CHAPTER ONE: THE OUTCAST
I had learned how to disappear long before I understood why I needed to.
It was not magic. It was posture. Silence. The careful art of making myself smaller than the world wanted me to be. Shoulders curved inward. Eyes fixed on the ground. Breath shallow enough not to draw attention. In the Shadowpine Pack, invisibility was survival.
“Move, wolfless.”
The shove came fast and hard. My back struck the cafeteria wall and pain shot up my spine. My books slipped from my arms and scattered across the floor. Laughter followed instantly, sharp and practiced.
Cassidy stood over me with Margot Vivienne and Elena clustered behind her. The alpha’s loyal admirers. They always moved as a unit, like a pack within the pack.
“You’re blocking our view,” Cassidy said.
I did not look up. I already knew who they were watching.
Kieran Blackwood stood across the room, tall and unyielding, speaking quietly with his beta and third about patrol schedules. Alpha heir. Twenty four. Storm gray eyes. A presence so steady it pulled every gaze toward him. He did not look in my direction. He never had.
I knelt and gathered my books without a word.
At nineteen, I should have shifted years ago. Wolves awakened at sixteen. Some even earlier. I was still human. Still fragile. Still wrong.
My parents had died defending the eastern border when I was twelve. The pack kept me because they had to. They fed me because the law demanded it. No one wanted the girl whose wolf never came.
“I heard Alpha Kieran is choosing his Luna soon,” Vivienne said loudly.
My chest tightened.
“She’ll be strong,” she continued. “Someone worthy of him.”
“Someone with an actual wolf,” Cassidy added.
I walked away. I always walked away.
What they did not know was that three nights earlier, on my nineteenth birthday, something had awakened inside me beneath the full moon. It had not been a wolf. It had been something vast and cold and ancient.
“Soon”, it whispered.
And for the first time in my life, I believed it.
