The leather straps cut deep into my wrists, biting into my skin.

I’d lost track of time in the windowless basement of the Ironveil church. It smelled of damp stone and rotting incense. They’d stripped away my coat, leaving me shivering in a white ceremonial dress—the exact one meant for our mate-bonding ritual. Now, instead of honoring me, the hem soaked in the murky water of a stone baptismal font they’d repurposed for a witch hunt.

A confessional. An execution stage. Take your pick.

I kept my breathing shallow. Every gasp made the strap across my chest bite harder. I needed to stay sharp.

Ethan stood three steps away.

Ethan Hollow. The Alpha heir of the Ironveil Pack. My fated mate. The man whose scent still made my stupid wolf whimper for him. He stared at the floor, fists clenched at his sides, playing the stoic, untouchable leader. But through our frayed, dying bond, I felt him shaking.

Good.

His sister, Victoria, clung to his left arm. She played the fragile victim perfectly—pale, wide-eyed, always looking a breath away from tears. She whispered into his ear, a relentless, toxic hum. I’d spent six months watching her poison this pack against me, and she was almost finished.

Soren, the pack healer, stepped up with his moonstone staff. He was in Victoria's pocket, bought and paid for long ago. He jammed the glowing stone against my temple.

Cold magic pierced my skull, digging violently for my secrets. It didn't ask nicely.

My vision blurred. *Now or never.*

"I'm three months pregnant!" I screamed, my voice raw and echoing off the stone walls. "It's your heir, Ethan! The only cure for your bloodline's curse!"

The room went dead silent.

Ethan’s head snapped up. I knew every micro-expression on his face. For a split second, sheer panic and desperate hope cracked his cold Alpha mask.

Victoria felt his hesitation. She tightened her grip, pressing her cheek against his chest.

"She’s lying, Ethan," Victoria pleaded, her voice dripping with fake pity. "She’d say anything to save herself. A traitor's desperate lie, brother. Don't let her manipulate you."

*Brother.* Everyone in the room swallowed that lie. I watched them accept her innocent act without question.

Ethan looked at me, then down at Victoria. The crack in his mask snapped shut. His eyes turned to ice.

"Ethan, stop him!" I begged, thrashing against the restraints. "You can feel the truth through the bond! You know I'm not lying!"

"There is no bond," Ethan said. His voice wasn’t an Alpha’s roar. It was a cold, empty whisper. "She's lying. Tear the truth out of her, Soren."

Soren twisted the staff. The magic turned into a razor, slicing directly into my brain.

I screamed. I didn't want to give them the satisfaction, but the agony was absolute. It ripped through my mind, but something much worse was happening in my body.

Then came the warmth.

Slow. Thick. Slipping down my inner thighs beneath the white dress.

It wasn’t fear. I knew exactly what it was.

This was my baby dying.

I dropped my chin, panting heavily. A dark red stain bloomed at the hem of my white dress. It spread violently, swallowing the fabric, climbing past my knees, reaching the water of the font. The clear water rapidly turned crimson.

I stopped feeling the cold stone under my feet. I stopped feeling the leather cutting into my wrists.

I raised my head.

Ethan was staring at the blood. The stoic, untouchable Alpha was gone. His face was completely bloodless, his eyes wide with a pure, primal terror I had never seen before.

I held his gaze.

I didn't have the strength to speak, but I made sure he could read my lips.

*It's a girl.*

The blood kept pouring.

And I smiled.

Not because I had won. But because he would have to live with this. Every time he closed his eyes, he would see this font, this dress, and the blood of his unborn daughter. I was going to make sure it haunted him forever.

Victoria gasped, stepping back in horror.

Ethan stood frozen, completely paralyzed.

The last thing I saw before the darkness took me was his face—the exact moment his arrogant certainty shattered into soul-crushing regret.

The staff tore through me like a key turning in a lock I didn't know I had.

And the first image that came wasn't Ethan's face.

It wasn't the font, or the blood, or Victoria's soft, poisonous mouth.

It was me. Twelve years old. Barefoot on the iron spikes of Ironveil's outer gate, the points pressing up through the thin skin of my soles, not quite breaking through. Not yet. I was holding myself very still, the way you learn to hold yourself when pain is the only thing keeping you upright.

No one opened the door.

The staff didn't care what I wanted to remember. It went digging.

---

I was nine when my parents sold me.

Not to a pack. Not to anyone with a name I was allowed to know. A man who smelled like copper and river water came to our house on a Tuesday, and my mother made tea, and they talked in the kitchen while I sat on the stairs and listened to the sound of numbers being exchanged. A price. My price.

I remember thinking it was higher than I expected.

The cage was silver. Not bars—actual silver, the walls, the floor, the low ceiling I couldn't stand up straight under after I turned eleven and grew three inches in four months. The man who bought me had theories about what I was. He kept records in a leather notebook, columns of dates and measurements and observations. He bled me on a schedule. He noted how the silver slowed the bleeding but never stopped it entirely. He noted the way my wounds healed—faster than human, slower than wolf. He noted the faint shimmer at the back of my neck that appeared when I was feverish or frightened.

He called it an anomaly.

I called it the thing that was going to get me out of here.

The day I escaped, I didn't plan it. I'd stopped planning things by then. Planning required a version of the future you could believe in, and I'd run out of those. What happened was simpler: he left the notebook too close to the cage door, and when he reached in to retrieve it, I grabbed his wrist and didn't let go. I bit down until something gave. I don't know if it was his wrist or mine. I think it was mine.

I ran anyway.

Three days. No shoes. No coat. The silver had done something to my sense of direction—or maybe that was just hunger—but the collar around my neck had a name pressed into the back of it, stamped into the metal like an afterthought.

Ironveil.

I followed it like a compass.

---

The gate was taller than I remembered imagining it.

I stood on the spikes because the ground in front of them was lower, and I needed the height to see over the wall. I needed someone inside to see me. I stood there and I bled, slow and cold, into the iron, and I waited.

The night passed.

The sun came up gray and indifferent.

And then there were footsteps on the other side of the wall—unhurried, like someone on an early patrol who wasn't expecting anything—and a voice said, "What in the—"

The gate opened from the inside.

He was young. Seventeen, maybe eighteen, with a Beta's build and an expression caught somewhere between alarm and something more careful. He looked at my feet first. Then up at my face. Then he pulled off his coat without saying a word and wrapped it around my shoulders, and the warmth of it hit me so suddenly that my knees nearly went.

His name was Nathan Hollow.

I didn't know that yet. I didn't know anything yet except that someone had opened the door.

He crouched down to look at my feet, and then his hand moved—slowly, deliberately, like he was trying not to startle me—to the back of my neck. His fingers found the birthmark there. The one that shimmered faint silver when I was scared.

I felt him go very still.

When he looked up at me, something had changed in his face. Not the careful blankness people use when they're deciding whether to be afraid. Something quieter. More like grief.

"Silverblood," he said. Barely a sound.

I didn't know what that meant. I didn't ask.

He stood up. Looked back at the gate, then at me, then at the gate again. Then he pressed two fingers lightly against the birthmark—not hard, just enough to cover it—and his voice dropped to something I had to lean in to hear.

"Don't show them this. Not yet." A pause. "Not ever, if you can help it."

He said it like he was pressing a thumb over a fuse.

Then he picked me up—just lifted me, because my feet were useless and he'd apparently decided that was simply the situation—and carried me through the gate and into Ironveil.

He never told anyone about the birthmark.

Not that I knew of. Not for years.

---

The staff wrenched me back to the present like a hook through the jaw.

I was on the treatment table now—they'd moved me while I was under, or maybe I'd never fully tracked the transition. The stone room. The cold light. Soren's hands somewhere near my head, and the staff's compulsion fading to a dull, nauseating hum at the base of my skull.

I stared at the ceiling and I thought about Nathan's voice.

*Not ever, if you can help it.*

And then I thought about Victoria.

The thought arrived the way the worst realizations do—not with drama, just with a quiet, terrible click of pieces falling into place.

Victoria had known.

Not guessed. Known. She'd known about the birthmark from the beginning—or close enough to it that the difference didn't matter. Five years of watching me, testing me, pushing me toward Ethan with one hand and pulling the ground out from under me with the other. Five years of small cruelties and careful positioning, of making sure I was isolated enough that no one would question whatever came next.

She hadn't been trying to destroy me.

She'd been farming me.

Silverblood couldn't be extracted from a body at rest. The old texts—the ones I'd found in Ironveil's lower library three years ago, the ones I'd told myself were mythology—were specific about that. The blood had to be activated. Stressed. Pushed to the edge of something.

Like, for instance, pregnancy.

Like, for instance, a forced truth-compulsion on a woman three months along.

Like, for instance, right now.

Victoria didn't want Ethan's heir.

She wanted what the heir's existence had done to my blood.

She'd been waiting—patiently, methodically, with that soft wounded smile she wore like a weapon—for the exact moment when my body held the highest concentration of activated Silverblood possible. Mother and child together. Three hundred years of dormant lineage, finally live.

And she was going to drain us both dry.

I turned my head.

Victoria stood at the edge of the room, near the door, her dark eyes already on mine.

She wasn't smiling.

She didn't need to.

The cold from the moonstone staff still buzzed against the base of my skull, a phantom ache that wouldn’t let me forget where I was or what I’d just lost. If I closed my eyes, I could almost smell the iron tang of blood in the font. But shutting them only made the memories surge up harder—the truth-compulsion had opened something in me, and now the past wouldn’t stop spilling out, thick and raw.

She stole more than my brooch—she stole my voice.

I don’t remember the exact moment I realized it. Maybe it was gradual, a slow unthreading of self that started years ago, long before Ethan or Ironveil or the day my body became a battleground. But the first time Victoria Hollow wrapped her arms around me, crying soft and desperate into the crook of my neck, I believed her.

I was eighteen. Still new enough to Ironveil that the packhouse felt like a cage dressed up as a home. The day Victoria came back from boarding school, the whole house was thrown into a fever of preparation. Polished silver, new candles, a roast in the oven that made my stomach twist with longing. Ethan barely said a word that morning—he was always quieter around family, a tension I’d learned to read but never dared to name.

When Victoria finally arrived, it was all at once—door swinging wide, her arms flung around Ethan’s neck, her dark hair spilling down his back. Then she turned to me, eyes shiny with tears, and pressed herself into my chest as if she’d known me her whole life.

“I’m so glad you’re here,” she sobbed, her fingers cold on my bare arms. “Ethan told me everything. I’ll love you like a sister, I promise. Like a real one.”

I remember standing there, stiff, feeling the weight of her head against my shoulder. I wanted to believe her. I wanted family so badly it made my teeth ache. For twenty minutes, she cried. For twenty minutes, I patted her back, awkward and hopeful, letting her grief—real or not—bleed into me like ink into water.

Three days later, I found my grandmother’s last letter was missing. I’d kept it hidden, pressed between the pages of my diary, the paper soft with age, still carrying the faintest scent of lavender and smoke. It wasn’t just a letter—it was a goodbye I’d never gotten to say out loud. The words were mine, written by a hand that shook, full of the things I wanted to believe about myself.

I tore the room apart looking for it. Under the mattress, behind the loose brick in the wall, between the dresses in my closet. Nothing. I told myself I’d misplaced it. That the housekeeper had moved it while dusting. That I was being foolish.

A week later, Victoria read it at the dinner table.

She passed it off as a tribute to her father—a poem she claimed she’d written in his honor, words thick with loss and longing. Only I recognized the lines, the way they caught in her throat just the way they’d caught in mine the night I wrote them. No one else noticed. Everyone wept. Even Ethan’s eyes went soft and wet at the edges.

"How poetic," someone said. "You have such a gift, Victoria."

I sat there, hands folded in my lap, nails biting into my palms. I didn’t speak. I didn’t accuse. I just watched her, watched the way her eyes flicked to me, a small, secret smile playing at the corners of her mouth. She wanted me to see. She wanted me to know.

That was only the beginning.

For the next three years, Victoria made a slow, deliberate study of me. At first, it was subtle—little things, little thefts. She started wearing her hair the way I did, loose braids tucked behind her ears, wisps left to frame her face. She borrowed my sweaters, my shoes, the silver hairpin my grandmother had given me. Once, I found her in the hall before a pack gathering, twisting her mouth in the mirror, practicing my smile.

She started mimicking my voice, too. The way I said Ethan’s name when I was tired, the lilt I used when I was nervous. At first, I thought I was imagining it. But the others noticed. They started to laugh about it, calling us twins, sisters in every way that mattered.

Victoria’s favorite game was to sit behind me on the rug, fingers deft and gentle, weaving my hair into intricate braids. She’d hum under her breath—a song I’d taught her, once, before I’d learned better.

One afternoon, she twisted a lock of my hair around her finger, her grip just tight enough to sting. “We're sisters now, Wren. Twins, almost. Won’t it be funny if Ethan one day can’t tell us apart in the dark?”

She said it softly, eyes dead and empty, her hands so careful they could have been loving.

I didn’t answer. I kept my face blank, let her finish the braid, and told myself that if I stayed very still, she might get bored. She never did.

She took my laugh next. My way of tilting my head when I teased Ethan. My habit of tracing the edge of my cup with my thumb when I was thinking. She watched, she learned, she claimed. By the end of that third year, she’d even taken the only thing I thought was mine alone—the mark at the base of my neck, the one Nathan told me to hide. I found her in her room one morning, the neckline of her dress slipping low enough to reveal a new tattoo, fresh and silver and shaped exactly like the flower that bloomed beneath my hairline.

She caught me staring. She smiled, slow and secret.

“Now we match,” she whispered.

The memory flickered, then faded, and I was back in the present—strapped on the treatment table, the cold light glaring down, the weight of the pack’s eyes pressing in from every side. My body felt hollow, scraped clean, as if the staff had scooped out everything that was still mine.

I squeezed my eyes shut. The room faded. In the darkness behind my lids, I could hear Victoria’s voice—a whisper at first, then louder, clearer, cutting through the fog of pain and memory.

She was speaking to Ethan. I couldn’t see her, but I didn’t have to. I knew the shape of her body pressed close to his, the angle of her face turned up toward his ear. I knew the exact cadence she would use—soft, pleading, the way I’d spoken to him three months ago, the night I begged him not to shut me out.

“Please, Ethan,” she murmured, her voice my voice, her words the ones I’d thought were safe. “I know you’re angry, but I can’t breathe when you’re like this. I need you.”

Ethan’s shoulders tensed. For the first time since they’d strapped me down, his brow furrowed—just a flicker, a shadow passing across his face. But he didn’t turn. He didn’t look at me. He let her words—my words—curl around him like smoke, and he kept his eyes fixed on some point beyond the edge of the table.

Victoria kept talking, kept weaving her web. I could feel her watching me, daring me to speak, to break, to scream. I didn’t. I lay there, silent, listening to the echo of my own voice coming from her lips, and wondered how much of me was left for her to take.

The air in the room shifted, heavy with things unsaid. Something in me hardened. I pressed my tongue to the roof of my mouth, tasting iron and defiance, and waited. Outside, the wind rattled the old stained glass, and somewhere deep inside the church, a door slammed closed.

I opened my eyes.

Victoria’s eyes met mine across the room—dark, unblinking, full of secrets. She smiled, just a little. And I understood, finally, what it meant to be hollowed out by someone who wanted you not dead, but empty.

The straps on my wrists tightened as Soren checked them, his hands clinical and indifferent. I didn’t fight. I didn’t beg.

I watched Victoria, and I waited for the next thing she would take.