Aliana
Present Day - Silvermere Pack Territory
The kick to my ribs didn’t wake me.
The floorboard above me did. That, and Cora’s vanilla perfume leaking down the stairs ahead of her feet hitting the hallway runner. A giggle. Sharp. Cruel.
I kept my eyes shut. I stayed curled on the hardwood floor with the thin rag I used as a blanket tangled around my ankles.
October cold had seeped through my dress overnight.
The pack’s central heating hadn’t been switched on yet, and Deeana had made it very clear that the basement was damp enough to freeze a wolf’s lungs.
Good thing mine barely made a sound.
“Ugh, she’s still asleep,” Cora called from the top of the stairs. “Mother, look. She’s like a stray dog we forgot to put out.”
I didn’t move. Moving meant acknowledging them. Acknowledging them meant feeding them.
But Deeana was never satisfied with being ignored. Boots thudded down the basement steps. One, two, three, and then the toe of her shoe connected with my hip. Hard.
“Up. Now.”
I opened my eyes. Grey light filtered through the small, grimy window near the ceiling. Red hair. Manicured nails. The sneer. Seven years she’d been in this house. Seven years of this.
I pushed myself up slowly, every joint protesting. My back ached from the floorboards. My hip was already bruising. I didn’t look at her. I stared at a spot near her feet.
“I want the kitchen scrubbed before the sun is fully up. The floors waxed. And do not—do not—leave your scent in the foyer before noon. Alpha Grayson is holding an assembly today, and I want this house smelling of pine and lemons. Not omega rot.”
She breathed the last two words like a prayer. Like she’d been saving them up.
“Yes, Deeana,” I said softly.
She marched back up the stairs, leaving the basement door gaping open. Her voice carried as she went. Lazy. Useless. Couldn’t believe Gerald had allowed his firstborn to become such a waste of space.
Cora giggled. Her footsteps padded towards the kitchen, and the smell of fresh coffee drifted down.
Coffee from the cabinet I wasn’t allowed to touch.
Hunger gnawed at my gut. Old news. I took a breath, held it, let the cold air numb the ache.
Then I rolled up my sleeves, grabbed the bucket of cold water from the corner, and climbed the stairs. They never gave me a mop. Rags and a worn brush.
Every day was a reminder.
Wolfless, they called me. Worthless.
They were wrong on the first count. But Zira hadn’t spoken in years, and a wolf too starved to surface might as well be no wolf at all.
? ? ?
I spent the morning on my hands and knees.
The Silvermere packhouse was modest by Alpha standards—two storeys, five bedrooms, a foyer that doubled as a dining hall on meeting days. Still too much house for one person to clean. Especially one running on scraps and two hours of broken sleep.
Deeana supervised from the kitchen doorway, sipping her coffee. Cora perched at the island, scrolling on her phone, bare feet propped up on a stool.
I scrubbed the foyer. I dusted the mantelpiece where my mother’s painting used to hang, before Deeana replaced it with a gaudy red-tinted landscape that matched her hair.
I knelt at the fireplace and scraped ash from the hearth until my fingers were raw. My reflection caught in the blackened grate for a moment—dark eyes, skin the deep brown of my mother’s, curls scraped back and dulled with dust. I looked away before I could catalogue anything else.
“You missed a spot,” Cora called from the hallway without looking up from her phone. “Under the rug. If Alpha Grayson thinks poorly of me—I mean, this house—I’m blaming you.”
I bit my tongue until I tasted iron. At nineteen, Cora had already crowned herself Grayson’s Luna. The Alpha hadn’t been consulted.
I pulled the rug back. I scrubbed.
And I thought about the prophecy. The one my dying mother had pressed into my ear eight years ago.
One in a millennium. The Moon Goddess’s child.
A bitter laugh climbed my throat and died there.
If I was the Moon Goddess’s child, the Moon Goddess had a wicked sense of humour.
She’d given me a wolf who had never shifted, never growled, never so much as broken skin—a quiet, fading thing only I knew was there.
She’d given me a father who saw a burden, a stepmother who saw a stain, and a stepsister who saw a toy.
She’d given me the memory of my mother’s touch and the promise of a mate I’d sworn to reject.
I scrubbed until the floorboards shone, then sat back on my heels, sweat rolling down my temples.
The house had gone quiet. Deeana and Cora had vanished to the back sunroom to gossip. My father was off doing whatever he did in the pack’s stores to keep the Alpha’s favour. For one moment, I was alone.
I let the silence hold me.
Then I heard it.
A low, rolling vibration. Not thunder. Heavier. It came from beyond the trees, from the ridge that bordered the Silvermere hunting grounds.
Paws. Hundreds of them. And the rhythm was wrong for a hunt or a search party.
It was a march.
I froze, fingers gripping the floor I’d just polished.
Slowly, I rose, crossed to the front window, and parted the heavy velvet curtains.
The tree line was moving.
I couldn’t make them out yet. Just shadows sliding between the trunks in perfect, terrible unison.
Black shadows.
And every wolf in Silvermere knew who ran black.
The first vehicle came to a halt. Another two followed. Diesel growled through the glass, and I dragged the curtain back to see a fourth. Deeana and Cora shoved me aside.
Deeana gasped.
“Hide. He will kill us. Cora, come with me,” she said, taking her daughter’s hand and dragging her away.
Their footsteps fled deeper into the house. The engines cut out, one by one, and the silence they left behind was worse.
A door opened.
With a thud, heavy boots landed. A gust of wind blew his dark hair over his face.
My eyes widened. He was the largest Alpha I’d ever seen.
He towered over his men and wolves. Ink covered his hands, his neck, a portion of his clavicle.
It was a serpent. His eyes swept over the house. I ducked before they reached my window.
My heart slammed against my ribs. Beneath it, so faint I might have imagined it, something else stirred—a flutter, deep down, where Zira slept.
Muffled voices, cold and gruff, grew closer. Gravel crunched under boots. Then under paws.
I jumped as fists pounded on wood.
Sorin the Terrible was at our door.
He’d slain the Crescent Blood Moon pack shortly before my mother died. I remembered the stories. No man, woman or pup had lived to tell the tale.
A dull thud hit the wood.
Then again.
Wood splintered, and I scrambled on my hands and knees beneath the table. I tucked my head down and held onto my knees, rag still in hand. The floor I’d polished that morning was cold through my dress, and it smelled of wax and lemons.
Pine and lemons. Just as Deeana wanted. The house would smell perfect for him.
Heavy footsteps followed.
Too many to count.
And over the wax, over the lemons, something new rolled in through the broken door. Cedar and smoke and cold morning air.
The house had never smelled of anything like it.