CHAPTER 5: The Beginning

"You have a beautiful smile. Don't hide it."

I am nineteen years old, sitting on a stool in the pack healer's room with a needle and thread in my hands and Damon Thornwell's blood on my gloves when those words change the direction of my life.

I haven't been called beautiful before. Not once. Orphans in Silverpine Pack don't get called beautiful. We get called useful, or quiet, or well-behaved, or sometimes nothing at all. We learn early that invisibility is safer than visibility.

I have been invisible my whole life.

Until this afternoon, when the newly appointed Beta walks in with a gash on his shoulder from training, makes me laugh while I stitch him up, and says those words to me like they cost him nothing.

I fumble the needle. My face goes so hot I feel it in my ears. He watches me recover with an easy half-smile and says nothing else, just lets me work. I finish the stitches in shaking silence and tell myself it means nothing.

He is Damon Thornwell. His father is the Alpha. He is twenty-two, newly appointed Beta, and everyone in Silverpine uses his name with a kind of reverence.

I am Iris. Just Iris. Healer apprentice. Nobody's daughter anymore.

Three days later, he comes back. No injury. He stands in the doorway in clean training clothes and says he wants to check how the stitches are holding. I tell him they're holding fine and he can see that for himself. He says he prefers a professional opinion.

He stays for an hour.

He comes back the next day. And the day after. Each time with some thin excuse we both know isn't the real reason. Each time he stays longer, talks more, asks questions about my work and what I think about things. Nobody has ever asked me what I think about things.

By the end of the first week, the other healer apprentices have noticed. I can feel their eyes following me. Can hear the whispered conversations that stop when I walk past.

Why her?

I ask myself the same question every night, lying on my narrow bed in the omega quarters, staring at the ceiling.

He brings me wildflowers the second week. Small, ordinary ones from the stream at the edge of pack territory. Nothing like the elaborate arrangements in the pack house. He holds them out with the slightly uncertain air of someone who doesn't do this often.

"Why me?" I finally ask one evening as he walks me back from the healing rooms. The sun is going down over the tree line, turning everything amber and gold. "There are she-wolves in this pack who've been hoping you'd notice them for years. Ranked wolves. Daughters of Betas and Gammas."

He is quiet for a moment.

"You're different," he says. "Sweet and uncomplicated." He reaches out and briefly touches my hand. "Being around you is easy, Iris. Everything else in my life is complicated, loud and exhausting. You're like peace."

Uncomplicated.

I hear the word and feel warm all over. Feel chosen. Feel like I am finally something someone wants.

I am young and I don't understand yet what uncomplicated means when a man like Damon says it. Don't understand that he isn't describing something he admires but something he needs. That what he wants in a mate isn't a partner but a place to rest. A soft, quiet thing that won't challenge him or expect too much.

He wants someone controllable.

I think he wants me.

Three months pass the way good months do, too fast and wrapped in golden haze. He takes me on walks through the forest at dusk. Brings lunch to the healing rooms. Sits beside me at pack gatherings for the first time in my life, so that people look at me differently. With acknowledgment. Something almost like respect.

Not because of who I am. Because of who has chosen me.

I don't examine that too closely.

The full moon comes in late autumn. I have always shifted alone, keeping to the outer edges where lower-ranked wolves stay, watching the Alphas and Betas run together in the center of things. That night, Damon finds me in the crowd before the shift. He comes straight through the gathering toward me and people part for him without being asked.

He stops in front of me, expression more serious than usual. Almost nervous.

"Be my mate," he says.

He goes down on one knee in the grass. Right there, in front of the entire pack, under the rising full moon.

"Be my mate, Iris. My Luna."

Everything stops.

"Yes." The word bursts out of me with a force that surprises us both. "Yes, Damon. Yes."

He rises and kisses me and the pack erupts around us, howls and cheers lifting into the night air, and I think this is it. The moment everything changes.

I don't notice Alpha Thornwell at the edge of the clearing. Not right away. When I finally look toward him, his face is carved from stone. No joy. No pride. Just a cold, assessing look that moves from his son to me and back again, like a man recalculating a disappointing result.

I see it. I register it.

I choose not to examine it.

That's when I see her.

Standing near the tree line, slightly separate from the crowd. A woman I don't recognize, blonde and green-eyed and beautiful in a way that is almost architectural. She's watching Damon with something layered and complex moving behind her eyes.

"Who is that?" I ask.

Something crosses Damon's face. Quick. Controlled. Gone.

"That's Clarissa. My half-sister. Father's, from before." He steers me gently away. "Come on."

But I look back.

Clarissa's eyes move from Damon to me. When our gazes meet, her expression rearranges into something warm and open, a smile that reaches her eyes and looks completely genuine. She raises a hand.

"Welcome to the family."

I smile back. Feel guilty for the brief discomfort I'd felt.

She seems lovely.

I wish I had trusted that first flicker of wrong underneath the warmth but I am engaged to the future Alpha and standing in the center of a pack. I am being celebrated after spending my whole life wanting exactly this.

Old Meredith finds me the next morning in the supply room. She has been healing wolves in Silverpine longer than most pack members have been alive. She closes the door and looks at me with an expression I can't read.

"Are you sure about this, child?"

"About Damon?" I laugh. Still floating. "Of course I'm sure."

"Does he love you?" She says it carefully. "Or does he love how you make him feel?"

The question lands oddly.

"There's a difference," she continues. "A man who loves you stays when giving becomes hard. A man who loves what you give him leaves the moment he finds an easier source."

"You don't know him."

"I know his father." She looks at her hands. "And I've watched that family for thirty years."

I tell her I appreciate her concern. The way you say it when you don't.

She leaves me alone with my supply list and the slowly cooling warmth in my chest.

I tell myself she is bitter. That people who have been alone a long time can't stand seeing others happy.

I believe that for two months. Until the wedding.

It should be small, Alpha Thornwell insists.

"An omega bride doesn't warrant spectacle."

He says it to Damon, in a conversation I am not supposed to overhear through the study wall. Damon agrees without argument. A simple yes, Father and the subject is closed.

Twenty guests. The pack house living room. No flowers because someone forgets to order them or doesn't bother. Clarissa sits in the front row. She has been living in the guest room for two weeks already, just temporarily, just until she finds her own place.

I walk down the makeshift aisle in a simple white dress that no one helped me choose. Damon stands at the end of it, handsome and straight-backed, looking somewhere slightly past my left shoulder.

I walk toward him anyway.

"I do," I say when the time comes, and I mean every syllable with everything I have.

He kisses me like an obligation.

I tell myself it's nerves.

Now I am twenty-three, locked inside a bedroom by the man I married, with a baby growing inside me and thirty days to prove my worth to a pack that has already decided I have none.

Meredith tried to warn me.

I should have listened.