Thornwood High

Chapter Four: The Pack Doesn't Vote

Word travels in a school built on old ground. By homecoming week, the pack elders — a tight, careful group led by a stern chemistry teacher named Mr. Alaric Voss, who Ren had genuinely thought was just strict about lab safety — called a meeting. Human girl, wolf secrets, too much noticed too fast. The old answer to that problem had a name pack members said carefully, like it might overhear itself: quiet her.

"We don't hurt people," Silas said, standing in front of Ren in a classroom that smelled like chalk dust and, underneath it, something that made the hair on her arms rise. "That's not what quieting means and you know it."

"It means erasing what she remembers," Priya said, arms crossed, voice steadier than Ren had ever heard it. "Which is its own kind of hurt."

Mr. Voss studied Ren for a long moment. "You could have told the whole town by now. Posted it online. Made us a headline."

"I could have," Ren agreed. "I didn't want to."

"Why not?"

She thought about it honestly, which surprised even her. "Because Priya needed someone to ask her a real question, and nobody else was going to. Because Silas walked me home three nights in a row and never once made it weird. Because you're not monsters, you're just — a family with a secret that got heavier than it should have had to be, all on its own." She looked around the room. "I don't want to blow that up. I want to help carry it, if you'll let me."

The silence that followed had teeth in it, but not the kind meant for her.

It was Priya who finally spoke. "The pack doesn't vote on this. But I do. She stays."