The healer gave me three days to live. Caleb gave me a slap.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let me back up ten minutes.

"Elena, are you sure you want to do this now?" Dr. Vincent stood beside me in the corner of the Pack Celebration Hall, his voice barely above a whisper. His eyes kept darting to the medical report clutched in my hand. The paper was already damp from my palm.

"I'm sure." I looked down at the words I'd memorized an hour ago. *Wolf Spirit Decay. Terminal. Estimated remaining time: 72 hours.* "I only have three days, Vincent. There's no better time."

He didn't argue. He just pressed his lips together and stepped back, the way people do when they've decided to let you walk off a cliff.

The hall was packed. A thousand white roses hung from the ceiling — Lydia's favorite — and the band was playing something soft and elegant. A banner stretched across the far wall: *Congratulations Lydia Vance — Lead Warrior.* My sister. My husband's favorite person.

I stood up from my corner. The dark green dress hung loose on me now. I'd lost twelve pounds in the last month. Caleb bought me this dress three years ago, told me I looked like a forest spirit in it. He didn't notice I was wearing it tonight. He wasn't even here — supposedly on a two-day border patrol. Supposedly.

I walked to the center of the hall. My heels clicked on white marble. A few heads turned. Then a few more. Being Luna still meant something, even when your own pack looked at you like an inconvenience.

I didn't raise my voice. I didn't need to.

"As of tonight, I formally request a Severing Ritual." The words came out steady. Steadier than I expected. "My wolf will be gone in three days. I want the bond cut clean before I go."

The music didn't stop — the band just kind of stuttered and died, one instrument at a time. The silence that followed was so thick I could hear the champagne bubbles popping in someone's glass.

Then Sarah — my mother — dropped her wine. The glass hit the marble and shattered. She stared at me with her mouth open, but not in concern. In fury.

And Lydia. God, Lydia was good. Her face went white on cue. Her hand flew to her chest. Her eyes went wide and wet. If I didn't know better, I'd have believed it myself. But I'd watched my sister rehearse that exact expression in the bathroom mirror when we were fourteen, practicing how to cry on command.

The main doors slammed open.

Caleb.

He stood in the doorway, still in his patrol jacket, his dark hair windblown. He was supposed to be at the northern border for two more days. He'd come back early — for Lydia's ceremony. Not for the wife who'd been coughing blood into the bathroom sink every morning for a month.

His eyes found me immediately. Not with worry. Not with confusion.

With anger.

"Elena!" He crossed the hall in long, hard strides. "What the hell do you think you're doing?"

"Caleb, I need to tell you—"

"You need to tell me why you're making a scene at Lydia's celebration." He stopped in front of me. Close enough that I could smell it — cedar. His cologne. That damn cedar scent I used to bury my face into every morning, pressing my nose into his pillow before he woke up, breathing him in like he was oxygen.

Tonight it smelled like someone else's husband.

"I'm dying, Caleb."

He didn't hear me. Or he chose not to. His eyes flicked to the frozen crowd, to Lydia's perfectly stricken face, and I watched him do the math he always did — *Elena is causing a problem. Lydia is the victim. Fix it.*

His hand came up fast.

The slap cracked across my face and snapped my head sideways. I stumbled back, my hip catching the edge of a table. Glasses rattled. Someone gasped.

I didn't scream. I didn't cry. I just lifted my hand to my mouth. My fingers came away red. Not from the slap — from the blood already sitting in my throat, waiting.

The cough hit me before I could stop it. It ripped through my chest like something with claws, and I doubled over. A mouthful of dark blood splattered across the white marble floor. Under the chandelier light, it spread in a shape that almost looked like a bloom. Like one of Lydia's white roses, painted red.

The hall went dead silent. A different kind of silent than before. This one had fear in it.

Caleb's expression shifted — just a fraction. His brow creased. He saw the blood. For one second, I thought—

Lydia moved first. She rushed to his side, gripping his arm, pressing herself against him.

"Alpha, please don't be angry at her." Her voice trembled perfectly. "She's not well. Today is just... just not her day."

Every word out of her mouth was a nail. *Not well* — like I had a cold. *Not her day* — like I'd chosen to be dramatic. She wasn't defending me. She was framing me. And everyone in this room was buying it.

My mother's voice sliced into my mind through the pack link. Sharp. Cold. Familiar.

*"Disgusting. Ruining your sister's day on purpose. You've been doing this since you were a child. No wonder no one loves you."*

I stared at the blood on the marble. My blood. On the floor of a party thrown for my sister, in a hall paid for with pack funds I'd managed for three years, surrounded by people I'd served as Luna since I was nineteen.

I closed the mind-link. Cut it clean, like slamming a door. Three years of swallowing her words, and tonight I just... stopped.

Caleb snatched the medical report from my hand. He scanned it for maybe two seconds.

"Wolf Spirit Decay?" He laughed. Actually laughed. A short, cold sound. "Elena, your lies keep getting lazier."

He tore the report in half. Then in quarters. The pieces drifted down to the marble, landing in my blood.

He turned away. His arm went around Lydia's waist. They walked toward the door together, and he didn't look back. Not once.

I stood there. In a too-loose green dress, with blood on my lips and torn paper at my feet, in a room full of people who wouldn't meet my eyes.

Dr. Vincent appeared beside me. He didn't say anything. He just put his hand under my elbow and guided me out the side door.

---

The car was quiet. Vincent drove slowly, both hands on the wheel, eyes straight ahead. The kind of careful silence a doctor keeps when he doesn't know what to say to a patient who's out of time.

I watched the trees blur past the window. Black pines under a half-moon.

"Elena." He cleared his throat. "Do you want me to tell him the full report? The part about the black obsidian traces in your blood?"

Black obsidian. The part that meant this wasn't natural decay. The part that meant someone had done this to me.

I kept my eyes on the window.

"No, Vincent." My voice sounded far away, even to me. "He's earned his ignorance. Let him keep it a little longer."

Vincent's jaw tightened, but he nodded. He pulled up to Luna House — the house I'd lived in alone for the past eight months, ever since Caleb started sleeping at the pack compound. *For security reasons,* he'd said. Lydia's quarters were in the pack compound too. Funny coincidence.

"Do you want me to help you inside?"

"No. I'm fine."

I wasn't fine. But I'd been saying that for three years, and the word had lost all meaning.

I got out of the car and walked to the front door. My legs were steady. That surprised me. I stopped on the porch and turned around.

Down the road, in the opposite direction, I could see taillights disappearing around the bend. Caleb's car. Taking him and Lydia to dinner somewhere. A celebration after the celebration. The Alpha and his Lead Warrior. His Luna left behind with blood drying on her chin.

I stood there for a long time. The wind picked up. Cool against my bare arms, my neck, the damp spot on my dress where I'd tried to wipe the blood away.

I wasn't cold.

That was the strange part. I should have been freezing. But something had shifted inside me — quietly, in the space between the slap and the torn report and the taillights vanishing into the dark. Something I'd been gripping so hard for so long that my fingers had gone numb, and I hadn't even noticed until I finally, finally let go.

"So this is what it feels like," I whispered. "When you stop."

Not hate. Not heartbreak. Just... stop.

I pushed the door open. Walked inside. And when it clicked shut behind me, I heard it — not a snap, not a crack. Something softer. Quieter. Like a thread that had been pulled too thin for too long, finally releasing.

Not breaking.

Just letting go.

I didn’t go upstairs. I didn’t take off my coat. The second I walked through the front door of the Luna House, I went straight to the kitchen and walked toward his coffee mug.

The marble island was completely empty. Caleb wasn't here. I knew he wouldn't be. He was across the territory right now, hosting an after-party to celebrate Lydia’s latest achievement.

The kitchen still smelled like the burnt edges of the toast I made him for breakfast. He sat right at this counter twelve hours ago. He took exactly two bites of the eggs I cooked, checked his phone, and rushed out the door to train with her.

I stopped at the coffee maker. Seven mugs hung on the metal rack above it. I reached for the one right in the middle.

Dark gray ceramic. A thin gold line rimming the top.

Caleb bought this for me on my twentieth birthday. A year later, I gave it back to him as an engagement gift the night he made me his Luna.

I pulled the mug off the hook. The ceramic felt cold and heavy in my palm. I flipped it upside down.

You had to catch the light just right to see it. I tilted it toward the stove light. There it was. A single line of text carved deep into the base.

I did it myself at the pack forge. It took me fourteen straight days. I worked the tools until my fingers bled, and I shattered three mugs before I finally got it right. I was twenty years old, sitting by the forge fire, smiling like a fool. I kept thinking about how my mate would see this message every single morning.

*If you ever look down, I'm here.*

Three years.

Caleb drank his black coffee from this mug every single day for three years.

He never saw it. Not once.

I stared at the tiny carved letters. I didn't scream. I didn't throw the mug against the marble floor.

I turned the mug back over. I placed it gently on the counter, face up. I let my hand rest on the rim.

"From today on," I whispered to the empty room, "this isn't for him anymore."

I looked down into the empty gray bowl of the mug.

"This is for me. Every time I look down, I'll see it. I'm still alive. I'm still here."

***

Ten o'clock. I stood in the master bathroom and locked the heavy wooden door behind me.

I unzipped my makeup bag on the counter. I bypassed the lipstick and the mascara, reaching all the way to the bottom. I pulled out a flathead screwdriver. I hid it there a week ago, waiting for a night when I knew Caleb wouldn't come home.

I walked over to the medicine cabinet above the sink. I gripped the screwdriver and went straight to work on the back panel.

Four screws. I twisted them out one by one. They dropped into the porcelain sink with loud, sharp clinks. I jammed my fingernails under the edge of the mirrored panel and pulled it away from the wall.

A flat, rectangular compartment sat built into the dark space behind the drywall.

I reached in. My fingers brushed against cracked leather. I pulled out a thick notebook. The corners were peeling. The binding was frayed.

I sat down right on the cold tile floor. I crossed my legs and rested the book in my lap.

I started writing in this notebook when I was eleven years old. I opened to the very first page. Every single page had the exact same layout. Three columns.

The date.

The physical symptoms my body suffered.

The events happening in the Vance family on that exact day.

I suspected the truth for a year. I tracked the patterns. But I never put all the pieces together in one sitting. Not until tonight.

I flipped the pages. My hands shook so hard the paper rattled, but my eyes were completely dry.

*April 7. Age 11.*

A sudden 104-degree fever hit me in the middle of the night. I almost seized. That exact same day, nine-year-old Lydia entered the pup combat tournament. She won first place in the entire region.

I turned the page.

*November 2. Age 13.*

Passed out in the middle of the school hallway. I woke up totally blind in my right eye for six hours. The pack doctor had no explanation. That exact same day, the Elders bypassed all age restrictions and made Lydia a warrior trainee.

I turned another page. My breathing grew shallow.

*August 23. Age 16.*

The night of my first shift. Or rather, my failed shift. My bones cracked but wouldn't turn. I threw up blood three times under the full moon while the rest of the pack ran. That exact same night, Lydia shifted perfectly on her first try. The whole pack cheered for her. They called it a miracle.

I skipped ahead. I found the page from three years ago.

*My 18th Birthday.*

The afternoon before Caleb and I announced our engagement to the pack. I was standing in the dress shop. My heart completely stopped beating for twelve seconds. I flatlined. I woke up with a bruised chest and oxygen tubes in my nose.

That exact same morning, the Elders stood before the pack council. They named Lydia the most talented young warrior in Vance family history.

Seventy-two entries.

I flipped through every single one. I read every date. Every symptom. Every family triumph.

Seventy-two times my body broke down, failed, or nearly died. Seventy-two times Lydia gained power, speed, or glory.

Every single entry was a perfect pair.

*I used to think I was just unlucky.*

I stared at the final page.

*That my wolf was just weak. That God didn't love me.*

I dragged my thumb over the ink of the seventy-second entry.

*Turns out it wasn't God. It was a nine-year-old girl in the room next to mine, stealing pieces of me while I slept.*

The bathroom went dead silent.

*And our mother... let her.*

I dropped the notebook onto the tiles.

I held up my left wrist under the harsh bathroom vanity lights. I pulled my sleeve back. The crescent moon birthmark sat right over my pulse point. It glimmered with a faint silver light.

It was the mark of the purest wolf blood in our pack's history. It meant I was supposed to be the strongest.

I stared at the silver crescent. I remembered Lydia standing in the doorway of my bedroom when she was nine years old. I remembered the way her eyes locked onto my wrist. She didn't look at it with admiration. She looked at it with absolute hunger.

Now I knew why. She didn't want to beat me. She wanted to be me. And my mother helped her take it.

I picked the notebook back up. I snapped it shut.

I didn't put it back in the hidden compartment behind the mirror. I left the medicine cabinet completely exposed.

I stood up, unlocked the bathroom door, and walked out into the master bedroom.

I went straight to Caleb's side of the huge king bed. I pulled open his top nightstand drawer. This was the drawer where he kept his favorite silver cufflinks. The drawer he opened every single morning without fail to get ready for his duties as Alpha.

I placed the worn leather notebook right inside, setting it directly on top of his expensive watch box.

I pushed the drawer closed. It shut with a soft click.

"Caleb," I said to the empty room. "I put the proof right next to your hand."

I stepped back from the bed.

"Let's see if, after three years, you can look down just once."

I turned off the bedroom lights. I walked downstairs in the dark.

I went into the living room and sat down on the edge of the sofa. I didn't look out the window. I didn't wait for Caleb's headlights to sweep across the driveway. I knew he wasn't coming home tonight. He was with her. He was always with her.

I pulled my phone out of my pocket. The screen lit up my face in the dark room.

I opened my contacts. I bypassed Caleb's name. I bypassed my mother's number.

I scrolled all the way to the bottom. I found a number I hadn't called in twelve years. A number I was strictly forbidden from keeping.

Rosa Delgado.

I pressed dial. I put the phone to my ear and listened to the line ring.

"You finally called me, you crazy bitch."

Rosa’s voice cut through the damp pre-dawn air. I opened the passenger door of her beat-up Ford pickup and climbed inside. The clock on the dashboard blinked 5:17 AM.

I hadn't seen her in twelve years. She didn't look at me right away. She kept her hands gripped tight on the steering wheel, staring straight ahead through the dirty windshield. In the back seat, her metal forensic kits clattered together as she shifted the truck into gear. Rosa was a lone-wolf medical examiner now. Back then, she was just my best friend.

"My mother called my dad twelve years ago," Rosa said. Her voice shook. Her eyes were rimmed with red. "She told him if I ever played with you again, she’d have the local packs revoke our medical licenses. Because the Delgado family was 'too low-tier' for a Vance. Do you know how much I missed you?"

I swallowed hard. "I missed you too, Ro."

"The stuff you said on the phone last night," Rosa continued, finally turning her head. "I don't want to believe a single word of it. But I’m driving you anyway. Whatever we need to find, I’m with you."

"Lydia is siphoning my wolf spirit," I said. I kept my voice flat. "She started when we were nine."

Rosa’s face went completely pale in the dim light of the dashboard. "Elena. That requires a soul-binding sacrifice. That is forbidden magic. You’re talking about a death sentence if she gets caught."

"I know." I pointed down the road. "Take the next left. My parents went to the Northside council meeting today. Lydia stayed at Caleb’s pack house. The Vance estate is totally empty. We need to go to the basement."

Rosa hit the gas.

Forty-five minutes later, we stood inside the Vance family apothecary.

It was located in the west wing of the ancestral house. The room smelled sharply of dried wolfsbane and old parchment. It was perfectly clean. Too clean. The kind of clean that hid things.

I walked straight past the rows of glass jars to an old oak cabinet in the southwest corner.

"Your dad’s private vault," Rosa whispered, standing right behind me. "We used to dare each other to touch it when we were kids."

"My mother always said only the Alpha could open it," I said.

I reached under the collar of my shirt and pulled out a thin silver key on a chain. John Vance slipped this into my hand on the night of my eighteenth birthday. He told me I was the eldest daughter, and there were things I needed to know. He never explained what those things were. He just gave me the key and walked away.

I inserted the silver key into the heavy iron lock. It clicked.

I pulled the heavy doors open. The top shelves held rare herbs and pack treaties. I ignored them. I dropped to my knees and reached for the bottom shelf. I pulled out a heavy, leather-bound ledger. The gold lettering on the spine read: *Soul-Records*.

Every noble family kept one. It tracked the wolf spirit fluctuations of every bloodline member.

I opened the book and flipped through the heavy pages until I found my name.

Rosa crouched next to me. She shined a small penlight on the page.

I stared at the ink. From the day I was born until I turned nine, my wolf spirit index was a solid, thick black line holding steady at ninety-eight percent. I was an Alpha-born prodigy.

Then, right at my ninth birthday, the line cracked. It started a slow, agonizing descent. It never spiked. It never recovered. By the bottom of the page, marking my twenty-third year, the number was written in stark red ink: *7%*.

"Turn to Lydia’s page," Rosa demanded.

I flipped fifty pages forward.

We looked at my sister’s chart. Lydia was born weak. Her line hovered around twenty percent for her early childhood. But on her ninth birthday, her line started to climb.

I placed my page next to hers. The two lines were a perfect mirror. Every time my energy dipped a fraction of a percent, Lydia’s energy rose by the exact same amount.

Rosa’s hands started shaking. She touched the paper.

"Elena, this isn't a normal siphon," Rosa said. She sounded sick. "Normal energy theft leaves uneven traces. The lines spike and crash. This line is too steady. It’s surgically precise. It’s like something is acting as a filter, measuring your energy drop by drop and feeding it directly into her system."

"A medium," I said.

"Look at the margins," Rosa pointed.

At the edge of every single entry where my energy dropped, my father’s handwriting noted a tiny abbreviation: *Med. fluc. Obsidian-based.*

Medium fluctuation. Obsidian-based.

My chest suddenly felt tight. A memory slammed into my brain.

Lydia, nine years old, running up to me in the garden. She threw her arms around me. *I'm so glad you're my sister, El,* she whispered.

I remembered the cold, hard pressure of her necklace pressing against my skin. It was a black obsidian pendant. Sarah gave it to her that morning. Lydia never took it off. For twelve years, she wore it every single day. Every time she hugged me, every time she pretended to comfort me when Caleb ignored me, that stone pressed right against my heart.

"The necklace," I whispered.

"What?" Rosa asked.

"Lydia’s black pendant. She’s worn it since we were nine."

Rosa stood up. She grabbed her forensic kit. "Take me to the basement. Now."

The steps down to the family ritual altar were steep and made of rough stone. I was banned from this room as a child. It was sacred ground. Today, I walked down without hesitating.

The basement was cold and smelled of damp earth. At the far east end stood the stone altar.

I didn't look at the altar. I walked straight to the dark corner on the right side. When I was nine, Sarah used to make me kneel in this exact spot for hours whenever I "upset" Lydia. She told me it would teach me humility.

I dropped to my knees. I ran my fingers over the stone floor. One of the bricks felt loose. I jammed my fingernails into the crack and pulled. The brick slid out.

Inside the dark alcove sat a small wooden box. It was secured with a cheap, tarnished brass padlock.

I didn't bother looking for a key. I grabbed a heavy iron candlestick from the floor and smashed it down on the padlock. Once. Twice. The cheap metal snapped.

I pulled the lock off and opened the lid.

Inside lay seven pieces of yellow parchment. They were covered in jagged, dark red runes.

Rosa dropped to her knees beside me. She gasped. She actually scrambled backward a few inches, her hands flying to her mouth.

"Ro. What is it?" I asked.

"Mate Bond forgery," Rosa breathed. She stared at the papers like they were venomous snakes. "I've only read about this in the black archives. You burn these runes, and they plant a false instinct inside a target's subconscious. They manufacture the feeling of a fated mate."

My blood ran cold.

Caleb.

For three years, I thought Caleb just didn't love me. I thought he looked at Lydia and naturally felt the pull of the Moon Goddess. I thought I was simply unlovable, broken, and rejected.

But it wasn't real. None of it was real. His preference for my sister was magically manufactured.

"Look at the stains," Rosa said. She pulled a cotton swab and a small vial of clear liquid from her kit. She rubbed the swab against a dark red smudge on the first parchment. The liquid turned bright blue.

"Human blood?" I asked.

"Wolf blood," Rosa corrected. "And I guarantee it’s yours. The ritual requires the blood of the person you are replacing."

I looked at the seven pieces of paper.

"Seven rituals," I said. "Seven times."

I thought back over my life. "When I was nine, I collapsed with a fever that lasted a month. At twelve, I coughed up blood for a week. Fourteen, sixteen, eighteen..." I paused. "Eighteen. The night before I got engaged to Caleb. I passed out in the hallway. They blamed it on anxiety."

"Twenty. Twenty-two," Rosa finished, pointing at the last two papers. "Every time you got sick, they were renewing the forgery spell."

I reached into the box. I picked up the first piece of parchment. It felt heavy. I flipped it over.

There was writing on the back. It was done in messy pencil. The handwriting of a child.

*If she dies, he'll love me by default.*

I picked up the next one. Age twelve. The handwriting was slightly better.

*If she dies, he'll love me by default.*

I picked up the last one. Age twenty-two. Written just last year in Lydia’s elegant, sweeping cursive.

*If she dies, he'll love me by default.*

One intention. Written seven times. Over thirteen years.

I didn't cry. I didn't scream. I just sat back on the hard stone floor. The cold seeped through my jeans. I stared at the dark wall. I sat there for three full minutes. The silence in the basement was absolute.

Something inside me finally snapped. The sad, desperate Elena who just wanted her family to love her died right there on the basement floor.

Rosa pulled out her phone. The flash blinded me for a second as she took pictures of every single parchment. She shoved the phone in her pocket and grabbed her kit.

"We are leaving," Rosa said. Her voice was pure steel. "Elena, we are going to Caleb right now. Right this second. We are taking these papers. We are taking the soul-record. We are going to march into his office and slam this evidence right on his desk."

I looked at her. I slowly shook my head.

I picked up the seven pieces of parchment. I neatly stacked them. I placed them back inside the wooden box. I closed the lid. I picked up the broken pieces of the brass lock. I pulled a piece of wire from my pocket and rigged the lock to look whole. I hooked it back onto the latch.

I slid the box back into the dark alcove and pushed the stone brick perfectly into place.

I stood up and brushed the dirt off my knees.

"No, Ro."

"Elena, what the hell are you doing?" Rosa grabbed my arm. "This proves everything!"

"If I put this on his desk today, he will look at Lydia," I said. "And she will cry. She will tell him she didn't know. She will blame our parents. And Caleb will believe her, because a twelve-year forged Mate Bond doesn't break in a single day. He is wired to protect her."

"So we just do nothing?" Rosa demanded.

"I didn't say that."

I paused. A small smile pulled at the corners of my mouth. It felt strange on my face. It was the first time I smiled all day. It felt as sharp as a razor.

"I haven't seen enough of her necklace yet," I said softly.

Rosa stared at me. She took a slow step back.

"Tonight is the Vance family banquet," I said. "Caleb will be there. The elders will be there. The whole pack will be there. I want to see exactly what is hanging around my sweet sister's neck."

I turned and walked up the basement stairs. I didn't look back.

Rosa followed me. I knew what she was thinking. The woman who called her crying last night was gone. The woman walking up the stairs wasn't looking for an escape anymore.

I was looking for a slaughter.