I wake before the stars finish folding into dawn, heart thudding like a caged thing. I have not seen him yet—never up close—but the palace has been whispering his name all week, and every rumor is a different weather. They say he is untouchable, that courtiers and warriors alike keep a wary distance. They say the new king holds his secrets like a blade. Tonight, the palace opens only for this: the first shift, the first howl. Tonight, the moon will claim him and the whole kingdom will hold its breath.
My father has sealed our doors and barred my feet from leaving the territory. He says it is for my safety, but safety for me tastes like control. He locked me in my room and told me—sourly, as if giving a verdict—that any disobedience will be met with punishment. His voice is a river of cold now; it has been since Mother died. Before then, his hands traced my hair like lullabies. Now those hands shape the whip.
I do not often argue with the ache in my chest, but tonight the ache turns into a small, hot ember called defiance. If the pack will not celebrate the new king because I am forbidden, then I will steal a piece of that night for myself. If my father believes he can keep the world behind his keys and fences, he has not learned how hunger can change a person.
When I slip my bag onto my shoulder, the room smells of old lavender and the iron tang of fear. I shove a few things inside: a scarf, a small knife I learned to hide in the hem of my skirt, the ribbon Mother braided into my hair when I was small. I press the ribbon to my mouth and remember her laugh, the way she would smooth my brow and call me "starlight" when the pack moons were cruel.
The window is glass and then night. I break it with a quiet curse and the glass bites my palms. The fall from the fourth floor steals my breath for a moment, but the cold ground steadies me. For a second I stand there, listening for the thunder of my father's boots. They do not come. I am a shadow in a town that does not notice its smallest rebellions.
I do not run as a human. I shift.
The change is a familiar ache and a strange delight. Bones remember themselves: long, lithe, quick. Fur blooms along my arms and shoulders like frost. My senses tear open and the night pours into me—the iron of dew on grass, the distant murmur of wolves gathered like a tide, the metallic tang of the palace from miles away. The moon is a watchful eye; its light makes the hairs along my spine stand up in respect.
Running as a wolf is less a motion and more a return. I move not with feet but with purpose, each stride eating distance, the world folding beneath me. I try not to think of consequence; thinking dims courage. If I want a life of my own, I cannot spend it asking permission. I must take it. I must step beyond the rope my father ties around me.
The tree he calls the Tree of Sin rises like a slow memory at the edge of the territory—a gnarled trunk bent by seasons, roots like the knotted fingers of grief. He tied Mother there when the pack turned away, and then he buried her beneath the roots as if the earth could keep what we could not. Every twig of that tree remembers the night my life scattered.
By the time I reach the palace, the world has become a scattering of sounds. Torches burn like small suns along the road; ribbons and banners peel in a wind that tastes of iron and incense. The palace sits at the center of this world—its bones of stone and gold, its halls humming with soldiers, betas, alphas, and lunas in their finery. This night belongs to the old king and the new, to the ritual that makes a mortal into a monarch.
I change back into myself in the shadow of an olive tree. Fingers fumbling, I yank on a skirt. A woman can shift at eighteen; a man at twenty-one. Royal blood folds time differently—twenty-five is when they cross the line. The younger warriors laugh at that old rule in private, but there is an old, formal reverence tonight. Royal shifts are not merely about muscle and bone; they are a kind of revelation.
I steal in close enough to see, eyes wide and ridiculous with something like wonder. There he is—King Zeus in human guise—tall, the kind of face people whisper about; severe cheekbones that catch the torchlight, jaw that has not learned to smile easily. He stands with the old king. He looks at the sky like he is measuring how much of himself the moon will take.
When the moonlight touches the golden stage, the air hushes into a held breath. The old king speaks of the Moon Goddess, and the syllables of the prayer feel like a net that pulls everything taut. Then the change comes.
Watching him shift is less violent than I expected and more intimate. His shoulders roll, his spine curves in a slow, unspooling motion. Sweat pieces through his shirt like ink. He does not cry out. It is as if the bones themselves are agreeing, folding, rearranging into the inevitable. Fur blossoms along his limbs, dark as the space between stars, until a wolf stands where a man once did—a midnight black wolf with a white half-moon marking across his forehead. The mark: a king's birthright in wolf form, a crescent that glows faint and terrible.
The crowd erupts. "Hail King Zeus!" peals through the night, a sound that makes my chest vibrate. I shout with them, though my voice needles with a panic that I am seen, that I am exposed. I did not come to be noticed. I only wanted to learn how he moved in that other skin, to understand if power was something sharp or soft.
Then my father looks up from the front row—Alpha by posture, whip in hand, face a mask of the same fury that has become his default. Our eyes meet. For a second, I am a child again, and the memory of his hands is a drumbeat of dread. I know, before even the first foot leaves the ground, that the whip will come for me.
I let the roar of the crowd swallow me for a moment, then I shift and run, paws cutting the night, moonlight sliding over fur. I run until the palace is a rumor behind me, until the familiar hollows of home rise to meet me. I arrive panting, and for a sliver of time—the size of a moth's wing—I imagine that perhaps he will not punish me this time. That hope is a small, dangerous thing.
The door of my room is not a lock but a thin curtain against what waits. It cannot stop him. The room scarcely holds the echoes of my breath when the door crashes open. My father's face is a volcanic map—anger erupting across it—and before I can even speak, his hands are in my hair. He drags me outside and the air cools with the weight of the pack's eyes. They have come, as if summoned by my disgrace; every neighbor and cousin and beta stares like a jury.
He lashes me to the Tree of Sin with a rope that has learned the shape of my wrists. The rough bark bites into my shoulders where it presses. My brother Sam speaks up, voice slicing through the murmurs—defending me in a way that makes butterflies loose in my chest. He argues of law and respect and balance; he speaks my name like a shield.
"How many times must I tell you to obey me?" my father roars, and the pack listens as if his voice were law hammered into stone.
"Dad, please, I only wanted to see him shift. No one saw me besides you," I manage, and my words come out as small as moths. Tears burn behind my lids. My throat tastes like metal.
"It is an insult," he says, eyes narrowed. "The law is the law. An Alpha's daughter undermines order when she wanders."
"She's my sister," Sam snaps back. "It was nothing—"
"My daughter disobeyed me. She must be made an example." His hand finds the whip at his belt; its leather is old, its stains a history I know too well.
The whip sings down across my back, and pain unravels me into small shreds. Each lash is a punctuation mark, correcting a wrong my father believes I wrote. My body learns to fold around the blows: breathe, count, do not give them the sight of your collapse. I have practiced this because he has practiced the lesson into me for years. The memory of that ribbon—Mother's ribbon—slips from my lips like a secret. I taste the memory of her hands on my hair, the way they smelled of sun and thyme, and it steadies me for half a beat.
"Is this punishment for what you did, or for what you will always be?" I whisper, voice thin and dangerous with the small rebellion of truth.
His eyes flash. "You will learn. You will remember who you are."
I pass out somewhere between the last crack of the whip and the world tilting away.
I fall into a dream that is not a dream but a place the mind goes when it cannot hold the shape of grief. I am a child, and light folds around me like a shawl. I follow a butterfly—its wings are a tapestry of blues—and the forest drinks the sun. Mother hums somewhere beyond the trees, her voice a silver thread. She has braided my hair with the same ribbon I still clutch. We speak of small things: the taste of river water, the perfect way to pluck a star from the sky. Her hand is warm.
We are near the cave by the river where the old stories say the bear lives. My father warned me never to go near there; he warned me because he loved me and because he feared loss. The world in the dream holds its breath. A bear bursts out from shadow like a fault in the earth, all teeth and thunder. I scream and Mother is a brown wolf in an instant—her shape a soft, fierce language I did not know she spoke.
She fights with the grace of someone who has loved too much and sick too often. She is brave and failing, and the bear rips into her chest. Blood becomes a bright, honest thing on her fur. Dad and the pack come; their howls are broken, too late. The pack doctor reaches for her, but she is already slipping away, and the ground closes around possibility like lids.
Dad collapses down in the dream, grief squeezing the sound from him. He slaps me then—not hard, but with a weight that breaks something else. "You," he says, voice splintered. "What happened?"
I try to explain. I tell the truth—a child's truth—and he looks at me as if the look can burn me into a story that fits. That is the moment he begins to change. That is when he learns to blame a small heart because it is easier than facing the emptiness his mate leaves behind.
The dream folds into more dreams: ropes, the smell of the Tree of Sin, the soft press of a whip. The dream is not tender; it is a teacher. It teaches me how to breathe through pain, how to become less breakable.
When I wake, the world is blurrier than before, but there is a new filament in me—a promise smoothed into the marrow. I have been punished, yes, and the stars have seen the way my body bears the memory. But something else has been born in the space between lashes: a hunger that is no longer merely to survive, but to be seen as someone who can stand without the consent of any man whose love has wilted.
I touch the ribbon in my pocket. It is still fragrant with lavender and memory. If Mother were here, she would hold me and whisper that life is more than the measure of pain. If Mother were here, perhaps my father would still be himself. He is not. He is a storm turned inward, and storms break everything they touch, including the hands that fed them.
The moon slides like a slow silver coin across the sky. King Zeus's howl still hums in my ears, a sound that felt like both a coronation and a question. I have seen the shift; I have tasted the crown from a distance. The night has given me a shard of a future that is not spelled by my father's whip.
So I will learn to walk with that shard. I will carry this new ache and let it teach me where the seams of the world are. The pack may teach me how to endure, but the palace taught me how to want. And wanting is sometimes the first step toward taking.