Chapter one

||Mira||

The train was late.

I know how that sounds, like the start of a bad night, like something to complain about. But standing on that platform at eleven p.m. with a coffee gone cold in my hand and nobody in the world who knew exactly where I was, the lateness felt like a gift.

Every extra minute was another minute of being nobody. No last name. No pack. No brother steering me through rooms like I couldn’t cross one alone.

Around here, I was just Mira. Just another girl in the city.

Dunmore Central had its own rhythm after dark. The last of the commuters were dragging themselves toward the exits, heads down, moving with the particular defeated shuffle of people who had given everything to the day and gotten very little back. Somewhere below the platform, a busker was pulling something slow and aching out of a violin, the sound rising up through the gaps in the floor in fragments. The fluorescent lights above Gate 7 kept flickering — on, hold, off, hold, on — in a pattern that suggested the building itself was running on fumes.

Six months I'd been at Moonstone University. It was long enough that the city had started to feel like mine, and I'd stopped flinching every time a stranger came up behind me. I'd finally started sleeping through the night again without lying awake cataloguing every sound the building made.

Suddenly, goosebumps spread across my skin as the weight of being watched settled on the back of my neck.

My hand tightened around the coffee cup. Anya stirred inside me, and the way she stirred told me everything I needed to know about how serious this was.

It was not the fast reactive surge she makes when something surprises us, nor the defensive snap of being startled.

This was eerie. It was the kind of tension that comes before prey bolts.

Don't turn around. Not yet.

She didn't use words. She never does. But I felt the meaning of it settle into my bones .

For a full ten seconds I stood, held my breath and watched the platform reflected in the dark glass of the train board across the tracks.

Then I turned around.

Nothing was out of place. It was just a woman with an oversized suitcase that kept trying to tip sideways, two students sharing earbuds, talking over each other and an old man in a wool coat reading a folded newspaper with the focus of someone who had nowhere urgent to be.

It was the usual Thursday night. Ordinary people doing ordinary things.

I let out a relieved breath.

Then the lights above Gate 7 went off.

For a brief moment in the dark , I saw him.

He was at the far end of the platform, well past the last of the crowd, standing in the strip of shadow beyond the last working light like he'd chosen the spot deliberately.

He was tall enough to stand out even that far away and he was dead still.

He looked directly at me, his eyes glowing yellow and he tilted his head slowly, like he was daring me to run.

The lights came back.

Then he was gone.

My coffee hit the platform. I hadn't felt my hand open.

Anya pressed against the inside of my ribs alert and pushed forward to stare through my eyes.

And right now, she was afraid.

My Lycan was never afraid.

That was what undid me. Not the man in the dark or his vanishing trick. The fact that the part of me built for this, the part that was supposed to be harder than everything else, was scared.

This wasn’t the first time.

Six months ago, I'd been running the path behind the east campus when I caught a shape at the edge of my vision, off the trail, between the trees, gone the second I turned to look at it directly. I'd written it off as a dog, or a shadow.

I'd been convinced about it.

Four months ago, the smell of pine hit me in the stairwell of the humanities building. It was not the thin, dusty evergreen smell of the ornamental trees they'd planted around the entrance. The scent was something darker, richer, alive.

I'd stood in that stairwell for a full minute trying to find a source. But there wasn't one.

Two weeks ago, on the walk back from the library, I heard footsteps behind me that kept my exact pace. When I sped up, they sped up, and when I slowed, they slowed, and when I finally spun around I found nothing but an empty street and my own heartbeat being very loud about the whole thing.

Every time, I'd given myself a reasonable explanation and held onto it until it felt true. A Lycan's instincts simply ran too hot in a city that wasn't built for them.

That was all. I'd said it enough times to make it a fact.

But that wasn't really why I hadn't told anyone.

The real reason was simpler and less flattering: if I told Zander, he'd be here within the hour. I knew this the way I knew my own name, and without doubt.

He would get in the car the moment the call ended and he would drive through the night and by morning this life I had built, this hard-won life where I was just a person and not the Alpha's little sister, where nobody tracked my location or assigned me an escort or made decisions about what I was allowed to do with my own evenings, all of it would be over.

Folded up and packed away.

The choice would stop being mine. Everyone would call it protection. Nobody would ask what I wanted.

People don't understand what it cost me to get here.

Not money, though that was part of it.

Getting here had cost months of arguments, slammed doors, and the kind of silence from Zane that hurt worse than yelling ever could.

I still remember Zander's face the day he finally said yes. That expression that said he doesn’t agree but he will go with the flow because he loved me enough to.

The love from my brothers sometimes feels thrilling and some days suffocating.

Here I'm not Mirabel Sloan. The golden princess of the Lycan pack, the girl who needs an escort to the grocery store because her brothers said so.

I'm Mira, and I decide what I do with my own evenings, and what scares me.

My phone buzzed.

I didn't have to look to know Zander was calling.

He always knows when something is wrong, not through the pack bond, which had softened with distance over time.

But distance has never stopped Zander from noticing when something was wrong with me.

I held my thumb over the screen. I didn’t have it in me to lie to him so I looked away.

Down on the tracks somewhere, the violin had stopped.

The silence it left was the loudest thing on the platform.

I looked back toward the far end of the platform. It was empty. The usual crowd, the usual light, the usual ordinary Thursday night going about its business.

There was nothing where he had been. No figure, no glowing eyes in the dark, nothing that didn't belong.

Then the pine smell hit me again.

Closer this time.

He hadn’t left.

He’d moved closer.

Somewhere on the platform, he stood just out of sight but close enough that his scent filled my lungs.

Anya growled inside me. She became alert and started pacing restlessly but she didn’t push me to shift.

Because underneath the warning, underneath the fear, there was something else, a light deep inside me, reaching towards him against my will.

My phone buzzed again. I couldn’t handle Zander right now.

I hit decline.

"One more night," I said out loud, to the platform and the dark and whoever was standing in it close enough to hear me.

The train came in. I quickly got on and took the window seat and watched the station pull away into the black outside the glass.

The pine smell stayed with me for three stops.

I kept my eyes away from the window. I was too afraid of what I'd see if I looked harder. Perhaps his reflection, or worse.

When the pine scent finally faded, somewhere between the fourth and fifth stop, I told myself I could relax.

Anya didn't rest. She didn’t settle. She stayed exactly as she was, alert and afraid.

Like she already knew that whatever this was, it hadn't ended on the platform and this was only the beginning.