Chapter 1

Aria’s POV

I was awake before the sun, the way I always was.

The healing house was still dark when I lit the candle and started grinding yarrow and comfrey into paste, and the smell of crushed herbs filled the small space the way it did every morning, familiar, and green, and mine. No one else was up yet. No one else ever was. The academy slept while I worked, and that was fine with me, because the quiet hours before dawn were the only hours of the day that was mine completely.

Two years.

Two years I’d lived in this pack, healed half the wolves in it, and most of them still didn’t know my name. Herb girl. The healer. Sometimes just a jerk of the chin in my direction when they wanted something. I cleaned the split knuckle and wrapped it, and the trainee looked past me the whole time, the way you’d look past a piece of furniture that happened to be useful.

I used to let it hurt.

I didn’t anymore. Or I told myself I didn’t, which came to almost the same thing, and the small ache that lived underneath it was quiet enough that I could pretend not to hear it most days.

A passing wolf outside the window said something to her friend about the plus-size of me, something dismissive and cruel and so unoriginal I could have finished the sentence myself. I’d heard every version of it. In the Vale pack, worth was measured in two things how strong you were and how you looked, and I had been quietly ranked at the bottom of both since the day I arrived.

I kept wrapping the knuckle.

The words landed somewhere they’d worn smooth a long time ago.

Halda came in near the end of the morning rush.

She was one of the senior healers, an older she-wolf with grey threading through her braid and a way of arriving exactly when the work was finished, and she moved through the healing house inspecting the morning’s patients with a critical eye that softened when she found every one of them already mending clean.

“Good,” she said, mostly to herself.

Then the training master stuck his head through the door to ask how the injured trainees were faring, and Halda straightened and told him they were healing well under her care, and he nodded, satisfied, and left.

I said nothing.

I ground a fresh batch of comfrey and let her have it, the way I always did, because I’d learned something in two years at the Vale pack that I’d learned the hard way somewhere else, too.

Being invisible was safer than being seen.

Every time in my life that I’d been noticed, really noticed, it had gone badly. So I let Halda take the credit, and I kept my head down, and I told myself this was fine, this was the life I’d chosen, and if it was lonelier than I’d imagined when I chose it, well. That was mine to carry.

And then Celeste walked in, and the whole morning got brighter.

“There you are,” she said, like she’d been looking for me, like I was someone worth looking for. “Goddess, you look exhausted. Did you even sleep?”

“A little,” I said, and I felt myself smile, the real one, the one that only came out for her.

Celeste was the single warm thing in my life at the Vale pack, and I never quite got over the strangeness of it. She was beautiful in the effortless way the pack prized, the kind of wolf who turned heads without trying, and popular and high-status, and for reasons I’d never fully understood, she was mine. My friend. The one wolf in the entire pack who said my name, who asked how I’d slept, who saw me when everyone else looked straight through.

“I saved you this,” she said, and produced a sweet pastry from the morning meal, wrapped in a cloth napkin, still faintly warm.

Something in my chest went soft.

It was such a small thing. A pastry. But no one else in this whole pack thought to save me anything, and Celeste did it without making a fuss, like it was nothing, like of course she’d bring me breakfast, and I took it and felt absurdly, embarrassingly grateful.

“You didn’t have to,” I said.

“I wanted to.” She hopped up onto the counter, swinging her legs, settling in to gossip the way she did most mornings. “You work too hard, and this pack doesn’t deserve you. Now. Tell me everything. Who came in this morning? Did that awful boy from the eastern line finally break his nose like he’s been threatening to?”

I laughed, and she laughed, and for a little while the healing house was warm.

This was the thing that got me through.

The ease of it. The way Celeste leaned on my counter and made the mornings feel less lonely, the way she remembered small details about the wolves I mentioned, the way she lit up my day just by choosing to spend part of hers with me. I loved her the way you love the one person who saw you when no one else did.

If there were small wrong notes, I didn’t hear them.

If her compliments sometimes carried a faint sting. 'You’d be so pretty if it’s brave of you to,' I told myself I was imagining it. If I always seemed to feel a little smaller after she left than I had before she arrived, I put it down to my crookedness, my own bottomless need, not anything she was doing.

She was my best friend.

I was too grateful to have one at all to look at it too closely.

“So,” Celeste said, and her voice went light and curious in the way it did every few days. “You never did tell me. Where were you before you came here?”

There it was.

She asked it in different forms all the time, where I came from, why a healer as skilled as me had turned up two years ago with no pack and no history, and what I was doing before Vale. Always gently. Always with that warm, harmless smile. And I always did the same thing.

“Oh, you know,” I said, waving a hand. “Nowhere interesting. Small pack, up north. Fell apart. Here I am.”

“You never say the name.”

“You never say yours when you’re avoiding a question either,” I said, teasing, and she laughed and let it go.

But I caught it, the way her smile stayed on her mouth and left her eyes, just for a second, the way she filed my deflection away somewhere behind those pretty eyes before the warmth came flooding back.

I told myself I imagined that too.

So I left.

By the time I came back out, the academy had woken fully, and the yard was alive with training.

I stood in the healing house doorway for a moment and watched it, the young wolves sparring and posturing, the older ones barking corrections, the whole yard loud, and underneath the noise, there was a current of something else this morning, a kind of held-breath anticipation, because everyone was waiting for one wolf who hadn’t appeared yet.

Everyone was waiting for Alpha Roman Vale.

You couldn’t spend a morning at the academy without hearing his name.

Roman Vale. The future Alpha. The wolf the whole pack orbited without quite realizing they were doing it. I heard three separate conversations about him before midday his strength, his bloodline, the way he’d taken down two seasoned warriors in a spar last week, and the way every unmated female in the pack was quietly, desperately hoping to catch his eye.

And the Moon Ceremony was coming.

I heard that too, and the speculation about whom she would name as Roman’s fated mate was reaching a fever pitch. Everyone had a theory. Everyone had a favorite. Every prominent, beautiful female in the pack was privately certain it might be her.

And I stood in my doorway and felt the thing I never let myself feel, the thing I’d never told a living soul.

The mate pull.

I’d felt it for months.

It made no sense, and I was ashamed of it, so I’d buried it as deep as I could, but there was an inexplicable tug toward Roman Vale that I couldn’t name and couldn’t explain. The one time our paths had crossed up close, months ago, when he’d come to the healing house with a training injury and barely looked at me, my wolf had stirred in a way it never had for anyone, a way it never had at all, and I’d spent every day since telling myself it meant nothing.

Because it did mean nothing.

A wolf like Roman Vale would never look twice at a wolf like me. He was everything the pack prized, and I was everything it overlooked, and the pull I felt was just my foolishness, my own hopeless heart reaching for something it could never have. I knew that. I’d made my peace with it, or I’d told myself I had.

I had never spoken of it. Not to anyone. Not even to Celeste.

Some things you keep, even from the people who see you.

An elder climbed the announcement platform, called everyone's attention, the yard went quiet, and my heart did a small nervous thing without my permission.

“The Moon Ceremony,” the elder called out, his voice carrying across the packed yard, “will be held at the coming full moon.”

The pack erupted.

I’d known it was near, but hearing it declared made it real, and the excitement that rolled through the assembled wolves was electric. The Moon Ceremony was the most important night in a young wolf’s life, the sacred, binding, public revelation of fated mates before the whole pack, the night the Goddess Herself reached down and named who belonged to whom. Every un-mated wolf in the yard now had a countdown to the night that could define the entire rest of their life.

And the speculation, which had been simmering for weeks, boiled over.

I heard it all around me. Roman. Who’ll she name for Roman? A cluster of beautiful, high-born females near the front were practically preening, certain that this might be their night, that the Goddess might hand them the future Alpha and everything that came with him. The whole pack assumed, expected, that Roman would be matched with someone worthy. Someone beautiful. Someone strong. Someone highborn.

I felt the pull toward Roman flare in my chest, and then I felt the immediate, practiced crush of my hope, quick and merciless, the way I’d trained myself.

Worthy.

A wolf like me was not what anyone meant by that word.

Celeste found me in the crowd.

She always could, somehow, no matter how well I hid myself, and she slipped through the press of bodies to my side and took my hand, threading her fingers through mine, and I felt that same helpless gratitude I always felt when she chose to stand with me instead of up front with the wolves who mattered.

She was glowing with the ceremony’s excitement, her eyes bright, her whole face lit up, and she leaned close to share the moment with me the way a true friend would.

But I missed what I’d have caught if I’d been looking—something moving behind her bright eyes as Roman’s name rippled through the crowd around us. Something that wasn’t exciting at all. Something that was counting.

“Can you believe it’s finally happening?” she breathed.

“I know,” I said.

Then she squeezed my hand and said it.

“Everyone expects Roman Vale to be matched to someone worthy of him.” She said it warmly, lightly, like she was just sharing pack gossip, her eyes on the platform. “Someone special. You know how it is.”

The words landed like a quiet blade, so gentle I almost didn’t feel them go in.

Because I did know how it was. I knew exactly where the pack placed my value, and hearing Celeste say it like this, even kindly, maybe even meaning it as a soft warning, a gentle don’t get your hopes up, sweet Aria told me she knew too. Told me that even Celeste, my best friend, the one wolf who saw me, placed me exactly where everyone else did.

Below the line of worthiness.

And underneath her warm, harmless smile, if I’d been looking, I might have wondered how she knew to say it. I might have wondered whether Celeste had guessed the secret I’d never told her, the pull I’d never spoken of, and whether this comment was as innocent as it sounded.

So I said nothing.

I held the secret of the pull I’d felt toward Roman Vale for months behind a small, agreeable smile, and I let Celeste believe I agreed with her that of course someone like me could never be worthy of someone like Roman, that the very idea was gently, obviously absurd.

I swallowed the hope the way I’d swallowed it a hundred times before, quick and quiet, until there was nothing showing on my face but that soft, agreeable nothing I’d perfected over two years of being invisible.

And I had no way of knowing, standing there at the back of the crowd with Celeste’s hand in mine and my hope freshly buried, that I was wrong about all of it.

That the Goddess had already chosen.