"Open the gates."

"Alpha Lucien ordered the rejected Luna gone before sunrise."

"She's barely standing."

"That's no longer our concern."

The iron groaned open. A guard hurled a leather satchel into the mud at my feet ... one dress, a handful of coins, my mother's journal. Everything I had left, thrown like scraps to a dog.

A younger guard flinched, opened his mouth. "I'm... sorry, Luna."

"Don't call her that," the captain snapped, and the gates slammed shut behind me with a sound like a coffin lid.

I didn't cry. I was done giving them that.

⸻

I stood there longer than I should have, staring up at walls I'd bled for, my hand lifting toward the gate on its own before I caught myself and let it drop.

"Goodbye," I said, to no one.

No one answered. Of course no one answered. I turned into the dark and started walking, because standing still meant thinking, and thinking meant remembering the warmth of his hand under that table.

⸻

Rain found me within the hour, cold enough to make my teeth ache. My sleeve had stiffened where the healers had taken blood for their ritual, dark and crusted against my skin. I walked until the ache in my legs drowned everything else out, then opened the journal just to feel something familiar in my hands ... the only thing left that still smelled faintly like her.

A page slipped loose ... folded small, tucked somewhere I'd never noticed before, not in all the nights I'd read this book cover to cover looking for her voice. My mother's handwriting, but shaking, rushed, nothing like the careful script in the rest of the book.

If you are reading this, then I have already failed to protect you.

My fingers went numb around the paper. I read it twice, certain I'd misunderstood.

Never let anyone see the mark beneath your collar.

I stopped walking. Rain ran down the back of my neck and I didn't feel it. My free hand found my collarbone on instinct, pressing flat over silk, over the place that had burned silver hours ago in front of three hundred witnesses. How. How could she have known, when I'd only ever hidden that mark out of shame, never once telling her, never once telling anyone ...

A howl split the trees, close, and every thought in my head went white.

⸻

The forest had gone wrong around me. No insects. No birds. Even the rain sounded muffled, like the world was holding its breath.

Crunch.

Crunch.

Not one set of footsteps. Dozens. Gold eyes bloomed between the trunks, too many to count, too still to be scavengers.

They weren't circling like hungry things. They were closing in like something trained.

"Found her," one rogue said, grinning wide enough to show teeth.

"Alive if possible," another answered, flat, businesslike.

Alive. The word hit harder than a threat would have. They didn't want me dead. They wanted me kept.

⸻

I ran before I decided to.

Barefoot, bleeding, my lungs already screaming. Branches opened new lines across my arms. Mud sucked at my ankles and nearly took me down twice. Behind me, laughter ... unhurried, cruel, the sound of men who knew exactly how this ended.

One shifted mid-stride, fur rippling out of skin, and closed the gap in three bounding strides. Another cut across the road ahead of me. I skidded, fell hard onto my palms, and the journal flew from my grip into the mud.

A rogue snatched it up, turning it over with mock interest. "Looks valuable."

He tore a fistful of pages loose.

"No!"

I threw myself at him without thinking, fingers hooking into his sleeve, and the backhand that followed sent the whole world sideways. I hit the road. The sky spun black at the edges.

⸻

Steel sang through the rain.

The rogue's head was gone before his body understood it, and then there was only silence ... until hooves broke it, dozens of them, riders pouring out of the treeline like something summoned rather than arrived. Moonlight caught on silver armor stamped with crescent moons.

"Silvercrest," someone screamed. "Retreat!"

The rogues scattered like smoke.

Their leader wheeled his horse toward me, sword still raised, not at me ... over me, a wall between my body and the dark. "Get up."

I couldn't. My arms had stopped answering.

He looked past me at the retreating shapes in the trees, then back down, and something in his face shifted from soldier to something closer to afraid.

"Princess..." He caught the word in his own throat, swallowed it whole. "Run!"

An arm closed around my waist. The ground dropped away beneath me, and the forest, the rogues, the torn pages scattering in the mud ... all of it vanished behind a wall of galloping horses and rain.

⸻

I woke to warmth. Fur against my skin, the gentle sway of a carriage, every muscle in my body reporting its injuries at once.

Across from me sat the rider who'd pulled me onto his horse. He wasn't looking at me ... or he was trying not to. His eyes kept sliding down, snagging on my collarbone, then darting away like he'd touched something hot.

My collar had slipped in the fall. I felt the cool air on the mark before I understood why he'd gone pale.

He came off the bench and dropped to one knee on the carriage floor. Not a bow. A kneel ... the kind reserved for something far above a rejected Luna.

Another rider leaned in through the curtain, voice low, urgent. "Is it really..."

"There's no mistake," the first said, and his hands were shaking when he said it.

I pulled my collar back into place, heart hammering. "What are you talking about?"

Neither answered. They only bowed their heads lower, like looking at me straight on might cost them something.

⸻

The carriage lurched to a stop.

Outside, an old man stepped into the storm, a silver cloak stitched with wolves clinging wet to his shoulders. Every rider dropped to their knees in the mud without being told, heads bowed so low their foreheads nearly touched the ground.

He approached slowly, like he didn't trust his own legs, one hand braced against the carriage frame as though the last few feet might undo him entirely. When his eyes found mine through the door, they filled and spilled over before he could stop them. His hand rose toward my face, trembling, and stopped an inch from my skin ... like he needed permission he was too afraid to ask for, like touching me might prove this was only a dream and he'd rather not know yet.

"We've searched for you," he said, voice breaking apart on every word.

A pause long enough to drown in. Rain dripped from his beard onto the carriage step.

"...for twenty years."

I stared at him. I had never seen this man in my life. And yet something in his face ... the shape of the grief there, worn deep like a groove carved by years, not minutes ... made my chest ache like recognition.

⸻

He drew a portrait from inside his cloak, the paper soft with age, and pressed it into my shaking hands before I could refuse it.

A woman looked back at me from the paint ... my own face, down to the shape of my mouth, the tilt of my eyes. Beside her stood a little girl, small and solemn, one hand pressed to her collarbone where a six-pointed mark caught the light exactly like mine did.

The old man sank to one knee in the mud, head bowed, voice cracking wide open around the words that stole every breath left in my body.

"Welcome home... Princess Felicia Silvercrest."

"Has the princess awakened?"

The question came before I opened my eyes.

"Not yet ... but if the mark truly awakened, then we've found her."

"After twenty years?"

"Tell His Majesty."

My eyes flew open. Princess. Who were they talking about?

⸻

Silk against my skin. Morning light too soft to belong to any room I'd ever woken in. Every muscle in me went tight before my mind caught up ... in Blackthorn, comfort like this always came with a bill attached.

A woman in pale robes approached slowly, hands open, empty, visible. "You're safe now."

I flinched back into the pillows before she'd finished the sentence. "Don't touch me."

She stopped instantly. Didn't argue. Didn't reach anyway like Lucien's healers always had, murmuring it's for your own good while they held me still. "No one here will touch you without your permission."

Something in my chest cracked at that, quiet and sudden. No one had ever asked.

⸻

As she worked salve into the cuts on my palms, I let my eyes wander ... silver wolves carved into white marble, six-pointed stars set into every doorway, a maid bowing to a guard just for holding a door. In Blackthorn, servants kept their eyes down and their bodies smaller than they were. Here, no one flinched from anyone.

"Where am I?"

She smiled, gentle. "The Kingdom of Silvercrest."

I frowned. "I've never heard of it."

The room went still. She traded a look with the maid folding linens by the window ... quick, worried ... and the maid murmured, almost to herself, "Of course she hasn't."

⸻

An old man entered without knocking, arms full of scrolls that looked older than the castle itself. He studied my face first. Then my collarbone, where the mark had gone quiet again beneath my collar. Then the journal someone had set on the table beside my bed.

His face changed ... the particular stillness of a man watching a theory become fact in front of him.

"Bring me the royal archives."

"Why are you looking at me like that?"

He hesitated, scrolls trembling slightly in his grip. "Because if I'm right..."

The doors burst open before he could finish.

⸻

Three men filled the doorway, and the whole room dropped to its knees like the floor itself had ordered it.

The eldest stopped short at the sight of me. His breath caught audibly, his hand rising halfway to his chest like something had struck him there. "...Impossible."

The youngest came closer, jaw tight, eyes moving over my face like he was checking it against a memory. "She has Mother's eyes."

The middle brother didn't tower the way the others did. He crossed to my bedside and knelt instead, bringing himself level with me, something careful and warm in the way he held himself ... like he understood, without being told, that I flinched from anyone standing over me.

"You don't know us," he said, quiet.

"Should I?"

None of them answered. The eldest turned and left without another word, and moments later every bell in the castle tore into the sky at once, ringing like the walls themselves had been waiting twenty years to make that sound.

⸻

They walked me to the Hall of Records with a hand hovering near my elbow that never once landed ... permission asked with silence instead of words. Books lined the walls floor to ceiling. An old historian waited beside a tapestry taller than the door, and without speaking, he drew the cloth back.

My breath left me in one long pull.

The painted queen looking back at me had my mouth. My eyes. The exact tilt of my chin when I was trying not to cry. The historian touched the painted collarbone, and beneath a few careful brushstrokes of fabric, there it was ... the same six-pointed mark I'd spent my whole life hiding under high collars.

⸻

He asked for the journal.

My hand tightened around it before I could stop it. It was the only thing of hers I had left, and some old animal instinct didn't want to let it out of my grip. But I held it out anyway, because everyone in this room had already given me more truth than Blackthorn had in a lifetime.

He flipped through slowly, then stopped, and held a page close to the fire. Ink bloomed out of nothing beneath the heat, faint and silver.

If the stars ever find you... go home.

Below it, in the same shaking hand ...

Trust the Silver Wolf.

I pressed my knuckles to my mouth. She hadn't just known. She'd planned for this, years before I ever stood in that hall and watched my whole life end. Tears came before I could stop them, and no one in the room told me to.

⸻

A woman entered with eyes the color of old silver, unclouded and startlingly clear. She looked at me the way the others hadn't ... not with grief, but with calculation, like she was reading something written just beneath my skin.

"Tell me," she said. "Have you ever wondered why you never awakened a wolf?"

I had. Every night of my childhood, actually, lying awake waiting for a shift that never came, certain something in me was broken.

She smiled, small and knowing. "Because you were never meant to awaken an ordinary one."

The room held its breath with me.

"Your blood has been asleep," she said. "waiting to come home."

⸻

Then she told us what had actually happened twenty years ago.

Silvercrest hadn't fallen. It had been erased ... deliberately, methodically. Every kingdom convinced the royal line had died in a single night. Maps redrawn. Books burned. Children raised without ever hearing the name. Someone had spent two decades making sure the world forgot this place had ever existed.

And whoever had done it, the Oracle said, was very likely still hunting whoever survived.

The brothers exchanged a look I understood without translation ... the look of men who'd suspected this and hoped they were wrong.

⸻

The Oracle set a silver dagger on the table between us. A ceremonial bowl. A small handful of moonstones, and beside them, a crown gone dull with age.

"There is only one way to prove who you are," she said. "The Blood Moon Ceremony. If the mark responds, you are the lost princess."

A pause I felt in my teeth.

"If it doesn't, you die."

The middle brother was on his feet instantly. "It's too dangerous." The youngest argued they should wait, gather more proof first, give me time. The Oracle only shook her head, unmoved.

"We no longer have time."

⸻

She placed the dagger in my hands. The hilt was cold, heavier than it looked.

Every eye in the room was on me. I looked at the blade. At the journal still sitting warm from the fire. At three men who already believed, in their bones, that I belonged to them ... and at how none of them had once tried to make that decision for me.

"If I've spent my whole life running from the truth," I said, and my voice didn't shake nearly as much as I expected it to, "then I'm done running."

I pressed the blade into my palm.

The first drop of blood hit the bowl.

Every candle in the room exploded into silver flame at once, and the floor trembled beneath my knees like the castle itself had exhaled.

⸻

Far away, in a hall still stained with my blood from another kind of ceremony, Alpha Lucien Blackthorn clutched his chest and went to his knees without knowing why.

His wolf tore through him with a roar that had no source, no enemy, nothing to fight but the impossible thought crashing through him all at once.

She's alive.