MARKED BY THE MAD LYCAN KING: You're Mine, Cinderella.

ZELDA The thing about being an omega is that you learn very early and very painfully, that your feelings are background noise. I figured that out when I was fourteen. I’d been crying in the girls’ bathroom after someone emptied my lunch tray into my bag, and the Alpha girl who walked in stared at me for a long moment before saying, flatly, “You’re so dramatic.” Then she reapplied her lip gloss and left. Five years later, I’ve perfected the art of swallowing it. The tears. The humiliation. The slow, grinding ache of being the person everyone looks through. I’ve gotten so good at it that I can smile through almost anything — a smile that doesn’t reach my eyes, but nobody is looking at my eyes anyway. It was a Tuesday in October when everything started to unravel. I was walking across the academy courtyard, head down, earbuds in, existing inside the particular silence I’d built around myself. The autumn air was sharp, carrying the smell of damp leaves and the distant pine of the forest that borders Ashford Pack territory. I like the cold. It makes the world feel a little less suffocating. I turned the corner toward the east corridor and stopped. James was there. That wasn’t unusual — James Calloway was everywhere, because people like James always are. What was unusual was that his hands were buried in someone else’s hair. And that someone was Mara Sloane, who had spent the last two years making my life a quiet disaster. My mind refused to process it for a full second. Then it did. James’s eyes opened. He saw me and something crossed his face like guilt, maybe, or just irritation at being caught. Mara turned, saw me, and smiled. It was the worst kind of smile. It was slow and imtentional. One that seemed like a mockery. “Oh,” she said, like I was an afterthought. “Zelda.” I didn’t scream. I didn’t cry. I did the thing I always do — I compressed everything into a small, tight ball somewhere beneath my ribs, turned around, and walked away. I walked until I found an empty stairwell and then I sat down on the cold concrete steps and shook. James and I had been together for eight months. I had trusted him with things I’d never trusted anyone with — my fear of the dark, the way I sometimes felt like a ghost in my own pack, the quiet loneliness that followed me everywhere like a shadow I couldn’t outrun. He’d listened. He’d held my hand. He’d told me I was different in a way that mattered. I’d believed him. And that, I realized sitting on those steps, was the most humiliating part. Not the betrayal itself. The belief. My phone buzzed. It was my sister Kinny. "How’s my favorite little omega doing? Miss you! Three heart emojis." Kinny was at Westbrook University, three hours away, building the life she’d always wanted outside the pack. She was effortlessly beautiful, warm, magnetic — the person who had always made me feel less invisible. And then she’d left, and the safety net had gone with her. "Fine, I typed back. Miss you too." I sat there until the bell rang, then stood, straightened my spine, and went to class. That night, I told no one. — — — The thing people don’t understand about Ashford Pack is that the cruelty isn’t loud. It’s a system. Omegas aren’t hated. We’re managed. Kept in our lane. Reminded, consistently and creatively, that softness is weakness, empathy is a liability, and our rank is our ceiling. The message comes in a thousand small ways — a laugh at the wrong moment, a chair pulled away, a lunch tray in a bag, and it works because nobody ever has to say it directly. My parents sit on the pack council. It should have protected me. Instead it made me a more interesting target, because bringing down a council member’s daughter quietly was a kind of sport. My father David was always occupied with territorial politics. My mother Renée was sharp and capable and perpetually on her way somewhere. They loved me the way people love things they don’t think are in danger. “You seem tired,” Mom said at dinner one evening, giving me her sixty-second look. “Just school,” I said. She nodded and went back to her tablet. Dad hadn’t looked up. I ate my food and thought about James and Mara and didn’t say a word. I was very good at not saying a word. What I was less good at, what I could never quite kill, no matter how many times it got me hurt, was hope. It was my most persistent flaw. I hoped the way certain flowers keep turning toward light even when there’s barely any left. Against all evidence. Against all sense. So when Mara appeared at my locker three weeks after the stairwell, with Cara and Simone flanking her and an expression arranged carefully into remorse, I felt my chest tighten. And when she said, “Can we talk?” in a voice stripped of its usual bite, when she looked almost genuinely like someone who regretted something — my traitorous heart cracked open just enough to let her in. She said they missed me. Said they wanted things to be different. Cara nodded. Simone looked at the floor. They’d rehearsed it, I could see the seams, but the part of me that had been eating lunch alone for months chose not to look too closely at the stitching. “We thought we’d take a walk Saturday,” Mara said. “Just the four of us. There’s that old estate at the edge of the forest. We’d just look at it from outside the gate. Not go in.” She laughed. “We’re not that stupid.” The Blackthorn Estate. Everyone in Ashford knew the name and the stories attached to it. The Mad Lycan King. A man who had retreated from the world years ago after his mate rejected him, who had lost his mind in the isolation, who tore apart anyone foolish enough to cross his gate. The stories got darker every time someone retold them. Nobody who went in ever came back. “Just to look?” I said. “Just to look,” Mara confirmed, smiling warmly. My instincts said no. My hope said yes. I listened to the wrong one. “Okay,” I said. “Saturday.” — — — Saturday arrived gray and cold, the kind of October morning that feels like a warning. We met at the edge of the residential streets where the suburb gives way to forest. Mara linked her arm through mine and laughed about something I’ve already forgotten. Cara told a story about her brother. Simone passed around hot chocolate. For twenty minutes walking through those trees, it felt genuine. It felt like the thing I’d been starving for. Then the trees thinned and the gate appeared, and every cell in my body went quiet at once. It was taller than I’d imagined. Black iron, ornate, vines threaded through the bars like the forest was slowly reclaiming it. Beyond it, a long stone drive disappeared into thick fog. At the end, barely visible, the estate rose against the grey sky, massive and silent, watching us the way old things watch — without moving, and without hurrying. “Someone should stand in front of it,” Mara said, lifting her phone. “Let me take a picture. Zelda, you go.” I stepped forward. The cold radiating off the bars reached me before I touched them. The air here smelled different — older, wilder, like the forest had a memory and it wasn’t a kind one. I turned to smile for the photo. Both of Mara’s palms hit my back with deliberate, practiced force. The gate swung open under my weight. I stumbled forward, arms wheeling, and hit the stone drive on my hands and knees. Pain shot up my wrists. Gravel bit into my palms. I heard the gate swing shut behind me with a sound like a sentence being finished. “Have fun, omega,” Mara said. I spun around and grabbed the bars. She stood on the other side wearing the smile of winners. Cara had already retreated several steps. Simone’s face held one honest second of horror before she turned and ran with the others. I pulled at the gate until my hands bled. The latch held. I was inside. Alone. And the fog behind me was already thickening, swallowing the drive, the trees, the road, and the world I’d come from. I turned to face the estate. The forest made no sound. Not a bird. Not a single branch moving in the wind. I opened my mouth and screamed. Nothing answered.