I lay awake staring at the ceiling and tried to convince myself that tomorrow would not hurt.
That was the lie I told myself most often.
The ceiling above my bed was cracked in thin, wandering lines, like veins spreading through old stone. I had counted them so many times I no longer needed the light. Seven long fractures. One dark stain my mother pretended not to notice. I traced them in my mind while the house slept, listening to the quiet settle into my bones.
Parents were supposed to love their children.
That was what everyone said. What the elders preached. What the pack believed without question. Love was meant to be instinctive, unavoidable—like the bond between wolf and skin.
If that was true, then something in me had been born wrong.
Across the hall, my sister's door opened. Soft footsteps passed. A laugh followed—Elira's, light and unburdened. I rolled onto my side and pressed my face into the pillow, trying not to listen.
Trying not to feel.
Elira had always been everything I was not. Graceful. Wanted. Planned for. My mother spoke of her future as though it were already written, carefully folded and tucked away for safekeeping. When she spoke to me at all, it was usually in reminders—what needed cleaning, what needed fetching, what needed fixing.
I had learned early how to make myself useful.
They said I was adopted.
That was the story given to the pack. The explanation that made everything neat and palatable. A kindness, they called it. A charity.
But lies have weight. And the truth pressed down on me every day.
I was not adopted.
I was the living proof of a man who had left.
My real father had chosen another Luna. A true one. A destined one. He had followed the pull of the bond and left my mother behind with nothing but shame and a child she could never quite forgive.
That child was me.
She remarried quickly after. To a man the pack trusted. A man who tolerated my presence because it was easier than explaining my absence. To everyone else, he was my uncle. To me, he was a wall—solid, distant, unmoving.
And now, at sixteen, the house no longer felt like a place of waiting.
It felt like an ending.
The knock came just after sunset.
My mother didn't wait for me to answer. She opened the door with the same sharp efficiency she used for everything concerning me.
"You'll stay in the storage room tonight," she said.
I looked at her, confused. "Tonight?"
Her eyes hardened. "Do not ask questions."
I didn't.
I followed her down the narrow corridor behind the kitchens, past shelves of dried herbs and sealed jars. The storage room waited at the end, small and windowless, its thick wooden door already open.
"Inside," she said.
I stepped over the threshold.
The door closed behind me with a dull, final sound.
Not anger. Not cruelty.
Certainty.
I stood there in the dark for a long moment, my hand hovering where the door had been, as if it might open again if I waited long enough. It didn't. There was no handle on my side. No latch to test. Just smooth wood and the quiet understanding that Lena had been put away.
I slid down the wall until I was sitting on the floor, knees pulled to my chest.
I told myself it was only for the night.
I don't remember deciding to sleep. I only remember the exhaustion sinking into me, heavy and familiar. At some point, my head tipped forward. The dark wrapped around my thoughts. Everything blurred.
When I woke, it was to noise.
Footsteps. Many of them. Overlapping. Rushed. The house was alive in a way it hadn't been before—doors opening and closing, fabric brushing fabric, voices rising and falling with excitement. Somewhere nearby, someone laughed.
I startled upright, heart pounding.
They were preparing.
I pushed myself to my feet and moved closer to the door, pressing my ear to the wood. The sounds came through faintly at first, then clearer as voices drifted down the corridor.
My mother's voice.
"Stand straight, Elira. Shoulders back. You don't want to look uncertain."
"Yes, Mother."
My sister's voice—soft, eager. Loved.
"No, not like that," my mother corrected gently. "Lower your eyes when you greet him. Confidence, but respect. The Alpha notices these things."
I swallowed hard.
I could hear the brush moving through Elira's hair, slow and careful, as though every strand mattered. I could hear the warmth in my mother's tone—patient, proud. A voice she had never used with me.
"You'll be perfect," she said. "You've always been perfect."
The words landed deeper than I expected.
I pressed my forehead against the door, breath shallow. They were so close. Close enough that I could hear everything. Far enough that I might as well not exist.
Another voice joined them—my stepfather's—asking if everything was ready. My mother assured him it was. Assured him that everything was exactly as it should be.
No one said my name.
The voices drifted away. Music swelled somewhere deeper in the house. Laughter followed. The kind of laughter that came from anticipation, not fear.
Then I felt it.
A weight settling into the walls. A presence pressing into the space itself. Even locked away, even hidden, my wolf stirred uneasily beneath my skin.
The Alpha had arrived.
I wrapped my arms around myself, unsure whether I was cold or simply breaking.
Footsteps approached again. Slower. Heavier.
A man's voice echoed down the corridor—low, unfamiliar, faintly amused. "Bathroom?"
The steps paused. Turned.
Light flooded the room as the door opened.
I gasped, stumbling back, blinking against the sudden brightness. My heart slammed so hard I thought it might tear free.
The Alpha stood in the doorway.
He had opened the wrong door.
I could see it in his face—brief confusion—until his eyes dropped.
Until they found me.
The world narrowed to that single moment.
His gaze locked onto mine, sharp and searching, and every sound in the house fell away. No music. No voices. Just the pounding of my heart and the unbearable awareness of being seen.
I had never been looked at like that before.
Not as a mistake.
Not as a burden.
Not as something meant to be hidden.
Something shifted in his expression—subtle, unreadable.
And for the first time in my life, someone saw Lena.