My Rejected Sister Stole My Crown

Chapter Two

The courtyard exploded into chaos.

"Get back!" A guard's voice cracked through the screaming as Wren's new claws raked across stone, gouging deep lines into the ground beneath her. "Everybody back, NOW!"

Wren couldn't hear him. Couldn't hear anything except her own blood roaring in ears that weren't shaped like ears anymore. Her body wasn't hers. Fur. Claws. A snarl ripping out of a throat too wide for human words.

Somewhere above her, Alpha Thoren was shouting orders. Somewhere close, Maren was screaming her name, over and over, like saying it enough times could pull Wren back into her own skin.

It didn't.

The last thing Wren felt before the darkness took her fully under was her own heartbeat, slamming so hard it hurt, and one single, useless thought.

I don't know what I am anymore.

THREE HOURS EARLIER

"You call this clean?"

Cyrene's voice sliced through the kitchen before Wren even saw her face. Wren straightened up too fast, banging her elbow on the edge of the oven door, and swallowed a hiss of pain.

"I scrubbed it twice, Princess," Wren said, careful to keep her eyes down. Eye contact with Cyrene never ended well.

"Twice isn't enough, is it, since I can still see this." Cyrene held up a silver goblet, turning it slowly, hunting for a flaw that probably didn't exist. "There's a smudge right here."

There wasn't. Wren knew there wasn't. She'd polished that goblet until her fingers ached, until the metal gleamed so bright it hurt to look at it directly. But arguing with Cyrene was like arguing with fire, it only made things burn hotter, and Wren was the one who always got burned.

"I'll fix it," Wren said instead.

"You'll fix it now," Cyrene said, and dropped the goblet into the sink of scalding water without warning.

Wren instinctively reached in and grabbed it before it could hit the floor and make enough noise to earn a scolding from the head cook. The boiling water from the morning stew burned her fingers as she pulled it out.

She didn't scream. She'd learned a long time ago that screaming only made Cyrene smile.

"Careful," Cyrene said, sweet as poisoned honey, already turning to leave. "Wouldn't want you useless before tonight."

Wren pulled her hand out, skin blazing red across three fingers, and pressed it against her apron to hide the shake. Behind her, one of the younger kitchen girls, a wide-eyed twelve-year-old named Petra, hurried over with a rag.

"That looked like it hurt," Petra whispered.

"It's fine." Wren wrapped her fingers quick, tight, the way Maren had taught her years ago. Wrap it fast, work through it, nobody in this kitchen gets to stop for pain.

"Get back to the trays before Cook sees you standing around."

Petra scurried off. Wren flexed her burned fingers once, testing how badly they'd slow her down, and went back to scrubbing.

This was her life. Had been her life for as long as she could remember. Wake before the sun, work until long after the moon rose, and somewhere in between, absorb whatever cruelty Cyrene felt like handing out that day. Burnt fingers were nothing. She'd had worse.

What really hurt—the kind of pain that didn't fade by morning was something much quieter.

She was eighteen.

She should have felt her wolf two years ago.

Every Draukmoor born pup felt it by sixteen. Some small stirring under the skin, a pull toward the moon that meant something ancient was waking up inside them. Petra, only twelve, already talked about it sometimes with the other kitchen kids, giddy and nervous, wondering what her wolf would look like, what color, what size.

Wren used to wonder too.

She'd stopped.

There had been a night, four years ago, when she'd stood alone behind the kitchens under a half moon and waited. Really waited, arms out, eyes shut, whispering “please, please, please” like it was a prayer instead of a wish. Nothing had answered her. Not that night. Not the night after. Not any night since.

“You don't have one,” Maren had told her once, brushing hair back from her face, voice gentle in that careful way adults used when they were trying to soften something sharp. Some of us just don't, sweetheart. It doesn't make you less.

Wren had believed her, mostly, because there wasn't another explanation that made sense. A servant girl with no pack rank, no parents anyone spoke of beyond a nurse who'd taken her in as a baby of course she had no wolf. Wolves like that belonged to royal blood, not girls who scrubbed floors.

She scrubbed harder now, like she could scrub the ache out along with the stains.

"Wren."

She turned. Maren stood in the kitchen doorway, apron dusted with flour, face tighter than usual. Something about the way she said Wren's name made the hair on the back of Wren's neck rise.

"What?"

"The cook needs someone on the wine trays tonight." Maren's eyes flicked away, toward the ovens, toward the door, anywhere but Wren's face. "For the Rite."

Wren's stomach dropped.

"I'm not allowed anywhere near the Rite," she said slowly. "You know that. Servants don't attend"

"You're not attending." Maren's voice was tight. "You're serving. There's a difference, and Cook needs bodies who won't drop a tray in front of the entire pack."

"Cyrene will be there."

"Cyrene is always there, Wren, she's the.." Maren stopped herself, jaw working, like she'd bitten back the rest of that sentence on purpose. "She's the one being called tonight. You'll be at the edges. Pouring wine. In and out, no one will even look at you."

No one ever looks at me, Wren thought, and didn't say it out loud, because saying it out loud always made Maren's face crumple in a way Wren hated.

"Fine," she said instead. "I'll go."

Maren's shoulders sagged with something that looked almost like relief, though relief over what, Wren couldn't guess. "Wear the gray dress. Not the one with the torn hem."

"I only have the one with the torn hem."

"Then borrow Petra's." Maren was already turning to leave, voice clipped, like the conversation had cost her something. At the doorway, she paused. Didn't turn around.

"Wren."

"Yeah?"

"Stay close to the kitchen doors tonight. Don't wander toward the dais. Promise me."

It was such an odd thing to say, said in such an odd voice, that Wren almost laughed. "Where else would I even go?"

Maren didn't answer that. She just nodded once, sharp, and disappeared down the hall toward the pantry, leaving Wren standing alone in the kitchen with burnt fingers, an aching chest, and a strange, cold feeling crawling up her spine that she couldn't explain.

She told herself it was nothing. Nerves, maybe, about serving so close to the royal family for the first time.

She told herself a lot of things that night that turned out to be wrong.

By the time the sun dropped low and the torches were lit along the courtyard walls, Wren stood at the edge of the crowd in Petra's borrowed dress, a tray of wine glasses balanced on one arm, watching Princess Cyrene climb the steps of the dais in a gown the color of fresh blood.

Wren's burned fingers throbbed under the tray's weight. Her feet ached from a full day of work with no rest before this. And somewhere beneath all of that, quiet and stubborn, was the ache she never let herself think about too long, the one that whispered “you'll never stand where she's standing, you'll never feel what she's about to feel, you don't even have a wolf to call.”

She had stopped hoping for a wolf a long time ago.

She had never once imagined that hers had simply been waiting silent, coiled, and far more dangerous than anyone in Draukmoor could have guessed for exactly this moment to finally answer.

The drums began.

Cyrene raised her arms to the moon.

And three hours later than this moment, when Wren would collapse in the shadows near these same kitchen doors and become something the whole courtyard had no name for, Maren would be the only person in Draukmoor unsurprised by what came out of her.