Chapter 4

The lab pulled what it could off the note from my stomach.

Acid had eaten most of the ink, but enough survived. A handwritten order from an apothecary's shop. The line that came back read: "Mom, you carry the whole pack. Let someone carry you for once." The name at the bottom was gone but for a single letter—W.

An enforcer called Dad. "Alpha, the paper we found on the victim looks like a gift order, with a birthday note for a mother. Your Luna's birthday falls next week. Would the two of you come look?"

Dad went still. "A birthday note."

He took a moment. "Rosalind's birthday is next week. And Wren's still not home. What if something really did happen to her? Maybe I should open a—"

Mom talked over him. "Don't. If Wren cared enough to order me a gift, she cared enough to answer her phone. She's holed up somewhere, waiting for us to come chasing after her. I won't do it."

"We've been here before. Last fight she had with Noelle, she pulled the exact same trick—vanished a week, then slunk back home."

Dad let it drop. The line between his brows didn't.

Mom said we'd been here before. She wasn't wrong. Last time I ran, it was because of Noelle too.

A year back. Noelle's kidneys were giving out. Mom asked me to give her one.

"I can't. I've only got one."

I pulled up the side of my shirt and showed them the scar. "They took the other when I was five."

Dad's eyes stopped on it. Something moved behind his face. Then Noelle's crying started up—"She won't even try to save me"—and whatever it was, it went out.

Mom gathered Noelle in and rounded on me. "You could've told us months ago. You sat on it to make her look bad, didn't you."

Neither of them asked how the kidney got taken. Neither of them asked what happened to me at five.

Selfish, they called me. In the end I gave up more than a kidney. I just didn't get a say in it.

If I were alive I'd still be doing the small things nobody ever caught me at—the salve in Dad's study, a gift for Mom's birthday, food left warm by the door on their late nights. They always chalked it up to Noelle.

No more food by the door. The dead don't get to fuss over anyone.

The lab lifted one more thing off the paper—a shop name. Wildrose Apothecary. The enforcers asked my parents to come identify the order themselves.

The woman who ran the shop checked her book. "A young girl put it in. Said it was for her mother's birthday."

She ran a finger down the page. "She was in here a long time deciding. Told me her mom was the pack's healer—took care of everyone but herself. She wanted the strongest sleep blend I had. Said she wanted her mom looked after for once."

Something in Dad's face gave way.

"Soft-spoken girl. Polite. Paid the whole thing up front." The woman looked up. "Never came back for it. I rang her a few times. She never picked up."

She turned the order slip around. "The name on it is—Wren Mercer."

Mom's hands started to shake. "Wren?"

Dad reached for something steady. "Could be someone else. Another Wren. She'd never—she doesn't—" The words ran out.

The enforcer brought up the shop's camera footage. A thin girl at the counter, filling out a little card, careful with every letter. She pointed at the shelf and asked the woman something.

The woman remembered. "She wanted to know if I did the pressed-flower cards. I said I did. She sat with it a while, then wrote her line out."

Mom stared at the screen. Her mouth moved. Nothing came.

Dad kept his voice flat by force. "This proves nothing. Could be chance. Might have no connection to the body at all—"

Each word landed softer than the one before it.

He didn't want it to be true. Because true meant the girl he'd called ungrateful had spent her last free hours choosing a birthday gift for the mother who never once came looking.

Mom said it barely above a breath. "That girl. She looks like Wren."

"No." Dad shook his head. "Wren's out there. She's—"

He stopped, because the rest of it landed on him at once. The body in the warehouse. The old scars down the back. The line on the left side where a kidney had been cut away years ago.

Wren had those scars. Wren was down a kidney.

He didn't say any of it. Out loud, it would be real.

"Get in. We're going back."

Nobody spoke in the car. Mom thumbed through her phone—every picture of me a school badge shot. Not one taken with the family.

Her hands wouldn't hold still.

The phone rang.

The lab.

She answered. She could barely keep her grip on it.

"Luna, the results are in on the unidentified female. We ran her blood against the missing records." A beat of quiet down the line. "She's a clean match to your daughter. To Wren."

Mom couldn't get a sound out.

"There's more. Her wolf was torn out of her alive, the night of the full moon. A stolen wolf can't sit loose—it has to go into a new body that same night or it's gone by morning." The enforcer's voice slowed. "So we pulled every wolf that woke in the pack that night. There was only one."