Chapter One: Wrong Skin
The first thing I felt was the wrongness of my own hands.
I lifted them in front of my face, and they were not the hands that had clawed at Damien's chest as he drove the silver blade through my ribs. These fingers were stubby, the nails bitten down to the quick, the knuckles scarred from something — falls, maybe, or fights nobody had bothered to teach me how to win.
I had died a queen.
I remembered it the way you remember falling — not the impact, but the half-second before, when you already know. Damien's eyes had not been cruel when he killed me. That was the part that still burned. He'd looked almost sorry, the way you're sorry for a dog you have to put down. I'm sorry, Seraphine. The Conclave demanded it. A queen who won't kneel is a queen who has to die.
I had been Seraphine Vaughn. First and last of my bloodline, the only werewolf queen in four hundred years to rule without a king beside her. I had burned three rival packs to ash for daring to test my borders. I had let my mate put a knife in me because some treacherous, sentimental part of me hadn't believed he'd actually do it.
That part of me was dead now. Good. I didn't need it anymore.
I sat up, and the room tilted — small, water-stained ceiling, a single cracked window, the smell of mildew and someone else's cheap perfume two rooms over. Pack territory. I could scent it in my bones before I even understood what bones I meant. Wolves, dozens of them, layered over years in the wood of these walls. And underneath all of it, faint and constant like a current under ice: contempt.
There was a mirror nailed to the closet door, warped at the edges. I made myself walk to it.
The girl looking back at me was no one. Mousy hair chopped unevenly at the jaw, like it had been cut in anger rather than care. Sallow skin. A nose slightly too big for the rest of the face, eyes a flat, unremarkable brown. Seventeen, maybe eighteen. The kind of face a room forgets the moment it leaves.
I understood, distantly, the way you understand a fact before you understand its weight: I was not Seraphine Vaughn anymore. I was someone's daughter. Some Alpha's daughter, judging by the rank-stink soaked into this den. And from the way my own reflection made my stomach curdle with old, familiar shame — shame that wasn't mine, that belonged to her, the girl whose body I'd woken up in — I understood something else.
I was the daughter nobody wanted.
Ugly. The word surfaced in borrowed memory, spoken in a man's voice, flat with disappointment. Not cruel. Worse than cruel. Indifferent.
I almost laughed.
They had no idea what they'd just handed a second life to.
I turned from the mirror, and for the first time since I'd opened these stranger's eyes, I felt something settle into place behind my sternum — old, patient, and very much alive. Power doesn't care what face it wears. It only cares whether the woman inside knows how to use it.
I flexed the stubby, scarred fingers once.
"Let's see," I said, in a voice that was not quite mine and not quite hers, "what this pack thinks of its ugly little nobody now."
