CHAPTER ONE: THE INVISIBLE GIRL

(Kira POV)

The thing about being invisible is that eventually, you start to believe it's real.

I'd perfected the art over seventeen years of bouncing between foster homes, social workers, and schools that never bothered learning my name. Head down, mouth shut, wolf locked so deep inside me that sometimes I could almost pretend she didn't exist. Almost.

The parking lot of Callahan North High was mostly empty at six-thirty AM, which was exactly why I chose this time to arrive. Fewer people meant fewer chances for someone to notice the girl who didn't quite smell human but wasn't pack either. I'd lasted three months at this school, a personal record, and I intended to make it to graduation in May.

Then I could disappear for real.

My beat-up Honda Civic coughed as I killed the engine. The heater had died two weeks ago, and October in Callahan City meant mornings that bit with teeth. I grabbed my backpack from the passenger seat, checking that my sketch pad was still wedged in the side pocket where I'd left it. Drawing was the one thing that made the endless shuffle of temporary homes bearable. That, and knowing that in seven months I'd age out of the system completely.

Freedom tasted like cheap coffee and looked like that Honda, paid for with three years of working weekend shifts at a twenty-four-hour diner where nobody asked questions.

I was halfway across the parking lot when I smelled it.

Blood. Fresh blood. And underneath that, something that made my wolf surge against the iron walls I'd built around her, something that sang of pack and power and danger.

My body froze. Every instinct I'd spent years suppressing roared to life, screaming at me to run, but my feet had grown roots. Because I knew that smell. Not personally, but the way you know the scent of a predator even if you've never seen one: written in genetic memory, passed down through generations.

Werewolf. And not just any wolf, one of the Silvercrest Pack.

No. No, no, no. I'd been so careful. This territory was technically neutral ground, one of the few zones where the three major packs had agreed to human-only spaces. Schools, hospitals, certain government buildings, places where pack politics took a backseat to maintaining the secret that werewolves existed at all.

Or that was the theory. Reality, I'd learned, was messier.

The blood smell was coming from behind the gym building, in the narrow alley where the dumpsters lived and where people went to skip class or make out. I should have walked away. Should have gotten back in my car and driven until I hit a city where no pack had claimed territory. Should have done literally anything except what I did.

I followed the smell.

My wolf pushed harder against my control, excited by the scent in a way that terrified me. She'd been so quiet for so long, content to sleep as long as I fed her enough runs through the abandoned parks at night, let her out just enough that she didn't claw me apart from the inside. But this was different. This was awakening something I didn't understand.

The body was sprawled behind the dumpster, half-hidden in morning shadow.

Male, maybe sixteen or seventeen. Letter jacket with Callahan North's colors, though I'd never seen him before. Dark hair, athletic build, and glassy eyes staring at nothing. His throat had been torn open, but that wasn't what killed him, I could tell by the way the blood had pooled, slow and thick. He'd been drained first, bled out carefully, methodically. The throat-tearing had come after, made to look like an animal attack.

But it wasn't. The cuts were too precise, too controlled. This was murder made to look like something else.

I should have run then. Instead, I knelt beside the body, some instinct I didn't recognize pulling me forward. My fingers hovered over the wound, not quite touching, and my wolf surged forward with such force that I gasped. For a moment I felt something flow through me. Like electricity, like ice water, like the first breath after being held underwater.

The boy's eyes flashed gold. Just for a second. Then nothing.

"What the hell did you just do?"

I spun, losing my balance and landing hard on my ass next to the corpse. Three people stood at the mouth of the alley, and I knew immediately what they were. The power rolled off them in waves, making my skin prickle and my wolf whine in something between submission and defiance.

Silvercrest enforcers. I'd seen them around the city, always in their perfect clothes, moving through crowds like they owned everything they touched. Because in a lot of ways, they did.

The one who'd spoken was a woman in her thirties, red hair pulled back in a severe ponytail, wearing a business suit that probably cost more than my car. Her eyes were fixed on me with an intensity that made me want to crawl out of my skin.

"I found him," I managed, trying to keep my voice steady. "I was just… I was checking if he was alive."

"You're lying." This from the man on her left, younger, built like a tank. "I can smell it on you."

Of course he could. Werewolves could detect lies through the chemical changes in human, or wolf—bodies. It was one of the reasons I'd learned to believe my own lies so thoroughly that they almost became true.

"I'm not…"

"You're rogue." The woman cut me off, taking a step forward. The two men flanked her, boxing me in against the dumpster and the body. "No pack scent, no collar, no registration. That alone is a death sentence. But this?" She gestured at the corpse. "This is Adrian Sorenson. Beta's nephew. And we just found you crouched over his body with your hands glowing."

"They weren't glowing," I said automatically, then cursed myself. Wrong thing to focus on.

"What are you?" The woman's voice had gone quiet, which was somehow worse than if she'd shouted. "You're not human. Not entirely. But you're not pack. So what are you?"

I didn't answer. Couldn't answer, because I didn't know. I'd spent my whole life as a question mark, a girl with gaps where her history should be. The social workers had found me when I was six years old, wandering the Ruins district covered in blood that DNA tests proved wasn't mine. No missing persons report matched my description. No parents ever came forward. I'd simply appeared, like I'd crawled out of the city's shadows fully formed.

The burns on my arms had already been old scars by then.

"Bring her in," the woman said finally. "Alpha will want to question her personally."

The tank-man moved faster than I could track, grabbing my arm in a grip that would definitely leave bruises. My wolf snarled, surging upward, and for a terrifying moment I felt her pushing at the surface, wanting to fight, to run, to…

I shoved her back down with every ounce of control I had. Shifting here, now, in front of Silvercrest enforcers, would be signing my death warrant in triplicate. Rogues who couldn't control their wolves were put down immediately.

"Wait," I gasped. "I didn't kill him. I swear. I just found him."

"Then you won't mind answering some questions." The woman's smile didn't reach her eyes. "Cooperate, and maybe the Alpha will be merciful."

I'd lived in Callahan City long enough to know that was a lie. Werewolf Alphas didn't do mercy, especially not for rogues found at murder scenes. But I also knew that fighting three trained enforcers would end with me dead in that alley, my body dumped next to Adrian Sorenson's.

At least if they took me to their compound, I might have a chance to escape.

It was a thin hope, but it was all I had.

They zip-tied my wrists and loaded me into a black SUV with tinted windows. I watched Callahan North High disappear in the side mirror, along with any chance of finishing my senior year, aging out of the system, and disappearing into the kind of normal life I'd always dreamed about.

The invisible girl had finally been seen.

And it was going to get me killed.