The Wedding Gift

Aria

The knife her sister used didn't even shake.

Aria felt that more than the blade itself — the steadiness of it, the ease. Like she was cutting a ribbon instead of a person. Like this was nothing.

Rain fell in cold sheets over the courtyard, hissing against the torches lining the ceremony grounds. Aria's knees hit the mud first. Then her palms. The white of her gown was already ruined, blooming red from the inside out.

"You should say something," Lilith said, crouching to Aria's eye level, careful not to let the hem of her wedding dress touch the blood. "Last words and all that.

Aria's mouth filled with copper.

She could hear the guests beyond the hedges — laughter, glasses clinking, someone tuning a violin for a ceremony that hadn't been cancelled. Just relocated. Just rewritten, with a different sister standing where the bride should be.

"Nothing?" Lilith tilted her head, golden curls catching the torchlight, looking every bit the perfect bride she'd been groomed since birth to become. "That's fitting. You were always quiet when it mattered."

Behind her, their mother didn't look away. She watched with the same expression she used to check off chores — is it done, is it done yet.

"Faster," their mother said. "Before someone wanders back here."

Lilith sighed like she'd been asked to do something tedious. She wiped the blade against Aria's sleeve, unbothered, as if blood were something that simply belonged on Aria and always had.

"Don't look so betrayed," Lilith murmured, leaning close enough that her breath warmed Aria's cheek. "You were never going to be the one who mattered. I just made it official."

Official.

Aria's vision blurred at the edges, rain and torchlight smearing into gold.

She thought she'd feel more. Rage, maybe. Grief. Some final, desperate scream clawing up her throat.

Instead there was only cold clarity, sharp as the knife still slick with her blood.

Of course it was her. Of course they let her.

"Get up," their father's voice, from somewhere behind the hedge, low and irritated — not at his daughters, but at the delay. "The Alpha's convoy will be here within the hour. She needs to be gone before then."

Gone. Not dead. Gone. Like she was luggage misplaced before a trip.

Aria pressed a hand to the wound in her side, blood slipping hot between her fingers despite the freezing rain. She tried to speak. Only a wet, broken sound came out.

Lilith crouched lower, almost tender, the way you'd lean down to a dying pet you'd grown bored of.

"You'll understand eventually," she said. "Somewhere, wherever you end up. This was always going to be my life. You were just renting space in it."

Renting space.

Seventeen years, and that was the epitaph. Not daughter. Not sister. A tenant who'd overstayed.

Aria's fingers curled into the mud, grasping for something — anything — to hold onto besides the truth crashing down with the rain.

She thought of every time she'd made herself smaller. Every bruise she'd hidden so her mother wouldn't be inconvenienced by the sight of it. Every "someday you'll understand" they'd fed her instead of love.

She understood now.

She understood perfectly.

The world was going dark at the edges, torchlight collapsing into pinholes, the music from the courtyard growing distant, underwater.

Lilith rose, smoothing her skirts, the picture of a bride again. She glanced down at Aria one last time — not with hatred. That would have required feeling something.

She looked at Aria the way you look at a task crossed off a list.

"Goodbye, Aria."

Footsteps retreated. Fabric rustling. Her mother's voice, already moving on to logistics — someone needs to clean this before the guests circle back — as though Aria's body were spilled wine and not a daughter dying in the mud.

Aria's cheek met the cold ground.

The rain kept falling, indifferent, needling into the wound at her side like it wanted to finish what the knife started.

This is it. This is how it ends. Kneeling. Quiet. Exactly the way they always wanted me.

She waited for peace. For the soft, forgiving darkness people promised waited on the other side.

It didn't come.

Instead, something ignited beneath her skin — a heat that had no business existing in a body this cold, this empty. It started at her chest, right where her heartbeat should have been fading, and spread outward like flame chasing oil.

Not pain.

Hunger.

Her vision, already collapsing to black, caught one final thing before the world disappeared entirely —

A symbol, searing itself into the skin above her heart, glowing white-hot beneath the rain.

Something ancient. Something that should not have existed.

Something that was waking up.

And somewhere far beyond the hedges, beyond the music and the laughter and the family already forgetting her name —

a wolf that didn't belong to this pack threw back its head, and howled.