Chapter 1
Wren's POV
I'd been carrying a load of firewood through the back hallway when I heard voices from the storage room. Donna's voice, low and satisfied in a way that made my stomach tighten. She was my mate Cole's mother. Then her daughter Cassie's voice, younger and sharper, cutting in with that laugh she had.
I should have kept walking. I knew better than to listen in on Carter family conversations. Nothing good ever came from knowing too much in this house.
But I heard my name.
"— Wren doesn't suspect anything," Donna was saying. "Three years and she still thinks she's just fat. Thinks the wolf never came because the Moon rejected her." A pause. The sound of something being set down on the shelf. "Stupid girl."
I set the firewood down without making a sound. My heart was already beating too fast.
"How much longer do we need to keep doing it?" Cassie asked. "The wolfsbane, I mean. It's expensive."
"Until Cole gets the land deed transferred. Once the Ashwood property is legally in our name, she's no use to us anymore." Donna's voice was completely flat. Practical. Like she was talking about a piece of furniture she planned to throw out. "After that, a wolfless woman with no pack, no family — accidents happen."
The firewood was still in my arms. I realized my hands were shaking.
Wolfsbane.
Three years. They had been putting wolfsbane in my tea for three years.
I thought about the tea Donna insisted on making for me every morning, saying it was good for my health. I had drunk it. Because I was grateful, because I had nowhere else to go, because Cole had told me his family would take care of me.
The weight. The slowness. The wolf that had never come, the silence inside me where my wolf should have been — I had thought it was because I was broken. Because my parents' disgrace had somehow broken me. I had spent three years believing I was the problem.
I was not the problem.
I heard Donna's footsteps shifting toward the door, and my body made the decision before my brain did — I turned and looked for somewhere, anywhere, to disappear. I couldn't let them find out I knew
My legs started moving before I made any decision to move. The storage room had a large ceramic water barrel in the corner, the old kind, deep enough that a person could crouch inside with the lid on. I climbed in and pulled it shut above my head.
The water was ice cold.
In the dark, crouched in that barrel with water up to my head. My body wasn't cooperating — the cold had gotten into my muscles and the wolfsbane was in my blood and I was twenty-one years old and I had just learned that my mate's family had been slowly poisoning me for three years and planned to kill me when they were done, and something in me had simply stopped working.
My arms had no strength left in them.
I tried to push the lid open and found I couldn't. I was going to drown in a ceramic barrel in the back storage room.
No!
The word didn't come from my brain. It came from somewhere deeper, somewhere that had been dark and quiet, and it came up like a fist. Like something that had been held underwater for a very long time and had finally decided it was done being held.
Heat exploded through my chest. Not warmth — heat, white and furious, the kind that comes from something that is very old and very angry and done waiting. It moved through my arms and into my hands and the ceramic cracked, and then it shattered, and water and broken shards went everywhere, and I went with them, and then there was nothing.
The first thing I felt was cold.
It took me a few seconds to figure out where I was. The floor of the back storage room. My cheek on the cracked linoleum. Wet all the way through.
Water pooled around me in a dark ring. My hair was stuck across my face and I had to blink it out of my eyes to see.
The water barrel was in pieces around me. Big ceramic shards, still wet, scattered across the floor like broken teeth.
Then the pain hit. All at once, like it had been waiting for me to wake up.
My ribs hurt like someone had kicked them. My arms wouldn't straighten out. Something hot and stinging ran down my forearms and one hip and the side of my jaw.
The barrel had broken right next to me. Shards of it were everywhere. Some were tiny, some were as long as my hand. A few of them had gone into my skin.
They were still there. Still biting every time I breathed.
Then I heard Donna.
"— look at this mess! That crock cost forty dollars, you useless piece of —"
I turned to her.
"— don't just lie there, get up, do you know what that barrel cost —"
I put my hand flat on the floor and pushed myself up.
Donna was standing over me with her arms crossed, her face red, her voice doing the thing it always did when she was performing. Cassie was in the doorway behind her, arms folded, watching with that look she wore when she expected entertainment.
I got to my feet.
It took a moment. My legs were unsteady and everything hurt and I was still dripping water onto the floor, but I stood up, and I looked at Donna Carter, and something in my face must have been different from every other time I had looked at her, because she stopped talking mid-sentence.
The silence stretched out.
"You're going to pay for that barrel," Donna said, but her voice had lost some of its certainty. "You clumsy, worthless — I don't know what Cole was thinking, bringing a wolfless waste of space into this house —"
I slapped her.
Donna's head snapped sideways. The sentence died in her mouth. For a full three seconds, neither she nor Cassie moved. They just stood there, Donna with her hand flying up to her cheek, Cassie with her eyes gone wide, both of them staring at me like I had just done something that wasn't supposed to be physically possible.
Then Donna screamed.
It wasn't words, just pure rage, and she launched herself at me with both hands out, and Cassie came right behind her. I stepped into it instead of back and I caught Donna's wrist mid-swing and twisted, using her own momentum, and felt the exact moment the joint gave way. Donna's scream changed pitch. She went down to one knee, her arm bent at an angle it was never meant to hold, and I held her there and looked down at her.
"I'm a Gamma's daughter," I said. "I've been training since I could walk. Did you really think you could take me?"
"Let go of me, you crazy —"
Cassie grabbed my shoulder from behind. I released Donna, turned, and shoved Cassie hard into the wall. She hit it with a grunt and slid down two inches before catching herself, and I stepped back and watched them both — Donna cradling her arm on the floor, Cassie pressed against the wall, breathing hard — and waited.
Donna spat, "It doesn't matter. You don't have a wolf. You're nothing. You could be an Alpha's daughter and it wouldn't mean a damn thing without a wolf behind you."
I felt it then. The heat in my chest, the thing that had broken the barrel, the thing that had been buried under three years of poison and silence — it rose up all at once, and I let it. I felt my eyes change, felt the ancient white heat of something enormous and furious and patient push forward behind my face, and the temperature in the room seemed to drop, and both Donna and Cassie went completely still.
"What about now?" I said.
Donna's face had gone the color of old ash.
