CHAPTER 5: The Beginning

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

Four years ago, I believed in fairy tales.

I was 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, and those seven words changed the entire direction of my life.

I hadn't been called beautiful before. Not once. Orphans in Silverpine Pack didn't get called beautiful. We got called useful, or quiet, or well-behaved, or sometimes nothing at all. We learned early that invisibility was safer than visibility. That taking up space was a luxury that belonged to wolves with bloodlines worth mentioning.

I had been invisible my whole life.

Until that afternoon in the healing room when the newly appointed Beta came in with a gash on his shoulder from training, and made me laugh while I stitched him up, and said those seven words like they cost him nothing.

Like they were simply true.

I had fumbled the needle. My face had gone so hot I could feel it in my ears. He'd watched me recover with that easy half-smile and said nothing else, just let me work, and I'd finished the stitches in shaking silence and told myself it meant nothing.

He was Damon Thornwell. His father was the Alpha. He was twenty-two and newly appointed Beta and everyone in Silverpine knew his name, used it with a kind of reverence, made space for him when he walked into a room.

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

It meant nothing.

Three days later, he came back.

No injury this time. He stood in the doorway of the healing room in training clothes, clean-shouldered, and said he wanted to check how the stitches were holding. I told him they were holding fine and he could see that for himself. He said he preferred a professional opinion.

He stayed for an hour.

He came back the next day. And the day after that. Each time with some thin excuse that we both knew wasn't the real reason. And each time he stayed longer, talked more, asked questions about my work and my life and what I thought about things. Nobody had ever asked me what I thought about things.

By the end of the first week, the other healer apprentices had noticed. I could feel their eyes following me across the room. Could hear the whispered conversations that stopped when I walked past.

Why her?

I asked myself the same question every night lying on my narrow bed in the omega quarters, staring at the ceiling, trying to talk myself out of whatever was happening to my chest when I thought about him.

He brought me flowers the second week. Wildflowers from the stream at the edge of pack territory. Small and ordinary and nothing like the elaborate arrangements in the pack house. He held them out with the slightly uncertain air of someone who didn't do this often.

I took them and didn't know what to say.

"Why me?" I finally asked one evening as he walked me back from the healing rooms. The sun was 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 was quiet for a moment. Considering.

"You're different," he said finally.

"Different how?"

He looked at me with those blue eyes. "Sweet. Uncomplicated." He reached out and briefly touched my hand. "Being around you is easy, Iris. Everything else in my life right now is complicated and loud and exhausting. You're like... peace."

Uncomplicated.

I heard the word and felt warm all over. Felt chosen. Felt like I was finally something someone wanted.

I was nineteen and I didn't understand yet what uncomplicated actually meant when a man like Damon said it. Didn't understand that he wasn't describing something he admired but something he needed. That what he wanted in a mate wasn't a partner but a place to rest. A soft, quiet thing that wouldn't challenge him or complicate his life or expect too much.

He wanted someone controllable.

I thought he wanted me.

Three months passed the way good months do, too fast and wrapped in a kind of golden haze that I kept waiting to end. He took me on walks through the forest at dusk. Brought lunch to the healing rooms so we could eat together on the steps outside. Sat beside me at pack gatherings for the first time in my life, so that people looked at me differently. With acknowledgment. With something that felt almost like respect.

Because he'd chosen me. Because he sat beside me. Because I had value now that could be measured in proximity to him.

I didn't examine that too closely at the time.

I was happy. Simply, completely happy, for the first time since my parents died and left me to be passed between relatives who didn't want me. I had someone. I mattered to someone.

The full moon came in late autumn. The whole pack gathered in the clearing for the run, the way they did every month. I had always shifted alone before, keeping to the outer edges where the lower-ranked wolves stayed. Watching the Alphas and Betas and Gammas run together in the center of things, loud and joyful and free.

That night, Damon found me in the crowd before the shift.

He came straight through the gathering toward me, and people parted for him without being asked, the way they always did. He stopped in front of me and the expression on his face was different from usual. More serious. Almost nervous.

"Be my mate," he said.

The noise of the crowd around us seemed to drop away.

"What?"

He went down on one knee in the grass. Right there, in front of the entire pack, under the full moon that was just beginning to rise above the trees.

"Be my mate, Iris. My Luna."

Everything stopped.

My hands flew to my mouth. Around us, the crowd had gone silent. Two hundred wolves watching. Waiting. The full moon casting silver light over everything.

Luna. He wanted me to be Luna. Not just his chosen mate but the pack's female Alpha. The role that belonged to the strongest, the most capable, the most deserving.

Me. The orphan omega who had never expected anything more than a quiet life stitching wounds and mixing herbs.

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

He rose and kissed me and the pack erupted around us, howls and cheers lifting into the night air, and I thought this was it. This was the moment everything changed.

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

I saw it. I registered it somewhere in the back of my mind behind all the joy.

I chose not to examine it.

Damon steered me away, toward the celebration, toward the center of things where I had never stood before. I let myself be steered.

That's when I saw her.

Standing near the tree line, slightly separate from the celebrating crowd. A woman I didn't recognize, blonde and green-eyed and beautiful in a way that was almost architectural. Perfect bone structure. Perfect posture. She was watching Damon with an expression I couldn't fully read. Something layered and complex moving behind her eyes.

"Who is that?" I asked.

Damon followed my gaze. Something crossed his face. Quick, controlled, gone.

"That's Clarissa. My half-sister." He said it lightly, like a footnote. "Father's, from before. Different story."

Half-sister. I hadn't known he had one. He'd never mentioned her.

"I didn't know you had a sister."

"We're not close." He steered me gently away again. "Come on, let's not stand here."

But I looked back.

Clarissa's eyes had moved from Damon to me. When our gazes met, her expression rearranged itself into something warm and open. A smile that reached her eyes and looked completely genuine.

She raised a hand in greeting. "Welcome to the family," she called out. Sweet. Warm. Sincere.

I smiled back. Felt guilty for the brief discomfort I'd felt.

She seemed lovely.

I wish I had trusted that first instinct. That flicker of something wrong underneath the warmth. But I was twenty-two now and engaged to the future Alpha and standing in the center of a pack that was celebrating me, and I had spent my whole life wanting exactly this.

I wasn't going to ruin it with paranoia.

Old Meredith found me the next morning in the supply room at work. She was sixty and sharp-eyed and had been healing wolves in Silverpine longer than most pack members had been alive. She closed the door behind her and looked at me with an expression I didn't know how to read.

"Are you sure about this, child?"

"About Damon?" I laughed. Still floating. "Of course I'm sure. I love him."

"Does he love you?" She said it carefully. Not unkindly.

"Yes. Obviously."

"Does he?" She held my gaze. "Or does he love how you make him feel?"

The question landed oddly. I turned it over and put it down.

"That's the same thing."

"It isn't." Her voice was gentle. Patient. "There's a difference between a man who loves you and a man who loves what you give him. One of them will stay when giving becomes hard. The other will leave the moment he finds an easier source."

"You don't know him."

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

The words pricked at something I didn't want pricked. I pulled my supply list toward me and looked at it without reading it.

"I appreciate your concern," I said. The way you say it when you don't appreciate it at all.

Meredith was quiet for a moment. Then: "I hope I'm wrong. Genuinely."

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

I told myself she was jealous. Bitter. That people who had been alone a long time sometimes couldn't stand seeing others happy.

I believed that for two months, until the wedding.

It was small. Alpha Thornwell insisted.

"An omega bride doesn't warrant spectacle," he'd said. Not to me. To Damon, in a conversation I wasn't supposed to overhear through the study wall.

Damon had agreed. Just like that. No argument. No defense. A simple yes, Father and the subject was closed.

Twenty guests. The pack house living room. No flowers because someone forgot to order them, or didn't bother. Vows exchanged in front of a handful of people who attended out of duty rather than celebration.

Clarissa sat in the front row. She'd moved into the guest room two weeks before the wedding. Just temporarily, she said. Just until she found her own place.

She was still in that guest room when I walked down the makeshift aisle in a simple white dress that no one had helped me choose. Damon stood at the end of it in his suit, handsome and straight-backed and looking somewhere slightly past my left shoulder.

I walked toward him anyway.

"I do," I said when the time came, and I meant every syllable with everything I had.

He kissed me like an obligation. Brief and dry and already thinking about something else.

I told myself it was nerves.

I told myself a lot of things, back then.