THE WOLF I NEVER HAD

I read the first line again and again until the words started to blur.

My darling Liora, if you are reading this, then they have already killed me, and you are not who they told you that you are.

My mother had told me she was dying of a fever. I remembered the cold cloth on her forehead and the way she held my hand, and I remembered Roderick's rasping voice in the Alpha's bedchamber, telling me she had been silenced. I sat down on the dusty stone floor with the book open in my lap and forced myself to keep reading.

The pages were full of my mother's quick, slanted handwriting, and the story she told made my whole body go cold. She had not been an ordinary healer. Before she married my father, Elise Hale had been the Moon Keeper of Silverfang, the sacred guardian who spoke for the Moon Goddess in the temple. Veda had been her apprentice, a quiet young woman who learned everything and smiled at everyone.

Then my mother wrote about the night she saw Veda in the temple after midnight. Veda was kneeling in front of the altar with a silver knife in one hand and a bowl of black blood in the other, and she was whispering words that did not belong to the Moon Goddess. She was building a bond curse, one strong enough to chain a powerful wolf to the will of whoever held the other end. My mother tried to stop her, and Veda promised she would stop, and my mother believed her.

I turned the page with shaking fingers, and the next paragraph made my breath catch.

I did not tell your father, because I was afraid of what Veda might do to you. You were only a baby, but I knew from the day you were born that you were different. The Moon Goddess marked you at birth, my darling. You are Moonborn, the first one born in Silverfang in three hundred years. Your blood can break any bond curse that was ever made, and Veda knows it.

I read that sentence three times. Then I read the next one, and my heart stopped.

I sealed your wolf when you were six years old. It was the only way to hide what you are. Your wolf is not weak and she is not missing, Liora. She is sleeping inside you, behind a seal made of moon silver and my own blood, and she is stronger than any wolf in this pack.

I let the book drop into my lap. All my life I had been the healer's daughter who never shifted, the girl people pitied at every pack gathering. I had cried myself to sleep for years because my wolf never came, and she had been inside me the whole time.

"Mama," I whispered into the empty room, and my voice cracked.

The last page of the diary had been torn out, and only a ragged strip of paper was left along the spine. I pressed my thumb against it as if I could feel the missing words, and then I heard the sound of a distant horn.

DARIAN

The pain hit me before I even reached the top of the dungeon stairs.

It started in my chest and spread through every part of me like fire poured into my veins, and I dropped to my knees on the stone with a sound I did not recognize as my own. The silver mark under my collar burned so hot that I could smell my own skin. I had known it would come. The curse always punished me when I bent its rules, and tonight I had bent them further than I ever had.

"Alpha."

Veda's cool voice floated down the corridor, and I forced myself to stand. She walked toward me in her gray robes with two guards behind her, and her pale eyes moved over my sweating face with something close to pleasure.

"You look unwell," she said.

"It is grief," I replied through my teeth. "My father is dead."

"Of course." She tilted her head. "And the prisoner?"

I said nothing. One of the guards ran ahead down the row of cells and stopped in front of the last one. The iron door stood wide open, with a length of braided rope still hooked around the bar inside the empty shaft, and I heard his sharp intake of breath from where I stood.

The silence that followed was the longest of my life.

Veda turned slowly, and her smile was gone. "You gave her the rope."

"You told me to bring a rope to her cell," I said, each word scraping my throat. "I did exactly that."

She stepped close to me, so close that I could smell the dried herbs on her robes, and she lifted one thin hand and pressed her palm flat against my chest, right over the mark. The pain tore through me so violently that my vision went white.

"Remember who owns you, boy," she whispered. "Every time you disobey me, I will take something from you. Tonight it is only pain. Next time it will be someone you love."

She let go, and I fell against the wall gasping, with blood on my lip. Then her voice rang out down the corridor, sharp and cold.

"Sound the horns. The healer's daughter has escaped, and anyone who helps her will hang beside her."

LIORA

The horn sounded again, closer this time, and I scrambled to my feet with the diary clutched against my chest.

I knew that sound. It was the Silverfang hunting call, the one the pack used when they were chasing a rogue through the forest. They were looking for me now, and the whole pack would join in before the sun came up. I shoved the diary into my healer's satchel, which was still on my shoulder, and ran back into the tunnel with my hands trailing along the wall.

The gray glimmer ahead grew brighter with each step, and soon I could hear running water. I burst out of the tunnel mouth into a thicket of reeds at the edge of the river, and the cold morning air hit my face like a slap. The moon had sunk low over the trees. Behind me, up on the hill, I could see torches moving through the dark like a swarm of angry fireflies.

I plunged into the water without stopping to think about the cold and waded across with my dress dragging at my legs. By the time I dragged myself up the far bank, my teeth were chattering and I could barely feel my fingers. Somewhere behind me I heard dogs barking, and then a man's voice shouting that they had found the tunnel.

I ran into the forest as fast as I could, branches whipping across my face, with my lungs burning and my heart hammering so hard I thought it might break. I tripped over a root and fell hard on my hands and knees, and the sound of paws was suddenly very close.

Three wolves burst through the trees and surrounded me.

They were huge, with their ears flat and their teeth bared, and I recognized the one in the middle. It was Veda's chief hunter, a gray beast with a torn ear. He lowered his head and stalked toward me slowly, and I scrambled backward on the wet leaves with nowhere left to go.

I had no wolf to shift into, and I had no weapon. I was one girl on the ground against three hunters, and the dawn was breaking red behind them.

The gray wolf crouched to spring.

And then something deep inside my chest cracked open like ice breaking on a frozen lake. A wave of heat poured through my whole body, my skin lit up with a faint silver glow, and I heard a voice that was not my own, low and ancient and furious, speak inside my head.

Finally, little one. Let me out.