ELEVEN YEARS OF NOTHING

She was six years old when the old Queen found her.

Lira didn't remember much from before that night —just fragments, really. Snow. Cold that went all the way down to the marrow. A forest so dark it felt like it was breathing. She remembered being small enough that the drifts came up past her knees, and she remembered not crying, even though every instinct in her tiny body screamed at her to. Some part of her, even then, had known that crying wouldn't bring anyone back.

She didn't remember her parents' faces. She'd tried, so many nights over so many years, lying awake and reaching for something —anything — a voice, a scent, a shape in the dark. There was nothing. Just the snow, and the cold, and the sound of her own small feet crunching through it, walking toward lights she didn't recognize because staying still meant freezing to death, and some stubborn thing in her chest had refused to let that happen.

The old Queen's carriage found her first.

Lira remembered that part clearly;the warmth of it, mostly. Blankets that didn't smell like anything she recognized. A woman's face leaning over her, soft and lined with worry, gold eyes wide with something Lira didn't have a name for yet. Kindness, she'd learn later. That's what it was called. She just hadn't had a word for it at six years old, half-frozen and half-convinced she was already dead.

"What's your name, little one?"

She hadn't answered. She couldn't. Whatever name she'd been given before that night had frozen somewhere in the snow along with everything else, and it never came back to her. Not once. Not in eleven years.

The Queen named her Lira herself, on the spot, because the girl had been humming some broken little tune under her breath the whole ride back to the estate....Lira, after the old word for a stringed instrument, because even half-dead in the snow, something in this child had been making music.

For two years, that kindness held.

Lira remembered warm rooms. A soft bed that was actually hers. The Queen's voice reading to her at night, patient and unhurried, never once making her feel like a burden or a mistake or a stray dog dragged in out of pity. For two years, Lira had almost believed she belonged somewhere.

Then the Queen got sick, and the sickness took her slow, the way the cruelest things always do — piece by piece, month by month, until the woman who'd pulled Lira out of the snow could barely lift her own head off the pillow. Lira remembered sitting by that bed every night, eight years old, holding a hand that used to be warm and was starting to feel like ice again.

"Promise me you'll be strong," the Queen had whispered, near the end. "Whatever happens after I'm gone. Promise me."

Lira had promised. She hadn't understood yet what she was promising to survive.

The moment the Queen died, the house changed overnight, like her kindness had been the only thing holding the walls up. The King had never wanted Lira there in the first place — that much became obvious fast. Without his wife to answer to, there was no reason to pretend otherwise. Within a month, Lira had gone from a child who slept in a warm bed to a child who scrubbed floors for one. The staff took their cues from him, the way staff always do. Sable, barely six years old herself back then, had learned cruelty early and practiced it often, like it was a skill worth perfecting.

Eleven years.

Eleven years of cold floors and colder rooms, of being fed just enough to keep working and never enough to feel safe, of watching Sable and the other pack children grow up soft and golden while Lira grew up sharp-edged and quiet, learning exactly how small she needed to make herself to survive a house that had never wanted her in it.

Eleven years of nothing, and somehow, still, that stubborn ember the Queen had pulled out of the snow all those years ago had never fully gone out.

Promise me you'll be strong.

Lira lay in the dark of the servant's quarters, three days from a place she'd only ever seen from a carriage window, and pressed her palm flat against her own chest, feeling her heartbeat under it.

Still there. Still stubborn. Still hers.

Whatever Alpha Academy turned out to be — whatever cruelty waited behind those towering gates —she had survived eleven years of exactly that already. She knew how to bend without breaking. She knew how to disappear into a room and still walk out of it in one piece.

She just didn't know yet that this time, disappearing wasn't going to be an option.

This time, the whole world was about to be forced to look at her.