Chapter Two

Ethan and I were twins — born under the same harvest moon, two hours apart.

For the first twelve years, we were the only children the Ashwood Pack had ever known us to be.

A matched pair. The elders called it an omen of fortune. Our parents treated it as a mandate.

Ethan had come first by exactly one hundred and twenty minutes, but he'd acted like a proper older brother from the time he could form a full sentence — yielding every dessert, every good seat, every last thing worth wanting. He'd built me into something embarrassing: the small princess of the Ashwood line, spoiled past any reasonable point.

At a winter gathering once, an elder had laughed and nudged my father:

"That girl of yours is going to be a force of nature, Gabriel. Lucky you had the sense to bond her early with the Holt boy — nobody else would ever dare take her on."

My father had set down his glass.

"My daughter wasn't placed in this world to be claimed by anyone," he said, his voice completely level. "If no suitable mate presents himself, she stays with this Pack. For good. I can provide for her."

My mother and Ethan said nothing. They simply continued sliding better things toward my side of the table.

The moonstone cuff I wore to my last real birthday — hand-forged silver set with matched stones, worth more than most wolves earned in half a year — had been the most ordinary thing I received that day. Ordinary, and, as it turned out, the last of its kind.

The year I turned twelve, my father's oldest war-companion died after a long illness. In his final days, he asked my father to take in his only daughter. Her name was Violet Cross. She became my sister in name, if nothing else.

After that, everything that had belonged to me — the warmth, the easy faith of belonging, the simple certainty that I was loved above all others — began migrating, piece by piece, toward her side of the house.

I'll admit it. I hated her. I was jealous.

Jealous of the way two tears from her eyes sent everyone scrambling. Jealous of the way she simply reached out and took, and no one ever used that word for it.

I became someone I didn't recognize. More erratic. More volatile. Stranger.

By the night of my eighteenth-year ceremony — the formal Pack rite that marked a wolf's full coming of age — I had already been splintering for years. But it was the garden that finished it. I stepped outside for air and found Violet and Aiden standing in the moonlight with his arms folded around her, her face tilted up toward his.

I confronted all of them. My parents. My brother. My promised mate. I had only one question left.

"Why would you do this to me?"

They looked back at me with expressions that were almost identical. Not guilt. Disappointment.

"Do you hear yourself right now?" my mother said. "You sound completely unhinged."

I laughed. The sound came out broken. My chest felt like it was being methodically taken apart, rib by rib.

I picked up the nearest thing — a cake knife, plastic, ceremonial, absurd — and lunged at Violet. Ethan's boot caught me square in the ribs and sent me backwards into the rose hedge. Every thorn had something to say about it.

Everyone surged toward Violet. Someone held her. Someone else told her not to cry. No one looked at the plastic knife still lying in the grass.

My parents had me committed. Emotionally unstable, they told the Pack. A danger to herself. A danger to others.

I think Ethan had cracked something when he kicked me. I coughed blood for days — or nights — however long it was before time stopped meaning anything. I asked every nurse, every orderly, every unfamiliar face that came through the door, to call my parents.

Not once did either of them pick up.

The last thing I knew before it ended for good was the shock treatment. And then — the threshold. The place between one life and the next. The man in the black coat who looked at me with something that might have been pity.

* * *

Now I stood in my bedroom in the Ashwood Estate, twelve years old again, while laughter drifted up through the floorboards.

"Rory!" My mother's voice carried effortlessly up the staircase. "Come down, sweetheart — Violet's asking for you!"

Violet stood in the foyer below, face scrubbed and pale, wide eyes raised toward the landing.

"Hi," she said softly. "Hi, sister."

I turned around and went back to my room.

The silence I left behind lasted approximately four seconds.

"What is going on with her?" my father muttered.

"She just needs a moment." My mother's voice smoothed over everything. "I'll go up and talk to her in a bit."

Violet's voice came next, thin and carefully calibrated:

"Is it me? Did I do something wrong? She doesn't seem happy I'm here."

Before either of my parents could respond, Ethan jumped in — immediately, without pause:

"No, no — she's not like that. She's just got a temper, her heart's fine. Don't cry. I'll talk to her, I'll sort it out."

"Ethan is so responsible." My father sounded genuinely pleased. "Look out for your little sister, yeah?"

Their voices rose and wove together into something seamlessly warm.

I sat on the edge of my bed.

The soundproofing in this house had always been terrible. I had forgotten how much I hated that.

I stood back up. If I was going to be kept awake by them, I could at least be productive. I didn't remember precisely what I'd owned at twelve — it had been too long since I'd lived inside this version of myself. But walking through the room now, taking proper stock, I was genuinely taken aback.

No wonder she'd wanted all of it.

Even my adult self, who had seen plenty, couldn't help feeling a faint, involuntary stab of something ugly.

I began loading jewelry from the vanity into my bag. Methodically. Without sentiment. If I left any of it here, it would find its way to her room by the end of the month — I knew exactly how that went.

I picked up the moonstone cuff.

I remembered the sound it made when Violet dropped it. The crack of it against the hardwood. I remembered her in the doorway afterward — eyes red, body made small, voice arranged into something fragile.

"I'm so sorry, I didn't mean to — I've just never had anything like this before, I only wanted to look at it, I couldn't hold on—"

She cried until our mother appeared. Then our father. Then Ethan.

That was the first time I ever hit her. A single open-handed slap, fast, before I could stop myself. It was also the first time my father confined me to my room.

Violet had sobbed against our mother's legs until she could barely stand — and then, in the one half-second when no one was looking, she lifted her head and made a face at me.

I pointed at her. I tried to tell them what I'd seen. Ethan shoved me backward through the doorway before I finished the first sentence.

"Aurora." His voice had been furious, certain, righteous. "Have a little compassion. She's upset. She didn't mean to break it. You have a hundred bracelets — you couldn't let her have this one?"

I bit down hard on everything that was rising in my throat.

One bracelet. As if it were about the bracelet.

That cuff was the one he had purchased with his own prize money — his first placement at the regional arts competition. He had saved for half a year. He'd presented it to me at breakfast with his ears bright pink, completely unable to hide how pleased he was with himself.

He had forgotten. Completely and cleanly.

From that year forward, I received no birthday gifts. The quiet stream of things that had always found their way to my door — clothes, books, small trinkets, stuffed animals — rerouted itself to Violet's room without fanfare.

Because she had told them, with great and careful sadness, that her classmates made fun of her. That she felt plain and overlooked. Nothing like her radiant older sister.

She was lying. I knew, because it was Ethan who had organized the exclusion — quietly, methodically, with the casual authority of a boy the Pack already deferred to.

He knew exactly what he'd done. He never once said a word in my defense. And my parents watched me with growing bewilderment, as though the only problem in the house was me.