ONE
My name is Lena Vance.
I'm twenty-six years old. I have no pack, no family, and until three years ago, I had no wolf either. They call that wolf-less in our world, like it's a disease. Like I chose to be born broken.
I didn't choose anything.
Not the parents who abandoned me. Not the foster packs who passed me around like a bad penny. Not the mating bond that snapped into place when Elias Blackwood smiled at me across a crowded room and said, "There you are."
I thought he meant it.
That's the stupid part. I really thought he meant it.
Tonight, I'm standing in my own kitchen, and I don't recognise my life.
The house is mine. I paid the down payment. I painted the walls. I planted the rosemary by the back door because Elias said he liked the smell, and I wanted him to like something about me.
Now the rosemary is dead. I stopped watering it three months ago. No one noticed.
The woman upstairs is not my sister. Not my friend. Not my blood. Her name is Mira, and she was mated to Elias's younger brother, Cole, until Cole got his throat torn out by rogues two years ago. Mira was pregnant then. She's still grieving now. I know all of this. I've been nothing but kind about all of this.
But she sleeps in my guest room. She uses my towels. She heats my mother's soup recipe in my grandmother's pot, and she doesn't even know whose grandmother that was.
And Elias? My mate? The man who bit my neck and swore forever?
He just spent forty-five minutes playing fetch in the backyard with Mira's son.
Not Mira's son, actually. He corrected me on that last week.
"He's family now, Lena. He's ours."
Ours.
Except I wasn't invited to be part of that ours. I was just told.
That's how it's been for fourteen months. Ever since Mira showed up on our doorstep with a baby in her arms and tears on her face. Elias looked at her, then looked at me, and said, "She needs us."
Not you. Us.
But the us he meant was him and her. I was just the furniture.
I'm slicing apples.
I don't know why. No one eats them. The baby is on puree. Mira is on a diet. Elias hasn't sat at the kitchen table for a meal in weeks. He eats standing up, or in front of the TV, or wherever Mira happens to be sitting.
But I slice them anyway, neat little crescents. The knife is sharp. My grandmother's knife. The only thing I have left from a woman I barely remember.
The knife slips.
It's my own fault. I'm not paying attention. My thumb is in the wrong place, and the blade bites deep — not deep enough for stitches, but deep enough to hurt. Deep enough to bleed.
Blood wells up. Red and hot and mine.
I stare at it.
I don't suck it clean. I don't grab a towel. I watch it drip onto the cutting board, onto the apple slices, onto the counter. Drop by drop by drop.
How long since someone asked if I was okay?
How long since someone touched me just to touch me?
How long since I felt like a person instead of a placeholder?
The blood keeps dripping.
I let it.
The back door opens.
I don't turn around. I assume it's Elias who forgets his keys all the time, even though I've asked him a hundred times to use the front door like a normal person.
"You're bleeding," a voice says.
Not Elias.
This voice is lower. Rougher. It scrapes along my spine like gravel and silk.
I turn.
The man in my doorway is not my mate. He's not anyone I've ever seen in this kitchen before. He's tall — taller than Elias by a head. Broad shoulders that block the light. Dark hair, dark eyes, a jaw that looks like it was carved by someone who hated soft things.
He's wearing a leather jacket that's seen better days. Boots caked with mud. His hands are bare, and I can see the scars on his knuckles, old ones, layered over each other like rings on a tree.
I should be scared.
I'm not.
"Who are you?" I ask.
He steps closer. Doesn't ask permission. Just walks into my kitchen like he's been here a thousand times.
"Kael," he says.
The name hits me like a punch.
Kael. The rogue Alpha. The king without a throne. The wolf, they say, went mad after his pack was slaughtered, or maybe he was mad before, and the slaughter just permitted him.
They say a lot of things about Kael.
None of them is nice.
None of them mentions him standing in someone's kitchen, staring at their bleeding thumb like it's the only thing in the world that matters.
"You're in my house," I say.
"I know."
"My mate is upstairs."
"I know that too."
He's close now. Close enough that I can smell him smoke and pine and something darker. Old leather. Old blood. Old hunger.
He reaches for my hand.
I let him.
His fingers are rough. Callused. They wrap around my wrist as they belong there, and I feel something in my chest crack open. Something I'd locked away. Something I'd forgotten I had.
He lifts my hand. Examines my bleeding thumb. His thumb, huge and warm, presses gently against my palm.
"You're not afraid of me," he says.
It's not a question.
"No," I say.
"Why?"
I think about it. About Elias upstairs, laughing with another woman. About fourteen months of being invisible. About six months since he last touched me. About three years since I stopped believing I mattered.
"Because I've already been invisible," I say. "There's nothing scarier than that."
Kael's eyes meet mine.
They're dark. So dark I can't see where his pupils end and his irises begin. But there's something in them I haven't seen in a long time.
Hunger.
Not for my body. Not for my blood.
For me.
He lifts my thumb to his mouth. His lips part. His tongue warms, wet, deliberate swipes across the cut.
It doesn't hurt.
Nothing has hurt less in months.
"Your mate is a fool," Kael says.
And behind us, upstairs, Elias finally notices something is wrong.
He starts to howl.
But it's too late.
I've already tasted a king.
