my name like an apology or a knife. “Tonight.”

There was no title between us. No ,mate*. No ,Luna*. Not even *girlfriend*. There never had been.

I was the one they didn’t see.

The staff knew me as a shadow in the back stairs, a door that stayed locked when guests came. At public events, I watched the replays on muted screens, Daire’s arm around no one. Never me.

I was the Alpha’s secret, his softness, his sin. The omega he kept behind thick doors and expensive silence.

In Nightmoor, a woman like me wasn’t called a person when powerful men wanted her gone—she was called *unclaimed*. And unclaimed omegas were “recoverable,” a clean word for *seized*.

Once, when I was small enough to sleep in a drawer, I’d heard an Elder mutter that **House Lunaris** was “wiped out for a reason”—a fairy story adults used when they wanted omegas quiet. Bad blood, bad wolves, bad ending.

I’d learned to stay forgettable.

“It’s because of the board?” I asked. My voice sounded wrong to my own ears—too calm. “Because of the Tribunal hearings?”

He drew in a breath. Not smoke—he still hadn’t actually lifted the cigarette to his mouth. Ash clung to the end, burning down untouched.

“She’s back,” he said.

Not an answer. A verdict.

“Who?” I asked, even though my stomach already knew. It had known when I saw the cigarette.

“Calista Dravenne.” His jaw flexed. “She’s at Frostveil. She’s—” He stopped, then said it like he was forcing the words past broken glass. “She’s staying.”

The missing Luna. The rightful woman. The name the pack still whispered like a prayer and a curse.

I swallowed. The city lights blurred for a moment and then snapped back into focus.

“Congratulations,” I managed. “They’ll be happy.”

“They’ll be appeased,” he said. The word tasted sour on his tongue. His voice stayed low, rough. “If I claimed you publicly while she was still ‘missing,’ the Tribunal would’ve taken you.”

Cold slid down my spine in a slow, familiar drip. The High Howl Tribunal had rules about Alphas who “replaced” missing mates. About omegas who appeared where they weren’t supposed to.

“You could’ve warned me,” I said. My throat ached, not from tears—I’d used most of those up years ago—but from holding them back. “You could’ve said something.”

“I am,” he said. “Now.”

A breeze swept in off the mountains, sharp with snow and distant exhaust. The cigarette burned lower. Still untouched. His hand shook once more and then stilled.

“Your things are ready,” he added, as if he were telling me my car had arrived. “Tamsen will give you the deed. The accounts are in your name. You won’t want anything.”

Except him. Except for a name that wasn’t *recoverable*.

My fingers curled around the balcony railing. The stone was ice-cold under my palms. “So that’s it?”

“Elowen.” He exhaled, and for a second, his shoulders sagged, like the weight he’d been carrying finally dug in. “Go before they get here.”

*They.* Not just Calista.

The Tribunal had been circling Frostveil for months, sniffing after Daire’s deals, his holdings, and his enemies. Calling for *audits*. Requesting *evaluation*. Soft words that meant shackles if you were the wrong kind of body.

“Right,” I said. The word tasted like rust. “Before they smell me on your balcony.”

He said nothing. Ash dropped soundlessly to the stone.

I turned away first.

Inside, the manor had already started forgetting me. Lamps burned low; the corridors felt like a hotel after checkout, all vacancy and faint echoes. Someone had propped my door open. Light spilled onto the polished floorboards, too bright against the hollow in my chest.

Tamsen stood inside with a clipboard. Daire’s assistant always looked like she’d been carved out of paperwork: neat, composed, made of lines, and ink.

“Elowen,” she said. Not *Miss*. Not anything. “We’ve packed your belongings.”

Black suitcases lined the wall like neutral soldiers. My clothes. My few books. Toiletries. No photographs—there had never been any of those. No framed proof I’d existed here.

On the bed lay a slim folder and a small box. The folder wore Frostveil’s crest in silver at the top. The box was velvet, navy, and its lid open.

“The deed,” Tamsen said crisply, indicating the folder. “Transfer of property. These are the account numbers, the keys, and the car registration. All clean, all yours. No tribunal entanglements.”

“What about—” My gaze snagged on the velvet box.

Inside lay the Frostveil pendant. His crest. A narrow disc of dark metal and ice-bright stone, the one he’d snapped around my throat the first time he’d asked me to stay longer than a night.

“I thought you’d want—”

“I don’t,” I said.

My voice surprised us both.

I reached past the pendant and took the pen she held out. Didn’t read the itemized list beneath the deed. If they’d decided to erase me, they could live with the ink.

My name looked small on the line. *Elowen.* No surname. No house.

The paperwork felt like a warning: status decided who got to stay human and who got turned into a file.

“Your car is loaded,” Tamsen said. “Daire asked me to tell you that—”

“He doesn’t need to tell me anything else,” I cut in.

Her mouth compressed, but she nodded. I closed the folder, set the pen down, and, on a reckless impulse, plucked the Frostveil pendant out of its box.

It was heavier than I remembered. Colder.

I walked to the little table by the door—the one where he dropped his keys, his watch, his phone at the end of each day—and I laid the pendant there, metal on wood. Returned property.

Let them keep the ghosts that smelled like me.

Downstairs, no one looked at me as I passed. The guards kept their eyes forward. A housekeeper fussed over a vase, rearranging flowers that didn’t need rearranging. I’d perfected the art of not existing around them. Tonight, the art worked too well.

Outside, the car idled in the circular drive. The cold slapped my face as I stepped out into it. My breath smoked in the air.

As I crossed the threshold, the “safety” bracelet on my wrist went from cool metal to blistering heat.

I gasped and clutched my arm. A thin, high sound rose under my skin—like glass singing. The faint scent of metal hit my nose, sharp as blood in winter air.

I jerked my sleeve down, hiding the narrow band. When I dared to look, I saw a new hairline crack along its surface, silver veins threading through the dark.

“Not now,” I whispered to it. To myself. To whatever old story sat buried in that seal.

The driver didn’t glance back. He opened the door; I slid in. The manor gates swung open behind us with mechanical grace, swallowing Frostveil whole.

I didn’t look back.

***

The house they’d bought me was small, neat, and anonymous—a two-story wedge of brick and faded siding on the edge of Nightmoor’s east district. The kind of place people drove past without seeing.

Perfect for a woman who’d trained her whole life not to be seen.

By the time I finished signing for the keys and lugging the suitcases upstairs, the adrenaline had burned off, leaving a hollow ache in my limbs. The clock on the new oven blinked 2:13 a.m. at me like it was judging.

I dropped onto the cheap sofa and stared at nothing.

Minutes passed. Or hours. My body didn’t know the difference anymore.

The first wave of nausea hit so hard that I barely made it to the bathroom.

I knelt on cold tile, palms flat, breathing through bile and dizziness. The world tilted, righted, tilted again. Sweat broke out along my spine.

It could’ve been a shock. Stress. The kind of emotional whiplash that made omegas curl up and shake.

Except… it wasn’t.

This was deeper. Older. A tug in the center of me that had been there for days, maybe weeks, and I’d been too busy surviving to name it.

“No,” I whispered to the toilet bowl. “No, no, no.”

A box of supplies sat on the counter, courtesy of Tamsen’s ruthless efficiency. Bandages, headache pills, basic toiletries.

And at the back, tucked in like an afterthought, a slim cardboard package.

Pregnancy tests.

For a second, all the air left the room.

I didn’t remember standing. I only remembered my hands moving, clumsy and shaking, tearing the plastic, following the little pictograms like I was outside my own body.

Wait three minutes.

I watched the strip on the edge of the sink. The line appeared faster than that. Bold. Unapologetic.

Positive.

The word didn’t appear, just the second bar. But it might as well have screamed.

I froze, hand on my stomach, palm flat against the thin fabric of my shirt. Nothing has been shown yet. No curve. No proof.

Inside, everything shifted anyway.

Panic and fury collided like storm fronts. A part of me wanted to laugh—thin, hysterical, ugly. He’d given me a house, money, papers, a graceful exit.

And this.

Pregnancy didn’t make an omega safer in Nightmoor. It made her more valuable.

More *desirable* to all the wrong men. More interesting to all the wrong laws.

If the Tribunal got my name on a form now—if they tied my scent, my blood, to a file—*recoverable* wouldn’t be hypothetical anymore. It would be a directive.

I sank down with my back to the cool wall, knees drawn up, the test still in my hand.

You should go.

Fine.

I would.

But not where he thought.

I pictured Frostveil’s balcony. His shoulders stiff and turned away. The cigarette burning down to nothing in fingers that shook.

“I’m done being your secret,” I told the empty, echoing bathroom. “And I’m done being anyone’s asset.”

I wiped my face, forcing my breathing to slow. If pregnancy made me more valuable, then disappearing had to become an art, not just a habit.

Vesperridge. The name slid into my mind like a stone into a pond—a distant city, busier, louder, full of wolves who didn’t know my face or my scent. Crowded enough to hide. Corrupt enough that no one asked questions if the money was clean.

I’d take the deed, sell the house quietly, and move before the Tribunal’s paperwork caught up. No more balconies, no more locked rooms, no more waiting to be told when to leave.

I wouldn’t just run. I’d survive long enough to make sure no one could ever stamp me as “recoverable” again.

I forced myself to my feet, splashed water on my face, and caught my own gaze in the mirror.

My bracelet caught the light.

It flared silver-hot, searing my skin. The hairline crack widened, spiderwebbing around my wrist. That glass-singing sound rose again, louder this time, humming in my bones.

My breath hitched. I grabbed the edge of the sink.

Silver light pulsed under my skin, faint but real, like something waking.

“Stop,” I whispered. To the bracelet, to the old stories, to the blood I’d never wanted to think about. “Not now. Not—”

The crack glowed, then settled into a dull, angry gleam. My wrist throbbed.

“House Lunaris…” The name came out of me before I could swallow it. I stared at the bracelet, at the thin lines of light that matched the fairy tale I’d been fed as a child, the monster house that had “wiped itself out for a reason.”

“House Lunaris… isn’t dead.”

That name had been a bedtime monster when I was small. It is a story to keep omegas obedient.

Now, it stared back at me from my own wrist.

And for the first time since Daire Vhaloren told me to go, something like a cold, clean purpose slid into the hollow spot in my chest where my heart had been.

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