I spent six hours on my feet getting the grand hall ready.

The long tables needed fresh linens — ivory, not white, because Colt hated white. The centerpieces had to be low enough that the Alpha table had a clear sightline across the room. The caterers needed someone to walk them through the seating chart twice because the third time I'd handed it to them, one of the Delta females had 'accidentally' spilled coffee on it. I reprinted it without a word and handed it over again with a smile.

That was my life in the Silverfang Pack. Smiling. Reprinting. Starting over.

My name is Nyomi Ryan. I'm twenty-two years old, and for the past three years I have been Alpha Colt's partner — his companion, his hostess, his placeholder. I run his household. I organize his events. I wear the titanium ring he slid onto my finger on the night he told me, 'You're mine, Nyomi. That's enough for now.'

I believed him. God help me, I believed him.

The ring sat heavy on my left hand as I adjusted the last floral arrangement on the head table. White peonies and eucalyptus — Colt's preference, not mine. My natural scent is floral, something sweet and warm that rises off my skin when I'm relaxed. Colt had asked me early on to cover it with a neutral spray. 'It's distracting,' he'd said, not unkindly. 'Just tone it down.'

So I did. I bought unscented everything. I stopped letting myself get too warm, too comfortable, too much. I toned myself down in every way I could think of.

Tonight was supposed to be different.

The Pack Banquet happened every year at the autumn equinox. It was the biggest event in the Silverfang calendar — every ranked member in attendance, the hall lit with hundreds of candles, the Alpha making formal announcements about the pack's future. Last year, Colt had squeezed my hand under the table and said, 'Next year, Nyomi. I'll make it official next year.'

Next year was tonight.

I smoothed the front of my dress — deep green, fitted, the nicest thing I owned — and looked around the hall. It was beautiful. I had made it beautiful. The candlelight turned everything gold, and the long tables gleamed, and for one moment I let myself imagine standing beside Colt when he took the stage. Imagine him reaching for my hand in front of the whole pack. Imagine finally, finally being seen as something more than the quiet girl who refilled his coffee and pretended not to hear the whispers.

'Placeholder.'

'Omega-level nobody.'

'Does she actually think he's going to mark her?'

I'd heard every version of it. In the kitchen, in the corridors, at the edge of pack runs when they thought I was out of earshot. The Beta and Delta females had a whole vocabulary for what I was, and none of the words were kind.

I touched the titanium ring with my thumb. It was plain and thick and completely indestructible — I'd learned that the hard way when I'd once tried to resize it and the jeweler's tools had barely scratched the surface. Colt had laughed when I told him. 'That's the point,' he'd said. 'It doesn't come off.'

At the time, I thought that was romantic.

The hall filled up fast. Pack members streamed in dressed in their best, the ranked wolves taking their seats at the long tables while the Omegas moved quietly along the walls. I knew where I stood — not quite Omega, not quite Luna, hovering in the uncomfortable space between. I took my usual spot near the side of the room, close enough to the head table to be useful, far enough away to be invisible.

Colt arrived at eight sharp.

He walked in the way he always did — like the room had been waiting for him, like the air itself rearranged to accommodate his presence. He was tall, broad-shouldered, with dark hair and the kind of jaw that made the unmated females straighten up when he passed. His Alpha aura rolled off him in slow, deliberate waves, and I felt it the way I always did — a pressure at the base of my skull, a reflex to lower my eyes.

I didn't lower them tonight. Tonight I watched him.

He scanned the room as he moved toward the stage. His gaze swept past me without stopping.

I told myself that was normal. He was focused. He had a speech to give.

The hall quieted the moment he stepped up to the microphone. That was the thing about Colt's aura — it didn't ask for silence. It just took it. Every conversation died, every glass was set down, and three hundred wolves turned their faces toward their Alpha like sunflowers toward a very cold sun.

'Three years ago,' Colt began, his voice filling every corner of the room, 'I told this pack that I was still searching for my path forward.'

My heart started to beat faster. I pressed my thumb against the ring.

'Tonight, I'm done searching.'

Someone near the front began to clap, and it spread quickly, a wave of anticipation moving through the crowd. I felt my lips part. My chest was so tight I could barely breathe.

This was it. Three years. Everything I had given, everything I had swallowed, every morning I had woken up and chosen to stay — it was all about to mean something.

Colt smiled. It was the slow, satisfied smile of a man who already knew how this story ended.

'I've found my true mate,' he said. 'And I intend to make her my Luna.'

The applause exploded.

I was already smiling when he extended his hand toward the side of the stage — toward the figure I hadn't noticed standing in the shadows.

She stepped into the candlelight in a red dress, her dark hair loose around her shoulders, her smile wide and practiced and aimed directly at me.

Camille.

The applause kept going. It was very loud. I stood there with my smile still on my face because my face hadn't gotten the message yet, hadn't caught up to what my eyes were seeing and what my stomach already knew.

Colt took Camille's hand. He raised it. He looked out at his pack with the expression of a man who had never once considered that someone in this room might be breaking apart.

The ring on my finger had never felt heavier.

"The Moon Goddess has finally blessed me," Colt’s voice echoed through the speakers, filling the grand hall.

His voice sounded different now. The Alpha tone that usually made my chest warm with pride and submission now felt like a physical blow to my ribs.

He pulled Camille flush against his side. She looked up at him through thick, dark lashes, a picture of perfect devotion.

"She revealed my true fated mate to me," Colt declared, his eyes scanning the cheering crowd before settling back on Camille. "My future Luna."

He leaned down and pressed a lingering kiss to her temple.

As he did, a wave of scent rolled off the stage and hit the front rows. It traveled fast, suffocating the delicate, natural smell of the white peonies I had arranged just hours ago. It was floral. Overwhelmingly, aggressively floral. It smelled like jasmine and crushed roses, but there was a sharp, chemical edge to it. It didn't smell like a wolf's natural aura. It smelled like a department store perfume counter.

It smelled exactly like the natural scent Colt had ordered me to suppress.

*Tone it down, Nyomi. It's distracting.*

My stomach violently twisted. He hadn't hated my scent. He just hadn't wanted it from me. Now he was breathing in Camille’s cheap, synthetic imitation like a starving man, burying his nose deeply into her dark hair.

The hall erupted. Men howled. Women cheered and clapped, stomping their feet against the wooden floorboards. The noise was a physical weight pressing down on my shoulders, pinning my feet to the ground.

I couldn't move. I couldn't breathe. Three years. Three years of waking up at dawn to manage his house. Three years of swallowing my pride, taking unscented showers, and silencing my inner wolf so I wouldn't be a nuisance to his Alpha sensibilities. All of it collapsed in the space of a single heartbeat.

I was a placeholder. I had always been a placeholder.

"Move out of the way, Omega."

The sharp whisper cut through the ringing in my ears. I blinked, my vision slowly coming back into focus.

Sasha Vance, Camille’s right-hand Delta, was walking straight toward me. She was flanked by three other elite females from their clique. They didn't alter their path to go around me. They marched forward like I was nothing but a minor obstacle in their way.

Sasha held a crystal goblet filled to the brim with dark red wine. As she brushed past my shoulder, she didn't even pretend to stumble. She simply tilted her wrist.

The cold liquid splashed directly onto the bodice of my deep green dress. It soaked through the fabric instantly, a freezing, sticky shock against my skin. It dripped down my stomach and pooled at the hem.

I gasped, taking a clumsy step back.

Sasha stopped and looked at me. Her lips curved into a cruel, jagged smile. "Oops," she said, her voice dripping with fake sympathy. "So sorry, Nyomi. But really, you should know better than to stand so close to the spotlight. It makes you look desperate."

One of the girls behind her snickered. "Omegas really need to learn their place. Did she actually think she was getting the Luna title tonight?"

"With that cheap metal on her finger?" Sasha scoffed, eyeing my left hand. "Please. He practically bought that out of a vending machine."

They laughed, the sound sharp and ugly, before shoving past me to get closer to the stage. One of them bumped my shoulder hard enough that my heel caught on the floorboards. I barely caught my balance.

Nobody helped me. Nobody even looked at me. Three hundred wolves in this room, and I was entirely, utterly alone.

I looked down at the dark, spreading stain on my dress. It looked like a bleeding wound.

I didn't cry. My eyes were dry, burning with a strange, hollow heat. The shock had burned away the tears before they could even form.

I turned my back on the stage. I didn't look at Colt. I didn't look at Camille. I just put one foot in front of the other, slipping through the heavy side doors and out into the dimly lit corridor.

The heavy oak doors clicked shut behind me, muting the wild cheers of the pack. The sudden quiet of the hallway was almost deafening. The air out here was cool, smelling of floor wax and old wood, totally free of Camille's suffocating perfume.

I stopped walking and leaned against the wall, sliding down until I hit the floor.

My hands were shaking. I lifted my left hand and stared at it.

The titanium ring caught the flickering light of a nearby wall sconce. It was thick, dull, and heavy. It didn't sparkle. It didn't catch the light the way a diamond would. It was just a solid, unbreakable band of industrial metal.

*It doesn't come off,* Colt had said, laughing when the jeweler couldn't scratch it.

I pressed my thumb against the cold metal, twisting it. It was tight. It had always been a little too tight, restricting the blood flow just enough to remind me it was there.

It wasn't a promise. A promise was given freely. A promise was meant to be beautiful.

This was a collar. It was a tag on a stray dog. He had chained me down with a piece of unbreakable metal so I would sit quietly in the corner and wait, keeping his bed warm and his house clean until his real prize came along.

I closed my eyes and reached inward, searching the deep, dark spaces of my mind for my inner wolf. I needed her. I needed her anger, her strength, her fangs. I needed her to howl and tear down the walls of this pack house.

*Please,* I whispered to her in my mind. *Please wake up.*

Nothing.

There was no answering growl. No comforting warmth. Just a vast, dead silence. I had shoved her down into the dark for so long, starving her of our natural scent, silencing her instincts to make Colt comfortable. Now, when I needed her most, she was gone. She was either too deeply buried to hear me, or she was simply dead from a broken heart.

I opened my eyes. A single drop of red wine fell from the hem of my ruined dress and hit the polished floorboards.

*Plop.*

It looked exactly like a drop of blood.

I stared at it for a long time. The cheers from the banquet hall rumbled through the walls, vibrating against my spine. They were celebrating their new Luna. They were celebrating the Alpha who had just shattered me into a thousand pieces.

I gripped the titanium ring, pulling at it with my right hand. It didn't budge. It dug painfully into my skin, scraping over my knuckle, refusing to let go.

I let my hand drop to my lap. The coldness of the wine was seeping into my bones, but beneath it, a tiny, unfamiliar spark of absolute clarity began to take root.

I didn't sleep that night.

I sat on the floor of the corridor until the banquet noise died down, until the last drunk Delta stumbled past me without a glance, until the pack house went dark and silent. Then I peeled myself off the floor, walked to the room I'd shared with Colt for three years, and sat on the edge of the bed.

I didn't pack. I didn't cry. I just sat there, staring at the wine stain on my dress, waiting for something that I couldn't name.

It came at seven in the morning.

A knock. Sharp, businesslike. I opened the door to find Marcus Webb, Colt's Beta, standing in the hallway with a cardboard box and an expression that was carefully, professionally blank.

"Nyomi." He didn't meet my eyes. "Alpha Colt has requested that you relocate to the Omega quarters by noon. Your personal belongings have been sorted. Anything that belongs to the Alpha suite stays."

I looked at the box in his hands. It was small. The kind you'd use for a pair of shoes.

"That's everything?" I asked.

Marcus shifted his weight. For a brief second, something flickered across his face — discomfort, maybe guilt — but it vanished before I could name it. "That's everything that's yours."

Three years. Three years of living in this room, sleeping in that bed, folding his shirts, arranging his books on the shelf by the window. And everything that was mine fit in a shoe box.

I took it from him. It was light. Painfully light.

"The ring stays on," Marcus added quietly, already turning to leave. "Alpha's orders."

I looked down at my left hand. The titanium band sat there, dull and immovable, like it had grown into my bone.

Of course. He didn't want me, but he wouldn't release me either. I was still his property. Still tagged.

The Omega quarters were in the basement of the pack house — a long, windowless hallway with six narrow rooms, each containing a single cot, a metal shelf, and a bare bulb hanging from the ceiling. The walls were unpainted cinder block. The air smelled like mildew and industrial cleaner.

I set my box on the cot. Inside: a hairbrush, a photo of my mother who died when I was four, a worn copy of a novel I'd read six times, and Barnaby's spare leash. That was it. That was my entire life, reduced to objects that could fit in my lap.

I sat down. The cot springs groaned.

Above me, through the thin ceiling, I could hear footsteps. Laughter. The sound of furniture being moved. Camille was settling into the Alpha suite. My suite. The sheets I had changed yesterday morning were probably already stripped and replaced with something red and silk.

I pressed my palms flat against my knees and breathed.

---

By two o'clock, Camille found her rhythm.

A young Omega girl appeared at my door, eyes wide and apologetic. "Miss Camille says you're to report to the training yard. There's mud from last night's rain. She wants it scrubbed before the evening session."

I stared at her. "Scrubbed."

"Yes, ma'am. On hands and knees. She said — she said to use the small brush."

The training yard was a massive, open-air rectangle behind the pack house, bordered by packed earth and lined with wooden sparring posts. Last night's storm had turned the ground into a churned mess of brown sludge. It would take hours. It was also completely pointless — the warriors would destroy it again within minutes of their next session.

That was the point.

I took the small brush. I walked outside.

The October air hit my face, cold and damp. The yard stretched out in front of me, a sea of thick, wet mud dotted with boot prints and claw marks. A bucket of soapy water sat at the edge, along with a scrub brush the size of my palm.

I got on my knees.

The mud soaked through my jeans immediately, cold and gritty against my skin. I dipped the brush and started scrubbing. The bristles barely made a difference. I was essentially pushing mud from one spot to another, leaving faint, clean streaks that filled back in within seconds.

It didn't matter. I kept going.

Within twenty minutes, the first audience arrived.

Three warriors — men I had once served dinner to, men who had nodded politely at me when I stood beside Colt — leaned against the fence posts with their arms crossed. They didn't say anything at first. They just watched. One of them smirked. Another elbowed his friend and tilted his chin toward me.

Then Sasha appeared.

She walked up to the fence with her phone already raised, the camera pointed directly at me. She didn't try to hide it. She held it up like a tourist filming a street performer.

"Smile, Nyomi," she called out. Her voice was bright, cheerful, dripping with amusement. "The pack network needs some entertainment today. Everyone's been asking what happened to the Alpha's little pet."

I didn't look up. I kept scrubbing.

"Oh come on," Sasha laughed. "At least give us a reaction. You're so boring when you're quiet." She turned to the warriors. "Isn't she boring?"

One of them chuckled. "Always was."

Sasha panned her phone slowly across the yard — my muddy knees, my raw hands, the pathetic little brush, the endless expanse of dirt. "Caption ideas?" she asked her phone. "'From Luna dreams to mud queen'? Or maybe 'Know your place'?"

She posted it. I heard the notification chime.

My hands kept moving. Scrub. Dip. Scrub. The repetition was the only thing keeping me from shattering. If I stopped, if I looked up, if I acknowledged any of it, I would break in a way that couldn't be fixed.

So I scrubbed.

The mud was endless. My back ached. My knees were raw. The sun moved across the sky and I didn't stop.

---

I was still covered in dried mud when the summons came for the pack run.

Mandatory. No exceptions. Every wolf in Silverfang, from Alpha to Omega, ran together under the full moon. It was tradition. It was law.

I stood at the tree line with the other Omegas, shivering in the evening chill. My body was exhausted — six hours on my knees in the yard, no food since yesterday's banquet, my muscles trembling with fatigue. Around me, wolves were already shifting. The air filled with the sound of cracking bones and rustling fur as bodies transformed, growing larger, more powerful.

Colt stood at the front of the pack in his human form, watching. Camille was beside him, already shifted into a sleek, dark-furred wolf that pressed against his leg. He ran his hand along her spine absently, like petting a prize show dog.

His eyes found me across the clearing. They were flat. Expectant.

"Everyone runs," he said. Not to me specifically. To the pack. But his gaze didn't move.

I closed my eyes and reached inward.

The shift was supposed to feel like falling into warm water. That's how the others described it — a rush, a release, a joyful surrender to the wolf within. For me, it felt like dragging something dead up from the bottom of a well.

I pulled. I begged. I clawed at the dark, silent place where my wolf lived.

And slowly, agonizingly, she came.

The transformation was wrong. I felt it immediately. My bones cracked too slowly, grinding rather than snapping clean. My skin rippled and tore rather than flowing smoothly into fur. When it was finally over, I stood on four trembling legs and knew — without seeing myself — that something was deeply, visibly wrong.

I was small. Half the size of the other females. My fur was thin and patchy, a dull, grayish color that looked like dirty dishwater. My ribs were visible beneath the sparse coat. I looked like a sick dog, not a wolf.

The clearing went quiet.

Then someone laughed. A single, sharp bark of disbelief. It spread quickly — snickers, whispers, open stares. Even the other Omegas edged away from me, as if whatever I had was contagious.

Sasha's wolf — glossy, well-fed, a rich chestnut brown — trotted past me and deliberately bumped my shoulder. I stumbled sideways, my weak legs barely catching me.

Colt watched from the front. His expression didn't change. He simply turned away, shifted into his massive black wolf form, and launched into the forest.

The pack followed. Three hundred wolves surging forward in a thunder of paws and muscle.

I ran. Or tried to. My legs shook with every stride. The pack pulled ahead of me within seconds, their powerful forms disappearing into the dark trees while I limped behind, gasping, my small body struggling over roots and rocks that the others cleared effortlessly.

The distance between us grew. The sound of the pack faded. The forest closed in around me — dark, cold, indifferent.

I ran alone.