Number Seven

Serena’s POV

“Don’t speak,” said the man in the dark. “Not one word. If you speak, I’ll lose you.”

I couldn’t have spoken if I’d tried.

The hall of the Mandai Ridge pack house was pitch black. Somebody had taped over every window. Somebody had put out every candle. Twenty women stood in a line along the wall, each in a black veil that fell to her knees, and none of us could see our own hands.

I was number seven.

I wasn’t supposed to be.

A footstep, slow and heavy, came down the line. Then another. It stopped in front of number four. The Alpha of Mandai Ridge breathed in once, long and quiet, and moved on.

Number five. Number six.

My heart beat so loud I was sure the whole hall could hear it.

~

Two hours earlier, my sister had knelt on my bedroom floor and begged.

“Just stand in my place, Serena,” Natalie said. “Fifteen minutes. That’s all I’m asking. Then I’ll come back and switch.”

I looked up from my sketchbook. My pen left a long black line across the page.

“You want me to stand in the Veil Night line.”

“Yes.”

“In your veil.”

“Yes.”

“Nat. I don’t have a wolf.”

“That’s why it’s perfect.” She grabbed my hand. Her nails were painted pale pink and her fingers were ice cold. “Nobody looks at you. Nobody checks. You’ll stand in my spot, number seven, wear my veil, say nothing. The Alpha will walk past, and he’ll pick someone in the front. Then it’s over.”

“Where are you going?”

She didn’t answer.

“Natalie.”

“Out.” She looked at the floor. “There’s someone. Outside the pack. I can’t tell you who, and please don’t ask, because I love him and if I go to that hall the elders will make me Luna and I’ll never see him again.”

The Veil Night is the oldest ritual we have. Once a year, on the first new moon after the Alpha turns twenty-eight, every unmated woman in the pack of Mandai Ridge stands in a dark hall wearing a black veil. The Alpha walks the line. He picks the one whose scent calls to his wolf. In the morning, the veil comes off, and she is Luna.

The elders had already told everyone who it would be. Beta Richard Lim’s golden daughter. Natalie. Our father had smiled about it for a month.

“Mum will kill me,” I said.

“Mum won’t find out.”

“Mum knows everything.”

“Please.” Her voice cracked. “You’re my little sister.”

That was the word that did it. Sister. My whole life, I’d wanted to be one to her.

Natalie is twenty-four. She has long dark hair and a laugh that makes strangers stop on the pavement. When she walks into the Bukit Timah hawker centre, the uncles put down their chopsticks. And I am twenty-two, small and plain, with ink on my wrists and a wolf who has never spoken to me once. In my family, that isn’t a small thing. It’s a stain.

My mother, Grace Lim, has called me “the quiet one” so many times that I think she’s forgotten it was meant as a mercy.

“Fifteen minutes,” I said.

Natalie threw her arms around me. She smelled of jasmine and her expensive perfume. “You’re an angel. I’ll owe you forever. I swear.”

She pushed a bundle of black silk into my hands and was gone before I could change my mind.

I looked at the veil. I looked at my sketchbook, where I’d been drawing the same face for eleven years without meaning to. Strong jaw. Serious mouth. A boy who once helped me pick up a dropped bag of oranges at a pack picnic, and never noticed that I couldn’t say thank you.

Alpha Marcus Goh.

I put the veil over my head.

My phone buzzed on the bed. Aisyah, my best friend, who works the night shift at a pharmacy in Woodlands and still finds time to text me the moment I’m about to do anything brave.

Are you going tonight?

I typed back, Standing at the back. Hiding behind a pillar.

You’ll be fine. Wear a jacket. Halls are cold. Also if the Alpha is rude I will personally throw a durian at him.

I laughed. It was the last real laugh I had that night.

The bedroom door opened without a knock. My mother stood there in a jade green qipao and pearl earrings, holding a small handbag, her mouth set in the straight line that means I have disappointed her again.

“Where is your sister?”

“Getting ready.”

“She’s late.”

“She’ll be there, Mum.”

Grace Lim looked me over from head to foot. The veil hung from my hand. She frowned at it, then at me.

“Serena. Tonight is important. Your father and I have worked for years for this. Stay at the back. Don’t speak to anyone. Don’t embarrass us.” She paused. “And take that ink off your wrists.”

She left.

I looked down. A row of small black lines ran along my left wrist, tiny flowers and doodles, the way I draw when I’m frightened. There were a lot of them.

I didn’t wash them off.

~

Now he stood in front of me.

I knew it before he made a sound. The air changed. It grew warm and close and heavy, like standing next to a fire. A smell reached me, pine and rain and a clean scent like new paper, and every hair on my arms rose.

He didn’t move. He didn’t breathe.

The silence stretched so long that it hurt.

“Seven,” he said, very low.

The back of my throat closed.

“Say nothing,” he whispered. “The rule of the night is silence. If you speak, the ritual says I’m allowed to know your voice. And I don’t want to know it yet. I want to know if I’d have found you without.”

He took one step closer. I could feel his breath through the silk, warm against my forehead.

He’d never come this near in my life.

“I’ve walked this line three times in my head,” Marcus Goh said. His voice was quiet and rough, as if the words cost him. “I thought I’d feel nothing. I’m twenty-eight. I have looked for ten years, and I’ve felt nothing every single time. I told the elders I’d choose whoever they liked and be done with it.”

A pause.

“And then I got to you.”

My whole body went cold, then hot.

“There you are,” he said.

A hand touched mine. Only two fingers, only for a second. A jolt shot up my arm like a spark from a socket, so bright that I gasped behind the silk.

Somewhere at the front of the hall, an old woman’s voice rang out. Elder Katherine Wee, who has run the pack for forty years and terrifies everyone in it. “Alpha Goh. The hour is done. Whom do you choose?”

The dark held its breath.

“Number seven,” said Marcus.

And in my sister’s veil, with my sister’s number and my own stolen heartbeat, I understood that I had just been chosen by the man I’d loved for eleven years.

He had no idea who I was.