Chapter 1

Lucia's POV

The whole pack was celebrating, and I hadn't eaten in two days.

I was Lucia. Wolfless and orphaned — I was not welcome to celebrate with the others.

I struggled to push my way to the table, just trying to reach a ham sandwich.

A hand slapped mine away.

"Did I say you could touch that?"

Olivia. The Alpha's daughter. She stood there in a wine-red gown, dark hair braided through with little gold beads, three of her friends fanned out behind her to block the way back.

"A wolfless mutt, helping herself at the victory feast." Her lip curled. "You don't eat what warriors bled for. You don't even have a wolf. You take up space and chew through rations we could spend on someone who matters."

I should have looked at the ground. That was the smart thing. I'd done it a hundred times.

"I've eaten leftovers for a month." My voice came out steadier than I felt. "I want one meal. A normal one." I looked at the tables sagging under more food than the pack could finish — half of it would go to the pigs by morning, like after every feast. "You throw out more in a night than I've eaten all winter. That's the waste. Not me."

Her eyes narrowed to slits.

"What gives you the right to talk back to me?" She picked up the very sandwich I'd reached for, studied it, then dropped it in the dirt and ground it under her heel. "I'd sooner throw it away than watch you eat it. Now get to work."

"I’ve already finished today’s work."

“No, you haven’t.” Her smile was sweet and cold at once. "Did you forget that our warriors fought a group of rogues today? The bodies are still on the border. Go clean up the field now.”

"Finish before dawn," she said, loud enough for the others to hear, "or you'll wish you had."

This was extra work, forced on me without reason.

Her friends laughed. One of them shoved my shoulder as I turned, and a boot clipped the back of my knee. I stumbled but I didn't go down. A long time ago I'd learned how not to go down.

Their voices chased me across the square.

"Can you imagine? A wolfless thinking she belongs here."

"Forget her. Did you hear the Lycan palace is hiring senior Healers this year?"

"Olivia, with your gift you'd pass the trial in your sleep. Private Healer to the Prince himself."

"Maybe more than his Healer." A burst of giggles. "Luna Princess Olivia. That has a ring to it."

"Stop it, you three," Olivia said. But she didn't mean it. I could hear exactly how much she liked the sound of it.

What none of them knew was that I had signed up for that same trial.

Not for a prince. Not for a crown. I wanted a real job, a roof that was mine, and a reason for no one to ever look at me the way Olivia just had. That was all.

I'd loved healing since I was small. While the other pups practiced shifting, I learned which leaves stopped bleeding and which roots dragged down a fever. I taught myself from secondhand books bought with coins I'd scraped together, and from the plants I dug out of the woods with my own bare hands. Nobody taught me. Nobody ever offered to.

The border field smelled of copper and turned soil.

I dragged bodies that outweighed me twice over. I dug until the skin on my palms split and stung. And the whole time I said the same thing to myself, over and over. The only words that kept me moving.

One week. The trial was one week away. If I could get through the first round and the final, I'd hold a Healer's papers, and a Healer could go anywhere she pleased. No more scraps. No more Olivia. No more being the thing the pack wished it could quietly throw out.

By the time I patted down the last grave, the torches had burned to stubs, and the moon had climbed high and thin above the trees. My arms trembled so badly I could hardly lower them to my sides.

I wasn't allowed to sleep in the pack house. I never had been. Home was a one-room hut at the far edge of Graywind land, past where the lanterns reached, where the dark started and didn't stop.

I was nearly there when I heard it.

A sound in the brush just off the path. Low. Wet. Something breathing the wrong way.

I should have kept walking. A smart girl would have kept walking. My feet stopped anyway.

I pushed the branches aside.

A wolf lay sprawled in the dirt — but no wolf I had ever seen in my life. It was massive, larger in fur than any Graywind warrior, and something had gone terribly wrong with its body. The coat was patchy and black, the skin beneath split and weeping. Its limbs bent at angles that didn't belong on a living thing. Dark veins crawled out from a deep wound in its side and spread like cracks through ice.

Then the wolf opened its eyes.

They found me in the dark and held on, gold and clouded and somehow aware. From deep in that ruined chest came a sound that was almost a word.

"Save... me."