Chapter 1

My administrative director, Diane, sent me the photos while I was reviewing test results for the next group of pups.

"Viola, look. Ollie finally ate today."

In the photo, Ollie and a few other children lay sprawled on the playroom floor, piecing together a little wolf from wooden blocks.

Color had finally returned to his face, and his right eye no longer turned gray when his wolf destabilized.

I zoomed in and stared at the photo for a long time.

Ollie's wolf was missing a leg, lopsided and wobbly, just like the one on my desk.

The one on my desk was Leo's. My son had made it for me when he was six.

The old residential district in northern Moonbridge had suffered chemical contamination. Pups born there had far weaker wolves than children elsewhere. If they became infected, their wolves would go dormant for good before they turned eighteen.

Leo had been one of the worst cases.

I consulted every doctor I could find, but in the end, I still lost him when he was seven.

Three years later, I took over the Moonbridge Medical Center and enrolled every contaminated pup from the old district in a free treatment program. I never wanted another mother to hold a child growing colder in her arms and hear a doctor say, "It's too late."

Four months into the program, all twenty-seven pups' wolf health scores were improving.

Ollie was recovering the fastest.

I had just filed the photo in the treatment records when a notification from X popped up on my phone.

The headline read: "Our Children Are Not the Moonbridge Alpha's Lab Rats."

I frowned, assuming it was another pack stirring up trouble. Then I looked more closely and realized the post was from Keira!

Ollie's own mother.

She had posted three photos from Ollie's treatment.

In the first, the boy was curled up on a hospital bed with an IV line in the back of his hand.

The second was a post-treatment fever log.

The third showed several fading needle marks on his arm.

But Ollie's treatment that day had been a success. His wolf health score had jumped from twenty-seven to sixty-three. She didn't mention that.

She didn't mention that the fever was a normal response as his wolf healed, and that it broke within two hours.

In her post, she had reinvented herself as a crusader for justice:

"A treatment that supposedly costs eight thousand dollars a month, and it's only free for our children? Why?"

"Because we're all Omegas! Our children have weaker wolves, their parents can't afford anything, and no powerful Alpha is going to hold anyone accountable for us. That makes our kids the perfect test subjects for new serums."

Beneath the post was a blurry shipping invoice.

Northridge Alpha... Stabilization Serum, twelve vials.

Keira had circled the line in red.

"Our children get their blood drawn again and again, while pack leaders' children get the finished product."

"This so-called free treatment is nothing but making poor kids take the risks for rich ones."

I recognized the invoice immediately.

It was a routine stabilizer order from Northridge Hospital, purchased from an entirely different pharmaceutical company. It had nothing to do with our treatment program. But the image had been cropped to remove the manufacturer's name, leaving only "Alpha" and "Stabilization Serum."

The comments section had exploded.

"I knew there was no such thing as free treatment."

"Poor kids can't even get sick without serving the upper ranks."

"She's an Alpha herself. Of course she'd be in on it with other packs."

"Find out where those children's blood was sold!"

Someone had even dug up my son Leo's death.

Keira wrote in a follow-up post:

"A woman who couldn't even save her own child, and now she's drawing blood from other people's children every day. Is she really saving lives, or is she using our kids to line her pockets?"

That sentence made my wolf bristle. My nails pushed through my fingertips and scraped a white line across my phone case.

She knew exactly how my son died!

The first time she brought Ollie in, his wolf was so weak it was barely detectable. Keira had knelt in my office, clutching my legs and sobbing, saying she would do anything if I could just keep Ollie alive until he was old enough to awaken.

I hadn't made her wait for approval, and I hadn't charged her a cent.

Now she was jabbing at my deepest wound to sell her lies.