Sienna's POV
The night my life fell apart started like every other night in the Greyhound Pack — with everyone looking at my sister like she hung the moon, and looking at me like I was the reason it ever went dark.
Gemma's twentieth birthday party was the most spectacular thing I had ever witnessed.
The ballroom blazed with light. Chandeliers dripped crystals overhead, casting everything in warm gold. Flashlights waved in the crowd like a sea of tiny stars, and voices rose together in a chorus so loud the walls seemed to breathe with it. There were flowers everywhere — white and soft pink, Gemma's favorites — and a tower of gifts stacked so high near the far wall it seemed structurally irresponsible.
It was beautiful.
It also left a taste in my mouth like something had died.
I stood near the edge of the room in a black dress I had ironed three times because I had nothing else worth wearing, watching my sister absorb the love of an entire pack the way sunlight absorbed into warm skin.
Her blue eyes were bright and her caramel hair sat in soft waves around her shoulders and when she laughed, which she did often, the sound carried across the room like music.
Gemma was the sun. She had always been the sun.
And I had always been the thing people glanced at sideways on a cloudy day, right before they looked away.
"It's your day, Gemma!" My mother's voice cut above the crowd, high and giddy with a joy she reserved exclusively for moments that had nothing to do with me. "My little girl is all grown up."
"I could never have asked for a more perfect daughter." My father pulled Gemma into a hug and the crowd erupted like he had said something profound.
I pressed my lips together and studied the floor.
I was not going to cry.
I had made that decision at the door and I intended to honor it. There were easily two hundred werewolves packed into this ballroom and every single one of them would love nothing more than to watch me crack.
That was the particular cruelty of being the pack outcast — your pain became entertainment. The moment you let it show, you handed them something to feed on for months. I had stopped feeding them a long time ago.
I smoothed the front of my dress. Straightened my spine. And walked forward with my head up and my expression carefully blank, extending the gift I had wrapped three times before the bow sat right.
"Happy birthday, Gemma."
The ballroom went dead quiet. My parents turned. The joy drained from my mother's face the moment her eyes landed on me, replaced by the particular look she reserved for disappointments and inconveniences.
She leaned toward my father and said, at a volume she clearly considered a whisper, "When are we making her move out? We can't have her shadowing Gemma all the time."
The whispers that followed were considerably less restrained.
What's the witch doing here?
She's bad luck. How dare she show up to Gemma's party.
Who would believe they're even sisters? They're total opposites.
They were vicious. But they weren't wrong about the last part.
I looked nothing like my sister. Nothing like anyone in this pack, actually, which was the root of every problem I had ever had.
Where Gemma was golden and soft-featured and easy on the eyes, I was her opposite in every particular. Black hair that fell thick and heavy past my shoulders, dark as ink with no undertone of warmth. Eyes so dark there was no visible distinction between iris and pupil.
Standing in this room full of warm, ordinary-looking wolves, I looked like a sketch drawn in the wrong medium. Like something from a different story entirely.
Like a witch.
The word that had followed me through every corridor of this pack for twenty years, said with more venom than any actual curse.
"Thanks, Emmy." Gemma barely glanced at me as she accepted the gift — the necklace I had spent three weeks saving for, chosen carefully from a shop window I had walked past four times before I went in — and shoved it into the pocket of her dress without opening it. Not a flicker of curiosity. Not even the performance of gratitude. "Can I go open the real gifts now, Mom?"
"Of course, my princess." And just like that, the room moved on. The crowd flowed toward the tower of presents like I had never existed.
I stood in the space they left and breathed through it.
Two years ago, on my own eighteenth birthday, the only gift I had received was a hastily wrapped chocolate bar from my grandmother. She had died not long after. I did not let myself think about that often because thinking about it too long led to other thoughts, about what it meant to be the only person in your family who had ever been kind to you and then lose her, and those thoughts had no useful end.
"Dad—"
My father's eyes cut to mine and his jaw went tight. "What have I told you about calling me that?"
The bitterness in my mouth thickened. "I'm sorry. Alpha."
He scoffed and walked away without another word.
Someone shoved me from behind hard enough that I stumbled into the edge of a nearby table. By the time I turned, nobody was looking at me — they had all already moved on, facing away, as if I were simply furniture that had gotten in the way of something more important.
Winter snarled inside me. My wolf wanted blood. I understood the impulse completely.
I let the rage sit there, unused and contained, the way I always did. Then I checked my phone.
My delivery was here.
Despite everything — the ballroom, my parents, the pack that had been deciding what I was before I was old enough to argue with them — I had one good thing. One thing I had been holding onto for eighteen months like a handhold on a very long climb.
Victor.
Victor Haines was the strongest warrior in the Greyhound Pack and the only person in it who had never once looked at my face and recoiled. He had not cared about my hair or my eyes or the whispers that trailed me through every room. He kissed me in the dark and called me beautiful and meant it — or he had seemed to mean it, which at the time had been enough.
We had been together for a year and a half. And tonight I was going to ask him to make it permanent.
The ring was in my bag — a simple silver band with a small inlaid stone, nothing extravagant, but chosen with enough deliberation to make up for what it lacked in size. I had rehearsed what I would say seventeen times, adjusted it fourteen, and landed on something honest. We would get married. We would leave — the pack, my parents, all of it — and build something quiet and real in the countryside. Something that had nothing to do with pack politics or the way I looked or the word that followed me everywhere.
It had sounded so perfect. I had believed in it so completely.
I slipped outside to collect the ring from the courier, stood in the cold for a few minutes until my lungs remembered how to work without effort, and went back inside to find the man I was going to spend my life with.
Victor wasn't where I had left him. My parents had drifted off toward the dignitaries they had invited. The music was loud and the crowd was thick and I moved through it with my nose working — cedar and something warmer underneath, familiar in a way that had always made Winter go quiet in the good way.
Down a hallway. Away from the noise.
I followed it.
A sound reached me before I reached him. Soft. High-pitched. A giggle I would have recognized anywhere.
I stopped.
At the far end of the hallway, half-lit by the light spilling from the ballroom behind me, was my sister.
In the arms of the man I loved.
Kissing him.
The ring box was still in my hand. I felt the hard corner of it pressing into my palm as I stood there in the hallway and watched my boyfriend kiss my sister with the unhurried ease of someone doing something they had done before, or something they had been wanting to do for a long time.
"What the hell is this?"
The words came out before I decided to speak. I crossed the distance between us and yanked them apart.
Victor turned and looked at me.
I had seen Victor angry before. Tired, distracted, cold. But what was on his face now was none of those things. It was the expression of a man looking at something that had become an inconvenience — patient, almost. Waiting for it to be over.
"What does it look like, Sienna?"
"Victor, what—"
"Oh, I'm so sorry, Emmy." Gemma's voice was all soft, practiced regret. "It seems the moon goddess thinks I'm a better match for Victor than you are."
The floor shifted under me.
"You're mates." Not a question. I already knew — I could smell it, the way their scents had knitted together into something settled and inevitable, sitting in the air between them like a done thing. I just needed to hear it said aloud so I could stop doubting what I was seeing.
"Yes!" Gemma grabbed Victor's arm with both hands and the joy on her face was entirely real, which somehow made everything worse. "I am so happy."
"So am I," Victor said. He turned away from me to look at her.
Winter screamed.
I do not remember deciding to shift. One moment I was standing in the hallway with a ring box in my hand and everything I had planned for falling apart in front of me, and the next I was wolf-shaped and moving and the only thing in my head was a white-hot wordless fury that had been building for twenty years and had finally found a direction.
"Stop!"
My father's Alpha command hit me like a wall. My legs locked mid-stride. I skidded and slammed sideways, half-shifted, shaking with the effort of fighting the order and losing it.
I couldn't fight it. He was my Alpha. I was still too young.
I shifted back. The cold floor of the hallway hit my bare skin and the cold air of the crowd that had come rushing around the corner hit everything else, and I lay there with the shame and the fury burning through me in equal measure and did not make a sound.
My father stood over me. He kicked me once. I pressed my teeth together.
"How dare you attack Gemma." His voice was thunder. "Have you lost your mind?"
I got to my feet. I was shaking, but I got to my feet. "Victor is mine. Everyone in this pack knows he's been mine."
"Don't be silly," my mother said.
"The moon goddess has decided," my father said. Flat. Final. "This conversation is over."
It was not over. Nothing about this was over.
But Victor was standing behind my father with his arms folded and his face empty of anything that had ever looked like love, and the ring box was somewhere on the floor where it had fallen, and two hundred wolves were watching me stand there with nothing on and nowhere left to fall.
I looked at Victor one last time. He didn't look back.
That was the thing that broke something. Not the betrayal — I would feel that later, in full, with the lights off and no one watching. Not the public humiliation, or my father's boot, or my mother's voice saying don't be dramatic like my heart was a performance she was bored by.
It was Victor not looking back.
Like I was already gone. Like I had never been there at all.
They made me come to the living room. I shoved a dress on and went because refusing would only give them more to use against me, and I was already running low on the kind of pride that could take another blow tonight.
Victor sat beside Gemma with his arm around her shoulders like he had always been there. Maybe he had always wanted to be. I sat opposite and said nothing and stared at the wall behind their heads.
"You will give your blessing," my father said.
"Over my dead body."
His jaw tightened. "Sienna—"
"I am your daughter too." I looked at him directly. It cost me something, the way it always did, because looking at him directly meant seeing the particular way he looked back — like a man regarding a problem that had been going on too long. "Does that count for nothing? Any of it?"
The silence that followed told me everything I had already known.
"Don't be dramatic," my mother said, smoothing her dress.
I stood.
"Get back here," my father snapped. "I am not finished."
I stopped. Turned. Waited.
"Your mother and I have been discussing your future," he said.
"I know you want me to move out," I said. "I was planning to anyway. I had a whole plan." I looked at Victor when I said it. He didn't react. "I had everything worked out."
"Good," my father said. "Then you'll understand that what I'm about to say makes sense. You will be participating in the Wolf King's bride selection."
The room tilted.
The Wolf King's bride selection. The annual spectacle that desperate she-wolves entered and quietly changed women came back from — those who came back at all. A king famous for his cruelty and infamous for his appetites, who had never once selected a bride from the ceremony that bore that name.
My parents were wrapping a death sentence in formal attire and calling it my future.
"Over my dead body," I said. Again.
But even as the words left my mouth, something else was already moving behind them. Something cold and quiet and very focused, running numbers while the rest of me fell apart.
I was not going to let them win.
I just needed a plan.
…