Chapter 1:The Wrong Name

"And the final candidate: Lira of the Eastern Bloodline."

I waited for someone to laugh, because surely that was what this was. A joke. A cruel one, the kind Silverstone loved.

Nobody laughed. For three full seconds the whole hall just held its breath, and I stood at the back where omegas stand on mate-choosing night, hands knotted in the only dress I owned, and thought: *There's another Lira. There has to be.*

There wasn't.

Then the sound came, soft at first, a hiss of air through teeth. Then a snort. Then a ripple of real laughter spreading across two hundred wolves like I'd just walked in with my skirt tucked into my underwear.

"That's her?"

"The omega?"

"Is this a mistake?"

Yes. It had to be. I hadn't signed up for this. I'd come because tradition said every unmated female of age had to be present, and I'd stayed at the wall because that was where I'd been shoved since I was nine. Nobody had told me my name was on any list. Nobody ever told me anything.

My legs moved anyway. I don't remember deciding it. One step, then another, and the crowd peeled back from me the way water does from something dirty. Three girls stood by the Moon Altar in silk the color of cream, chins up, already glowing with a victory nobody had handed them yet. They didn't look at me. That was almost worse than if they had.

I stopped at the edge of the circle. My voice came out thinner than I wanted.

"I was called. By tradition. I have the right to be here."

More gasps. Somebody whispered *the nerve*, loud enough for me to hear it.

And Kael turned.

I'd braced for it. Eleven years of being invisible to him, and I'd braced for the moment he finally looked straight at me, and I'd told myself it wouldn't matter. His golden eyes landed on my face and something in my chest, something stupid and starved, flared up like a struck match.

Then I watched his expression change, and I watched the match go out.

Not recognition. Not even anger. Disgust. The kind you'd show a stain you'd just noticed on your sleeve.

He crossed the hall so fast I didn't see him move. One blink and he was in front of me, close enough that I had to tip my head back, close enough to smell cedar and cold air on him, and every wolf in the room went dead silent.

"You think you belong here."

He said it quietly. Calmly. That was the worst part. I'd have known what to do with shouting.

"I'm part of this pack." My voice shook. I hated it. I made it hold. "I was called."

He smiled. It had no warmth in it at all.

"You are nothing."

I'd been called worse. By half this room, probably. But they'd said it to my back, or to each other, or in the dark. Nobody had ever said it to my face like it was a simple, settled fact, like telling me the weather.

He leaned down until his mouth was almost at my ear.

"I don't know why the Moon let you breathe in my territory."

My fingers were trembling against my dress. I pressed them flat to stop it. "I didn't ask to come, I never—"

He straightened and turned his back on me in the middle of my sentence.

I think that's the part I'll remember. Not the words. The turning away. The way I simply stopped existing in his attention, like a candle someone pinched out.

Then his voice rolled across the hall, clear and carrying.

"I, Kael of Silverstone, reject Lira."

The room erupted. Shock, then hunger, the thrilled, greedy noise of people who'd come for a show and got a better one.

"Not as a mate," he went on. "Not as a candidate." He glanced back over his shoulder, and his eyes found mine, and he finished it slowly, so it would sink in. "As a member of this pack."

Something snapped.

I felt it. Actually felt it, low in my chest, a thread I'd never known was there, pulled so tight for so long that I'd mistaken the tension for being alive. It went in one quiet, clean tear.

"You can't," I whispered. "You can't do that. That isn't—"

"I just did."

He lifted two fingers. "Remove her."

The guards didn't hesitate. That's what I keep going back to. They didn't even look at each other first. Hands clamped around both my arms, hard enough to bruise, and I heard myself say, "No, wait, please, *wait*," and my voice cracked straight down the middle, and everyone heard that too.

I looked for one face. Just one. The old healer who'd slipped me bread when I was small. The girl from the kitchens who'd once, once, sat beside me. Anybody.

They found something fascinating on the floor.

"Kael!" I screamed it. It tore out of me, raw, ugly. "*Kael!*"

He was already talking to the Elder. Already finished with me.

They dragged me down the center of the hall and the whispers followed, flat and sharp, like thrown stones. *Finally. No more shame.* The great doors swung open and cold air slapped my face, and then there was nothing under my feet.

I hit the mud on my shoulder and slid. The doors boomed shut behind me.

Silence. Real silence, with no pack in it. I'd never heard that before. My whole life there'd been that low hum of other wolves at the edge of my mind, and I'd hated it half the time, and now it was just gone, and my head rang with the empty space.

Then my wrist caught fire.

I looked down. The pack mark was blistering, black lines crawling out from it like it was being scraped off from the inside. I screamed. I couldn't help it. I curled around my arm and screamed into the mud, *no, no, no*, because I knew exactly what this was, and I couldn't stop it, and nobody on earth was going to.

Above me, over the gate, voices drifted down. Bored. Pleased.

"Is she gone?"

"Good. Maybe the place can finally breathe."

I clamped both hands over my mouth. Not to stifle the sobbing. That was already happening. I just wouldn't let them have the sound. They'd taken everything else.

Rain started, a few cold drops, then a downpour, soaking my dress to my skin, washing mud and blood and spit down my face until I couldn't tell what was what. The mark stopped burning. That was the worst moment of all. It went numb. It went *quiet*.

I was alone in my own head for the first time in my life.

A howl rolled out of the forest.

Low. Long. Close, much too close. I lifted my head, rain stinging my eyes, and every hair on my arms rose, because I knew every voice in Silverstone, every pitch and pattern, and this wasn't one of them.

It wasn't any pack I knew.

Something was out there between the trees. Something that had been watching a long while, patient as stone.

A branch cracked.

Then a second howl answered the first.

Not from the forest this time.

From right behind me.