The marker trembled in my hand as I drew the final line.
I didn't want to count anymore. I had told myself that a hundred times stop counting, Laura, it changes nothing and yet here I was, crouched on the cold floor of my room at five in the morning, adding one more mark to a wall that had long since stopped feeling like mine.
Two thousand one hundred and ninety days.
I pressed my fingers against the tally like it was a wound I couldn't stop touching.
Six years.
Six years since my parents looked at me really looked at me and decided I wasn't worth taking with them.
Not dead. I want to be clear about that, because dead would have been easier to survive. Dead, I could have grieved and buried and eventually stopped waiting. Dead, I could have hated them cleanly, without guilt.
But they left. In the middle of the night, without a word, without a note, without even the small mercy of a lie we'll come back for you, Laura, just wait they were simply gone. And I was twelve years old, standing in an empty hallway in my socks, not yet understanding that some absences never end.
I slid down until my back hit the wall, knees pulled to my chest.
The stupid part the part I couldn't seem to kill no matter how many times it tried to die was that I still counted for them. Some embarrassing, persistent corner of my heart believed that if I kept track, if I held every single day in my hands like evidence, they would come back one morning and I could show them. Look. This is how long I waited. This is how long I stayed. Don't you want to know what you missed?
Almost eighteen now.
Six more days.
I wondered sometimes what they would think if they could see me. If they drove back through those gates tomorrow and found their daughter. Would they recognize the girl who flinched at footsteps? Who had learned to eat quickly, sleep lightly, move through hallways like an apology?
Probably not.
The girl they left was softer. She still cried loudly.
I hadn't cried loudly in years. Loud crying only encouraged them.
I tucked the marker beneath my pillow and stood, pressing my palm flat against the marks for just a second. A habit I couldn't explain. Like checking a bruise to make sure it was still real.
My wolf should have stirred at the contact. Even a flicker warmth in my chest, a pulse of something alive behind my ribs. That was how it worked for everyone else. Their wolves were always there, breathing beneath the surface, steady as a second heartbeat.
Mine had been silent for two years.
Her name was Lue, and I missed her the way you miss a limb constantly, and in ways that caught me off guard. The worst was when I saw pack members shift, their wolves rolling through them like water finding its shape, and I felt the hollow in my chest where she used to be.
The last time I heard her voice was the day I almost didn't survive.
Three boys from the pack had lost a football match at school. They came home loud and embarrassed and looking for something smaller than them to destroy. I was the obvious choice I was always the obvious choice. I remember the taste of iron flooding my mouth. The way the cold ground pressed against my cheek like it was the only thing in the world that would hold me. I remember thinking, with strange and terrible calm: This is how it ends. Not with something meaningful. With a lost football game.
Lue had surged up from somewhere deep and desperate that day. She had roared through my blood and kept me breathing.
And then, when the danger passed, she went quiet.
She hadn't spoken since.
I understood, in my darker moments, why some of them said she left because she was ashamed. It was the kind of thing that lodged in you like a splinter too small to remove cleanly, too sharp to ignore. Even your wolf abandoned you.
I had stopped trying to argue with it.
The banging at my door exploded through the silence like a fist through glass.
I spun, heart slamming against my ribs.
"Laura! Get up!"
"I'm up," I called, voice still rough with sleep, steadying myself against the wall.
"The Alpha is asking for you!"
Everything inside me went still.
The Alpha.
Not a guard with instructions. Not a servant with chores. The Alpha himself.
I pressed my fist against my sternum, trying to slow my breathing before it could spiral. Being summoned by Alpha Carol never meant something good not for anyone, and certainly not for me. In six years of living beneath this roof, his eyes had slid over me like I was furniture. Invisible. Beneath notice. Same thing with his brothers, all three of them ignored me, He was the first born and the most powerful.
If he was noticing me now, it was because something had gone wrong.
I pulled on clothes with fingers that wouldn't cooperate, splashed water on my face, and opened the door.
The girl who had knocked was already walking away, not even sparing me a glance over her shoulder.
I followed.
The Alpha's private wing felt different from the rest of the packhouse. Quieter. Heavier. Like the air itself understood it was supposed to behave. My footsteps seemed too loud against the marble, each one announcing me in a way I desperately didn't want.
The guards at his chamber doors stepped aside without a word.
I pushed the door open.
The first thing I saw was the blood.
Thin red lines across Ayoya's perfect cheek long, jagged, deliberate-looking. She sat beside Alpha Carol with her head bowed, fingers wrapped around his arm, tears slipping silently down her face and stopping just short of the scratches like even her crying was choreographed.
My stomach dropped so fast I felt it in my knees.
No.
"She attacked me." Ayoya's voice was barely a whisper. Fragile. Wounded. "I only went to wake her up. And she she jumped on me."
The words hit me like cold water.
"That's not true." My voice came out smaller than I wanted it to. "I just woke up. Someone knocked on my door and called me here. I didn't touch anyone."
Ayoya made a soft, pained sound, as if my denial had physically hurt her.
Alpha Carol stood.
He was enormous not just in height but in presence, the kind that filled a room and pushed everything else to the walls. Power moved around him like weather. He looked at me the way you look at something you've found stuck to the bottom of your boot.
"You dare deny it."
Not a question. A verdict already reached.
"I didn't touch her." My voice was shaking now, and I hated it, hated that my body kept betraying me at the exact moments I needed it to hold. "I swear to the Moon, I didn't "
"Your father betrayed this pack." His voice was quiet. That was the worst part how quiet it was. Calm as a knife laid flat on a table. "Your mother ran like a coward in the night. And you stand before me and expect to be believed?"
"My parents "
"Silence."
The word cracked through the room like a whip.
I closed my mouth. My eyes burned.
"You are weak," he said, stepping closer. "Pathetic. A stain that we have tolerated out of obligation to pack law." Each word was precise. Placed like stones on my chest. "Your wolf left because even she was ashamed to be tied to you."
My throat clenched so hard it hurt.
Don't cry. Don't cry. Don't give him that.
"I didn't attack her," I whispered. One more time. Useless, but I couldn't stop saying it. Like if I repeated it enough, the truth might actually matter here.
He leaned down slightly, bringing his face closer to mine. His eyes were cold in a way that had nothing to do with anger anger would have meant I was worth feeling something about.
"You are nothing," he said softly. "You are lucky we let you breathe under this roof."
Guards.
The word didn't even register before hands closed around my arms.
"Take her to the courtyard." He straightened, already turning away. Already done with me. "Twenty lashes."
The world tilted.
"Alpha, please "
"Perhaps pain will teach you what words have not."
I fought then not hard, not with any real hope of stopping them, but I couldn't make myself go still. I twisted against their grip, my feet dragging against the marble, because some part of me that still remembered being human refused to walk quietly toward this.
"I didn't do it," I cried out, my voice cracking open. "I didn't do anything "
Over my shoulder, through the open doorway, I caught one last glimpse of Ayoya.
Her tears had stopped.
She was watching me go with something calm and satisfied in her eyes, fingers still resting delicately on Alpha Carol's arm.
And that look more than his words, more than the hands on my arms, more than everything was what finally broke my voice into silence.
The cold morning air hit my face as the doors opened.
The courtyard spread out ahead of us, and already, people were drifting toward the edges. Word traveled fast in this pack when there was something worth watching. Faces I recognized people I had grown up beside, eaten beside, trained beside in the years before everything fell apart turned toward the sound of my dragging footsteps.
"Laura!"
The voice stopped me cold inside, even as my body kept moving.
Alpha Mike. Second of the triplets. Crossing the training grounds from the eastern field, expression sharp with something I couldn't read yet, heading straight for me.
My stomach lurched.
Not now. Please, not now.
But it didn't matter what I needed.
It never had.
The guards forced me to my knees on the stone, and the courtyard filled around me, and Alpha Carol watched from the doorway with his arms folded, and somewhere behind me I could feel Alpha Mike's eyes finding me among the gathering crowd.
I pressed my palms flat against the cold ground and focused on breathing.
Six more days.
Six more days until I turned eighteen. Until the Grand Mating Ceremony. Until the Moon looked down at all of us and decided who belonged to whom.
Six more days until I either found my mate and walked out of this pack forever
Or discovered that even fate had looked at me and found nothing worth choosing.
Please, I thought, eyes squeezed shut, chin dropping to my chest as I braced for the first blow. Please let me be worth something to someone. Please let someone choose me.
Please let me get out of here alive.