CHAPTER 1: THE NIGHT BEFORE

Sera's POV

I have been invisible my whole life and I got good at it the way you got good at anything you practiced long enough.

Keep your head down. Answer when spoken to. Don't take up space you were not invited to fill. It was not a sad way to live. It was just practical. In a pack where every Omega knew their rank and the bottom rank knew it louder than anyone else, invisible was the safest thing to be.

My name was last on every list. Last to eat at communal meals. Last considered for work assignments. Last to be defended when the higher ranked wolves decided they needed someone to make an example of. I had learned to be somewhere else when that happened. I was good at reading a room. Better than most people realized, which was the point.

The mark on my wrist helped with none of that.

My mother covered it the day it appeared. I was three years old and I did not remember it happening. What I remembered was being seven and asking her why I had to wear the bandage and she went very still the way she did when she was thinking hard about how much to tell me.

Cover it, she said. Always. Don't let anyone see it. Don't ask me why.

I did not ask her why. I covered it. I kept covering it after she died and I did not stop after nine years of doing it alone and I was not planning to stop now.

It was the night before Presentation Ceremony and I was sitting on the edge of my bed in the room I shared with two other Omegas who were both asleep and not thinking about tomorrow.

I was thinking about tomorrow.

Not because I was nervous. I had been brought to Presentation twice before and it went the same way both times. You walked forward when your name was called. You stood in front of the Alpha King for approximately four seconds. He looked through you like you were furniture and said nothing and you walked back to your spot. That was the whole thing.

He had never chosen anyone. Three years and not one girl had walked out of that hall as anything other than what she walked in as. The council called it tradition. The older Omegas said he was waiting for someone specific. The younger ones said he simply did not want a mate and the ceremony was political theatre and nothing more.

I did not have an opinion. I just wanted it finished.

The mark burned at exactly midnight.

Not warm. Not uncomfortable. Hot. A sharp white heat starting from the center of the mark spreading up my wrist and I was on my feet before I was fully awake, pressing my palm flat over the bandage like pressure would stop it.

It did not stop.

I went to the bathroom and unwrapped the bandage at the sink. The mark looked the same as always. A small silver crescent shape sitting just below the inside of my wrist bone. I had looked at it thousands of times. It had never looked back.

It was glowing now.

Faint but visible in the dark bathroom. A thin silver light coming from underneath the skin like something lit from inside. I stood and stared at it and the heat moved past my elbow and settled in my chest and sat there pulsing slowly.

One beat. Two. Three.

Then it stopped.

The glow faded. The heat pulled back down to my wrist and went quiet. Not gone. Just still, the way something was still when it was waiting rather than finished.

I wrapped the bandage back and stood at the sink for a long time.

My mother's face. The way she went still when I asked her. Don't ask me why.

I had respected that my whole life. Covered it. Kept it covered. Not looked too long. Told myself it was just a birthmark that happened to look different from normal ones, that some people had unusual marks, that there was nothing strange about mine except the shape.

I was twenty-one years old and I had known for most of them that I was lying to myself.

I went back to bed. I did not sleep. I lay on my back staring at the ceiling listening to my roommates breathe and felt the mark sit quiet against my wrist like it was satisfied with something.

Before dawn I made a decision.

After tomorrow it was done. Whether the ceremony went the same way it always went or something happened that I could not predict, I was leaving the pack. I had been saving money for two years, small amounts nobody noticed because nobody was watching me closely enough to notice. I had a route mapped out. A city three territories over where I could disappear into the human population and not be found unless someone was specifically looking.

After tomorrow I was done being last on every list in a place that would never see me as anything else.

The mark pulsed once.

I pressed my hand over it.

Outside the window the sky was going grey. Less than an hour to dawn.

I thought about the Alpha King. I had seen him twice from across a crowded hall and both times I had the same thought. That he looked like a man who had made peace a long time ago with something most people spent their whole lives fighting. Not happy about it. Just finished with arguing.

Kael Dravon. Twenty-six. Three years on the throne. No mate. No interest in one.

I had no feelings about him. He was the Alpha King. He was not a person I would ever speak to or stand near or matter to in any way. After tomorrow I would never be in the same room as him again.

The mark burned.

White hot this time. No warning. Immediate searing heat from my wrist up through my shoulder and into my chest and I sat up in the grey dark with my hand clamped over my wrist and my teeth clenched and one thought moving through my head very clearly.

Something was wrong.

Something was already moving toward me in the dark and it had been moving for a long time and tomorrow was not a ceremony.

Tomorrow was where it arrived.