I heard him before I saw him.
Alpha Mike's voice hit the hallway like something thrown hard against stone sharp, sudden, cracking the air open. "Where are you taking her?"
My stomach dropped.
Not with hope. I want to be clear about that. There was a time, years ago, when hearing one of the triplets interrupt a punishment meant something might change. I had long since burned that particular hope to the ground and scattered the ashes.
The guards slowed anyway, their grip on my arms tightening instinctively, the way men do when they suddenly have two people to answer to.
"Alpha Carol ordered twenty lashes," one of them said stiffly. "For striking Ayoya."
The name moved through me like a cold current.
Ayoya. The concubine. The future Luna. The girl whose tears had dried the moment I was dragged out of the room.
Mike's footsteps closed the distance between us. I didn't look at him immediately. I was already cataloguing exits, already building the wall inside myself that I would need to survive whatever came next. But I felt his gaze land on me felt it the way you feel a change in temperature, something shifting in the atmosphere around your skin.
When I finally looked up, his face was stone.
Not the blank, unbothered stone of someone indifferent. The deliberate, carved stone of someone who has chosen what they feel and refuses to be moved from it.
Whatever he had once been the boy who silently handed me a towel when I slipped in the mud during training, who had not been kind exactly but had not yet been this was gone. Had been gone for six years. I didn't know why I kept looking for him.
"You rogue." The word came out low and venomous. "You worthless, betrayer's blood. How dare you put your filthy hands on her."
My mouth opened.
I don't know why I tried. I genuinely don't. Something stubborn and stupid in me, some last remaining piece that hadn't yet learned its lesson, kept insisting that the truth had value. That if I just said it clearly enough, precisely enough, someone would hear it.
"I didn't "
"Take her." He cut me off without even looking at me again, snapping the words at the guards like I was a problem to be redirected. "Punish her properly." A pause, and then, quieter, the part that made my blood go cold: "When you're done, bring her to my room. I'll handle the second round myself."
Second round.
The words sat in my chest like swallowed glass.
He turned and walked away. That was the thing about Mike he never watched. He issued instructions and moved on, as if what happened next was beneath his attention. As if I was beneath his attention.
In some ways that was worse than being watched.
The courtyard was already filling.
I don't know how they always knew. Some instinct in a pack, some invisible current that ran between wolves and pulled them toward spectacle. Pack members drifted in from the training fields, from the main hall, from the upper corridors, drawn by nothing more than the sense that something was happening and they might want to see it.
Faces I recognized. Faces I had grown up beside. Faces that had, once, been ordinary to me background characters in the landscape of childhood, people I passed every morning without thinking.
Now they arranged themselves into an audience.
I was forced to my knees on the stone.
The first lash landed before I had finished bracing for it.
The sound was the worst part. That specific, humiliating crack of leather through air, loud enough for everyone to hear, loud enough to make absolutely certain no one in that courtyard could pretend they weren't watching a girl be taken apart piece by piece.
What did I do?
The thought rose through the pain like something drowning.
What did I ever actually do?
We were not friends when we were young I had never been foolish enough to believe that. But there had been a neutrality once. A basic, unremarkable tolerance. I existed, the pack existed, and we occupied the same space without anyone needing to draw blood over it.
I remember the day my parents disappeared. I remember standing in the training yard the morning after, not knowing what else to do, going through the motions of routine because routine was the only solid thing left. I remember Alpha Mike looking at me across the yard.
And I remember the exact moment his expression changed.
Like a switch had been thrown. Like someone had handed him a new set of instructions about what I was and what I deserved and he had simply decided to follow them.
The second lash tore through me and I gasped, my teeth snapping together. I would not scream. I had learned early screaming only made them feel powerful. Silence, or something close to it, was the only dignity I had left to protect.
Six days, I told myself through the white-hot blur of it. Six days.
The hope felt pathetically small. But it was mine, and I held it with both hands.
Six days until my eighteenth birthday. Until the Grand Mating Ceremony, when the Moon would look down at all of us assembled beneath her light and draw the invisible threads between souls. Six days until I might find the person the universe intended for me someone outside this pack, someone who would look at me and see something other than my parents' sins and I could walk through those gates and never, ever come back.
The third lash.
Six days.
The fourth, harder.
My voice escaped on that one a short, broken sound I couldn't stop and the humiliation of it scalded worse than the pain. I dug my nails into my palms and focused on the sensation, sharp and grounding, and kept counting.
Lue, I thought desperately. Lue, please.
Silence. The hollow in my chest where she used to live yawned wide and dark and empty.
By the eighth lash the world had softened at the edges, pain blurring into a kind of static that hummed through my whole body. I wasn't crying anymore. I didn't have the energy. I was simply enduring, the way you endure weather not because you have a choice but because stopping isn't an option and the only way out is through.
I thought about the night they left. The specific, mundane memory I always returned to: not the horror of waking to emptiness, not the frantic search through rooms that already smelled like absence. Just the window. Me, sitting at the window in my socks because I had gotten up too fast to put on shoes, watching the gate long after their trail had gone cold.
The next morning, Alpha Kyle had looked at me differently.
Permission, I had thought later, when I was old enough to understand it. They had all been waiting for permission, and my parents leaving had given it to them.
The final lash landed.
The courtyard tilted. My ears filled with a sound like rushing water. I tried to hold myself upright through sheer force of will and failed completely, the stone coming up to meet me before I could stop it.
Then darkness.
Cold water hit my face like an open hand.
I came back choking, gasping, the air burning its way into my lungs as my body remembered how to be alive. My back screamed. When I tried to push myself upright, pain detonated through both shoulders and I made a sound I didn't recognize as my own voice.
"Get up," a guard muttered. Not unkindly. Almost apologetically, which was its own particular kind of awful.
My legs didn't work properly. They shook continuously, fine tremors that I couldn't control, as the guards pulled me upright and held most of my weight between them. My wet hair stuck to my face and neck. My shirt clung to wounds that had not stopped bleeding. Somewhere behind me on the marble floor I was leaving a trail, and I focused on that detail with the detached, foggy concentration of someone trying very hard not to think about where they were being taken.
His room.
Second round.
They stopped outside Alpha Mike's chamber and knocked once, then opened the door and shoved me through without waiting for my feet to catch up. I stumbled, one hand hitting the doorframe hard enough to bruise, barely staying upright.
The door closed behind me.
Mike stood at the window, arms folded, framed in morning light that made him look almost golden. There was nothing golden about him. He looked at me the way you look at something unpleasant that has been tracked inside on someone's shoe.
"Look at you." His voice was low and disgusted. "You're a mess. Like something dredged up from the bottom of a river."
I straightened as much as my body would allow.
"I didn't touch her." One more time. For no reason. For the record that no one was keeping.
Something shifted behind his eyes not doubt, nothing as useful as doubt but something. It disappeared before I could name it.
"Don't," he said sharply. "Don't stand there bleeding on my floor and insult me with that."
"I'm telling the truth "
"You carry betrayal in your blood." He stepped away from the window, moving closer, and the room seemed to contract around him. "You think I don't know what you're capable of? Violence is the only inheritance your parents left you."
The words found every tender place inside me with surgical precision.
"I would never hurt her." My voice broke on the last word. I hated that it broke. "I don't care about Ayoya enough to "
"There." His eyes sharpened. "That. Right there."
I stopped, confused.
"Yesterday in the dining hall," he said. "The way you looked at her. Like she was beneath you. Like you were somehow her equal."
I searched my memory and found nothing. A normal meal. A room full of people. Ayoya at the high table, me invisible near the far end, the same as always.
"I wasn't thinking anything," I said honestly.
"That expression," he continued, closing the last distance between us, his voice dropping to something darker and more deliberate. "That look you carry around like you're owed something. Like you still have pride." His jaw tightened. "That needs to end."
He reached out and grabbed my chin, forcing my face up.
I stopped breathing.
His eyes moved over my face slowly, as if cataloguing something he intended to dismantle. Up close I could see that he was angry in the specific, controlled way of someone who refuses to be accused of losing control every muscle held just slightly too tight, jaw just slightly too set.
"Please," I whispered.
The word tasted like surrender. I didn't even know what I was asking for anymore mercy, explanation, for him to let go, for him to look at me like a person for thirty consecutive seconds. All of it. None of it. Something.
He released my chin and stepped back, composing himself.
"My brothers punished you," he said, and the calmness in his voice was somehow more frightening than everything that had preceded it. "Now it's my turn." He moved toward the door. "If pain is the only language you understand, then that's the language we'll speak."
He called for the guards.
As the door opened and they filed in, something settled over me not peace, nothing as clean as peace. More like the moment a storm stops being surprising and simply becomes the weather.
This was not about Ayoya.
It had never really been about Ayoya.
It was about the fact that I existed in a space where my existence was considered an insult. That I breathed pack air and ate pack food and walked pack halls and some part of me that stubborn, stupid, unkillable part still believed I deserved to.
That was what they wanted to punish.
The guards moved toward me, and I closed my eyes.
Six days, I told myself. Just six days.
The Moon had to be kinder than this.
She had to be.
Because I had survived everything they had given me so far, and I was still here, still breathing, still counting.
And if I could just make it six more days
Please, I thought, for the second time that morning, toward whatever was listening.
Please let someone out there already be looking for me.