Chapter 1 — Bitter Mornings

The bitter drink is waiting for me like it always does. Centered on the kitchen table, steam curling up in thin, judgmental ribbons.

Mom calls it a tonic.

I call it punishment.

It sits in the same chipped mug every morning, the one with a faded blue wolf paw on the side. Melody used to tease that the mug was cursed because anyone who drank from it looked like they’d swallowed a live toad. She was right. If Melody were here, she’d wrinkle her nose dramatically and say, “Abby, if you drink that, at least let me write your funeral speech.”

I pick up the mug anyway, because in our house you don’t get to skip “tonic” without getting the kind of silence that feels like a noose.

The first sip hits my tongue and my stomach answers immediately sharp and hot, like something acidic scraping down my throat. I swallow on instinct. My eyes water. I keep my face as blank as I can manage, because Mom watches in a way that’s almost… hungry.

“Good girl,” she says softly.

I’m almost eighteen. I’m not a girl, and I’m definitely not good, but I don’t correct her. Correcting Mom is like kicking a stone wall and expecting the wall to apologize.

Dad, Graham Barns, the pack Beta sits at the far end of the table with his breakfast untouched. He’s already dressed for patrol, dark uniform crisp, hair pulled back. He looks tired. He always looks tired now. His gaze passes over me like I’m another chair.

Not in a cruel way. Dad isn’t cruel.

Just… absent.

Mom moves behind him and rests her hands on his shoulders. “The rogues hit a trading route near the south ridge last night,” she says, voice honey smooth. “Again.”

Dad’s jaw tightens. “I heard.”

“And yet,” Mom murmurs, leaning closer, “you still want to send Abigail away.”

The words slice the air cleanly.

My fingers tighten around the mug. I stare into the remaining liquid like it might offer an escape route.

Dad finally looks at me. Not warmly. Not with pride. Just with the same careful attention he’d give a blade he wasn’t sure was sharp.

“The order came from the capital,” he says, voice flat. “It’s not my choice.”

I set the mug down too hard. A droplet splashes onto the table. “It should be,” I snap before I can stop myself.

Mom’s eyes flick up, warning bright as a flare. Dad’s expression doesn’t change.

“You leave in two days,” he says. “Pack females your age are being called in to meet the prince. Mate evaluation. Formal introductions.”

“Mate evaluation.” I repeat the words like they’re in a language I hate.

Mom’s hands tighten on Dad’s shoulders. “It’s an honor,” she says.

“It’s a trap,” I say under my breath.

Tessa would tell me not to say things like that, that words have energy, that the Moon Goddess listens. Briar would tell me I’m finally developing survival instincts.

I don’t know which one is right. I just know my chest feels too small for my lungs.

I’m supposed to be excited. That’s what everyone keeps saying. Excited, honored and lucky. Like being paraded in the capital in front of a prince is some kind of prize instead of a spotlight aimed directly at everything I’m missing.

I haven’t shifted.

I haven’t even felt my wolf since I was twelve.

Most wolves start showing signs by thirteen, sometimes earlier. By sixteen they can shift, even if it’s ugly and painful and they end up limping for a week. Melody shifted at sixteen, late, they said, but not unheard of.

When I was twelve, I felt her once. My wolf.

It wasn’t a voice exactly. More like a presence, dark and warm, pressed up against my ribs like another heart. It lasted three days. I remember lying awake at night, grinning into my pillow because I could feel her curled inside me, waiting.

And then, on the fourth day, she was gone.

Like she’d been yanked out by the roots.

No warning. No slow fade. Just silence.

I told Mom when I felt her. I told Dad. Mom’s mouth tightened and she brought me this tonic for the first time the next morning. She said it was for “growing pains.”

Now I’m nearly eighteen and everyone acts like I’m just… delayed.

Like I’m a late bloomer.

Like I’m not a problem.

But I am. I can feel it every time someone looks at me a second too long. Every time conversation stutters around the word unshifted. Every time younger wolves, fourteen year olds with sharp grins and sharper teeth, race through the woods in their wolf forms while I walk behind them like a human child playing pretend.

The capital will be worse.

The capital will put me under a microscope.

Dad stands, pushing his chair in with military precision. “I’m going to the council,” he says. “There’s talk of increasing guard rotations.”

Mom’s face smooths into concern. “Be careful.”

He pauses like he wants to say something else. Something that matters. He doesn’t.

His gaze flicks to the empty chair beside mine.

Melody’s chair.

It’s still there. Mom says it’s unhealthy. Dad says nothing. I keep it because it’s the closest thing I have to proof she existed, and I’m terrified that if I let the house rearrange itself around her absence then it will become easier for everyone to pretend she was never real.

Dad leaves. The door shuts with a final thud.

Mom turns to me.

The kitchen feels colder when she looks at me like that, like she’s measuring how much trouble I’m capable of.

“You will go,” she says.

“I don’t want a mate,” I say, and the words come out rougher than I intend. “I don’t want a prince. I don’t want any of it.”

Mom tilts her head. “You want to stay here.”

“Yes,” I admit. “I want to stay with,” I stop before I say Melody’s name, because saying it in front of Mom sometimes makes her eyes go strange. Like a shutter clicking closed.

“With what?” Mom presses.

“With… everything,” I finish weakly. “With home.”

Mom steps closer and cups my jaw with fingers that are cold despite the steaming mug. Her nails are neat, filed smooth. A Gamma’s hands. Healing hands.

Hands that can also hold you in place while you drown.

“Home is not a place,” she says gently. “It is duty. You will learn that.”

Her thumb strokes the corner of my mouth, wiping away a drop from the tonic I hadn’t realized was still there. I swallow hard.

“I’m not Melody,” I say before I can stop myself.

Mom’s hand stills. Her eyes sharpen.

The room seems to tighten around us.

“No,” she agrees, voice quiet. “You are not.”

For a moment, that’s all she says. And something about it, something about how easily it leaves her makes my skin crawl.

She releases me and turns away to rinse the mug. “Pack females are leaving for the capital from all territories,” she says, as if we’re discussing weather. “They will see what you are. It’s better to go before rumors build.”

What you are.

Not who.

What.

I scrape my chair back, heart pounding. “What I am is tired.”

Mom doesn’t turn around. “Go get your things ready. Tessa Hale and Briar Wren will travel with you.”

That jolts me. “Tessa and Briar? Why?”

“They were selected.” Mom’s tone makes it clear the selection wasn’t up for debate. “You’ll need companions. The road is not safe.”

Because of rogues.

We don’t say the word in this house without it tasting like blood.

Rogues have always existed. Wolves who severed pack ties, who lived outside laws, outside territory lines. But in the last year the number of rogue attacks has exploded across the realm. Entire patrols missing. Small villages burned. A trading caravan slaughtered so completely the bodies weren’t even left for burial.

Melody vanished in the middle of it.

Officially, she was killed by rogues.

Unofficially, Dad still searches like he can drag her back from whatever darkness swallowed her.

I used to search too. For months after she disappeared, I’d walk the tree line at night and listen for howls that weren’t there, convinced that if I could just hear her I could follow the sound like a thread.

Now I keep her chair and her scarf and the little carved wolf she made me when I was ten. That’s my version of searching.

I stand. My legs feel unsteady. “When do we leave?”

“Dawn, two days from now,” Mom says.

I hesitate at the doorway. “Do you really think a prince is going to… what, sense something in me that I can’t even find?”

Mom finally looks over her shoulder. Her smile is small. “The prince will know what you are when he meets you.”

The way she says it calm, certain makes my stomach twist.

Because she sounds like she already knows the answer.

Upstairs, my room is a museum of unfinished things.

Half folded dresses I never wore. Books I started and couldn’t focus on. A comb Melody used to steal and hide in her hair just to make me chase her down the hallway, laughing and furious.

I sit on the edge of my bed and open the wooden box under my mattress. Inside are Melody’s belongings, the ones Mom didn’t throw out in a “grief cleansing” fit.

Her scarf, knitted in dark green. A small journal with medical notes, her handwriting tight, determined. A silver hair clip shaped like a crescent moon.

I pick up the journal. The pages smell faintly like dried herbs.

Melody always smelled like herbs. Like the healing hut. Like crushed leaves between fingers.

My throat tightens.

“I’m sorry,” I whisper to the empty room, the words out of habit, out of ache. “I’m sorry I’m leaving you here.”

Of course she doesn’t answer.

She never answers.

And yet sometimes, late at night when the wind hits the house just right, I swear I hear footsteps in the hallway that don’t belong to Mom or Dad. Soft, familiar steps.

It’s probably my grief being theatrical.

Or maybe the house is haunted by all the things we never said out loud.

I set the journal down and begin packing, folding clothes with mechanical precision. I’m halfway through my second dress when I hear voices downstairs Mom’s and someone else’s.

A council member?

No. The other voice is male, lower, rougher. Not Dad.

I freeze.

We get visitors, sure. Dad’s position brings in patrol leaders, messengers, even the Alpha sometimes. But the tone is wrong too quiet, too intimate.

I creep to the top of the stairs and crouch, pressing my fingers to the banister.

Mom’s voice drifts up, clear as a blade.

“…she leaves in two days,” she’s saying.

A pause. The male voice answers, too low to catch every word. I hear only fragments—“…capital… overdue… blood…”

My pulse spikes.

Mom laughs softly. “You worry too much.”

Another pause.

Then Mom again, and this time her words hit like ice water: “No one will suspect a thing. She’s always been… delicate.”

Delicate.

I clamp my hand over my mouth, suddenly nauseous, because Melody used to say the same word with a sneer. They call us delicate when they don’t want to admit something is wrong.

The male voice murmurs something I can’t hear.

Mom’s reply is crisp. “Graham suspects nothing. He never wants to see what’s in front of him.”

My heart thuds so loud I’m sure they’ll hear it. I pull back, retreating into the shadow of the hallway.

The floorboard beneath my foot creaks.

Silence drops downstairs. Sharp, immediate.

I hold my breath.

Mom’s voice floats up, sweeter now. “Abigail?” she calls. “Is that you?”

My blood turns cold.

I force myself to speak normally, because if I don’t, if I sound guilty, she’ll come upstairs and look at me with that measuring gaze and I’ll lose whatever tiny advantage I just gained.

“It’s me,” I call back, throat tight. “I’m packing.”

A beat.

Then Mom: “Good. Come down in a moment, sweetheart. We have something to discuss.”

Sweetheart.

The word lands wrong. Heavy.

I wait until I hear the front door open and close, until footsteps fade outside.

Then Mom’s steps start up the stairs.

I rush into my room and shut the door, leaning against it as if a thin slab of wood could protect me from whatever just shifted in the air.

My eyes flick to Melody’s journal on the bed.

To her neat, stubborn handwriting.

To the proof that she noticed things.

That she wrote things down.

That she may have known more than I ever understood.

My hands shake as I open the journal and flip through pages filled with remedies and notes about fevers, fatigue, muscle weakness.

Then a line catches my eye, underlined twice.

Wolfsbane symptoms: nausea, burning throat, weakness, suppressed shifting response.

My mouth goes dry.

Burning throat.

Weakness.

Suppressed shifting response.

My mind snaps to the mug downstairs, still in the sink.

The bitter drink.

My stomach heaves.

I don’t know what I’m thinking, only that suddenly the capital doesn’t feel like a parade.

It feels like a doorway.

And if I step through it, I might finally find out why my wolf went silent.

Or why Mom sounds so sure that no one will suspect a thing.

A knock taps at my door.

“Abigail,” Mom calls softly from the hall. “Open up.”

I stare at Melody’s journal like it’s a lifeline.

Then I slide it into my bag beneath my clothes.

My voice comes out steady, even as my fingers tremble on the latch. “Coming.”

And when I open the door, Mom is smiling.

Like nothing in the world is wrong.

Like she hasn’t just turned my whole life into a question with teeth.