All Chapters of CHOSEN LAST: Chapter 1 - Chapter 5

Sages’s POVThe flowers came again this morning.White roses, dozens of them, tied with the same silver ribbon someone uses every single year. They sat on our porch before I even opened my eyes and I already knew what today was without checking a calendar. I didn’t need to. My body always knows before my mind catches up. There’s a heaviness that settles into the air a full day before the date arrives, like the whole pack territory holds its breath together.Five years. Five years since my sister died and the whole pack decided her death deserved its own holiday.I stepped over the flowers instead of picking them up. My mother would deal with them later, arrange them just right in the vase we keep for this exact day, the one that lives in the closet the other eleven months of the year, wrapped in old newspaper so it doesn’t collect dust.Redhollow Pack doesn’t do quiet grief. We do public grief, the kind with a ceremony and a bonfire and speeches from the Alpha about sacrifice and love

Sage’s POVI didn’t go home.Home meant my mother asking questions I didn’t have answers for and I didn’t have it in me to explain what had just happened in that clearing. So instead I walked, with no real direction in mind, until I found myself standing at the edge of the old training grounds where the pack used to run drills when I was a kid.Nobody came here anymore. Not since they built the new grounds closer to the pack house. This place had gone quiet, overgrown at the edges, forgotten in the way certain things get forgotten when better options come along. It felt right. It felt like somewhere I belonged.I sat down on the same fallen log I used to sit on as a teenager, back when Vanessa would drag me here to watch her train, back when I still believed the two of us were close instead of just related. My chest still ached from that pull, the one connecting me to Ethan whether I wanted it or not. I pressed a hand against my ribs like that could somehow make it stop.It didn’t.I

Sage’s POVI pressed myself closer to the closet door, my heart hammering so loud I was sure they would hear it through the wood.“Who?” Aunt Ruth’s voice had dropped even lower now, barely more than a whisper. “Ruth, if you know something, you have to tell me. This has gone on long enough.”“I only know pieces,” Mrs. Whitfield said, and for the first time she sounded less sure of herself, less like a woman spreading gossip and more like someone who had been carrying something heavy for far too long. “My sister said the name once and then she never said it again. Made me swear I would forget I ever heard it.”“Then why are you telling me now?”“Because I saw Sage at the gathering two nights ago.” A pause. “Because I watched the Alpha look at that girl like she was something to be ashamed of and I thought about how she’s spent five years paying for a mistake that was never hers to pay for. It isn’t right, Ruth. It was never right.”My throat had gone tight. I wanted to shove the door o