All Chapters of BLOOD OF THE FORGOTTEN : Chapter 1 - Chapter 3

Cold wakes Lyra before the bell does.It always does. Her room sits at the end of the servants' hall, the last door before the stone gives way to bare rock, and the wind finds every crack in the wall like it's looking for her on purpose. She pulls the thin blanket tighter and stares up at the ceiling, watching her own breath curl into the dark.Somewhere above her, the rest of Blackthorn Keep is still asleep. Warriors in their warm beds. Healers in rooms with real fireplaces. The Alpha, high up in the Moon Tower, wrapped in furs thick enough to swallow a person whole. Lyra used to imagine what that felt like, waking up warm. She doesn't anymore. There's no use aching for something she'll never have.She is an Omega. The lowest rank in the pack, lower than lowest, really, because at least the other low ranks get looked at once in a while. Lyra gets looked through. She has learned to move through the Keep like smoke, quiet and gray and easy to forget, because the alternative is worse. O

Lyra runs until her body simply won't anymore.The forest blurs past in streaks of black and silver, branches tearing at her fur, roots catching her paws, and still she doesn't stop, because stopping means thinking, and thinking means feeling everything that happened in that Hall all at once. Better to run.Better to let her legs burn and her lungs scream and her mind go blank and white with effort.She killed her. She killed my mother.The thought keeps surfacing anyway, no matter how fast she runs from it.By the time the trees thin out and the ground turns rocky and strange under her paws, she's shaking with exhaustion, her wolf form trembling at the edges like it might give out. She doesn't know how long she's been running. She doesn't know where she is.She only knows she can't take another step — and then, quite suddenly, she can't.Her legs fold under her. The forest floor rushes up, and everything goes dark.She wakes to firelight and the smell of woodsmoke, and for one terrif