Chapter 1
1386 Words
CLARA
Cecelia would not stop screaming.
"Today is the day Clara! Get up get up get up!"
She burst through my bedroom door like she owned it, which honestly she might as well have because she had been doing that since we were seven years old and I had long given up trying to stop her. I buried my face in my pillow. "Five more minutes."
"No! Absolutely not!" She grabbed my blanket and yanked it clean off the bed. "Today you turn eighteen. Today the Moon Goddess shows you your mate. You are not sleeping through this."
I sat up slowly and glared at her. She was already dressed, hair done, eyes bright with excitement that honestly belonged to me because it was my birthday and my mate reveal and yet somehow Cecelia always managed to be more excited about my life than I was. "What if my mate is horrible," I said.
"He will not be horrible.""What if he picks his teeth at the dinner table."
"Clara."
"What if he does not like dogs. I like dogs. I cannot spend my life with someone who does not like"
"Get up!" She threw my blue dress at my face. "Wear this. It makes your violet eyes look beautiful and today you need to look beautiful."
I caught the dress and looked at it for a moment. Then I got up.
My name is Clara Voss and I was the invisible daughter. My father was Alpha Voss of the Silveridge Pack, powerful and respected and completely uninterested in me. My sister Vera was the one he cared about. Vera was golden haired and green eyed and charming in the way that made everyone in the room turn toward her like sunflowers turning toward light. I was the quiet one. The small one. The one people forgot was in the room.
My wolf Lyra was what they called a recessive wolf which was a polite way of saying she was weak. She had always been small and quiet inside me. But that morning, as Cecelia dragged me toward the pack birthday gathering, Lyra was anything but quiet.
She was restless. Pacing. Making small sounds I had never heard from her before.
"You are shaking," Cecelia said, squeezing my hand as we walked.
"I am nervous." "Do not be nervous. This is a good thing."
"What if the Moon Goddess forgot about me," I said quietly.
Cecelia stopped walking and turned to look at me properly. Her voice went soft. "She did not forget about you Clara. Nobody with eyes like yours gets forgotten."
I did not know what to say to that so I just nodded and we kept walking.
The great hall was packed. Music and laughter and the warm smell of food and firewood. Normal pack gathering things. I had been to a hundred of them.
But the moment I walked through the door something happened that had never happened before.
Warmth. Sudden and enormous and spreading through my whole chest like I had swallowed sunlight. Lyra made that sound again, that new sound, and this time it was louder and higher and so beautiful it made my eyes sting.
My head turned on its own.Across the crowded room Sean Holt had gone completely still.
He was looking directly at me.Sean Holt. Tall and strong and on his way to inheriting an Alpha title. Every girl in the pack had liked Sean at some point. I had told myself a long time ago to stop being one of them.
But this was different. This was not liking someone. This was the mate bond and it was real and it was between me and Sean and for about ten seconds I felt like the Moon Goddess had finally, finally seen me.
"Cece," I breathed. "It is Sean."
"WHAT." She grabbed my arm with both hands. "Sean Holt? Clara oh my goodness go over there right now go go go"
But then Sean's eyes moved.Just slightly. Just to the left.
Vera was standing right beside me. I had not even noticed her appear. She was on her phone, golden and glowing and completely unaware of what was happening, and Sean looked at her and something in his face changed so fast and so completely that I felt it like a door slamming shut somewhere inside me.
"Cece," I said. My voice came out very flat. "Something is wrong." "No no no he is just nervous that is all he is just"
Sean walked to the centre of the room. People moved aside for him.
The hall went quiet. "I, Sean Holt, reject the mate bond between myself and Clara Voss."
I had heard about mate rejections my whole life. Every wolf had. We all knew what they were and we all agreed they were the worst thing that could happen to a person.
I had not understood. Not really. Not until that moment when Lyra stopped singing and the warmth in my chest vanished and something tore through me from the inside out, something so big and so painful that my vision went white at the edges.
The whole hall was looking at me. I lifted my chin. I turned around. I walked out.
Cecelia found me behind the packhouse sitting in the cold grass with my back against the stone wall and my knees pulled up to my chest.
She sat down next to me and did not say anything for a while. Then she said, "He is the stupidest person alive."
"He chose Vera," I said.
"I know."
"She did not even notice him. She was on her phone."
"I know." Cecelia put her arm around me. "He is still the stupidest person alive."
I leaned my head on her shoulder and looked at the Silver Forest at the edge of our territory and breathed slowly until the white stopped creeping into my vision.
That night I lay in bed and stared at the ceiling and told myself tomorrow would be better.
I was almost asleep when I heard my father's voice through the bedroom wall. He was on the phone and his voice was low but our walls had always been thin.
"The debt cannot wait any longer. Blackwell wants what he is owed."
I went still.
"Vera is not an option. She has her own future to secure." A pause. "But Clara is free now. No mate. No real prospects. Blackwell can have her instead."
My heart stopped.
"Yes," my father said, calm as if he was discussing the weather. "She will do perfectly fine."
The call ended. I lay in the dark with my heart slamming so hard I could feel it in my ears.
Blackwell. Alpha Lucian Blackwell of the Ironveil Pack. Even children knew that name. The most feared Alpha in the entire region. People said he had killed his own mate. People said his warriors shook when he walked past them. People said a lot of things about Lucian Blackwell and none of them were good.
And my father had just given me to him.
Like I was nothing. Like I was something he needed to get off his hands.
The next morning my father sat us all down in the sitting room. Vera stood behind him with her eyes on the floor. My mother looked at the wall.
"Clara," my father said. "In three weeks you will marry Alpha Lucian Blackwell."
I looked at Vera.
She still would not look at me."Okay," I said. "When do I leave."
My father blinked. He had been expecting tears. Begging. A scene he could shut down. "Three weeks," he repeated, more carefully this time.
I nodded and stood up and walked out.
I went straight outside and around the corner of the packhouse and stopped and pressed my back against the cold wall and closed my eyes.
Three weeks.
Then from just inside the packhouse, close enough that I could hear it clearly through the open window above my head, came the sound of Vera's voice.
She was on the phone. She was talking to someone about the wedding.
And then she said something that turned my blood completely cold.
"Yes it worked. She is going." A laugh. "She has no idea what is waiting for her there. Nobody does.”
- Writer
