Nyx
The alarm shattered the silence like a blade against glass, shrill, unforgiving, relentless. I jerked upright with a ragged gasp that scraped my throat raw.
"Fuck..." The curse tore out of me as my hand shot forward, slapping blindly at the clock until the piercing wail finally choked and died.
For several heartbeats I simply sat there, chest heaving, pulse hammering in my ears. Then the pain arrived, slow and thorough, cataloguing every abused inch of my body.
My spine felt as though someone had taken a length of iron pipe to it. My neck refused to turn more than a few degrees without sending fresh needles down my shoulders. My arms and legs were leaden, swollen with the dull ache of sleeping on unforgiving stone.
The fog in my mind parted just enough for yesterday to rush back in cruel clarity.
I wasn't in my bed.
I was sprawled on the floor.
On a threadbare mat so thin it might as well have been a rug sample, laid directly on the frigid stone of what everyone now called the storage room.
No. Not storage.
My punishment room.
I let out a long, trembling breath and tipped my head back, staring up at the ceiling. Cracks spiderwebbed across the plaster like old lightning scars. Dust had settled in thick gray blankets along every beam and corner, as though the room had decided years ago that no one would ever bother to disturb it again. The air tasted stale—damp wood, mildew, the faint metallic bite of forgotten metal tools rusting in the shadows.
I had offended my father yesterday.
More accurately: I had existed yesterday.
And the day before that. And the day before that. My very breath seemed to be an insult he could never forgive. If the council challenged him in a meeting, somehow I had whispered poison in their ears. If pack revenue faltered, clearly I had cursed the treasury. If his whiskey tasted bitter or his temper flared without warning, the fault could always be traced back to me... his living, breathing disappointment.
Yesterday had simply offered him a fresh excuse.
So here I lay. Exiled from the small, bare room I was permitted to call mine, sentenced to this stone crypt "until I realized my mistake."
The joke, of course, was that I still had no idea what the mistake was supposed to be.
I wondered... quietly, wearily... how many more mornings it would take before I finally "realized" something that had never happened.
My gaze drifted across the room, tracing the same bleak landmarks I'd memorized long ago. No outsider would ever guess what this space had once been.
This had been a princess's chamber.
My twin sister's chamber.
Eira's.
The name lodged beneath my ribs like a splinter.
She was gone. Dead. Entombed beneath layers of silence, shame, and secrets too dangerous to speak aloud. And in some exquisite cruelty, her old room had been repurposed as the place my parents sent me whenever they needed to drive the lesson deeper: You are not her. You will never be her. You are the leftover piece no one wants.
The walls were stripped bare now, stripped of everything that had once made the space hers... except for one thing.
Her portrait.
It hung directly across from the mat, positioned with surgical precision so that it would be the very first thing my eyes met every time I woke.
Eira gazed down at me with the same luminous calm she'd always carried. Black hair spilled over her shoulders like moonlight made solid. Her eyes... clear gray-green, warm as spring—seemed to hold secrets only she understood. Her lips curved in that gentle, effortless smile that had once drawn every soul in the pack toward her like moths to flame.
The artist had captured her so perfectly that in the pale, slanting light of early morning the canvas sometimes felt alive. As though she might blink. As though she might speak.
As though she might finally tell them the truth.
I swallowed hard and tore my gaze away.
No matter how many nights I spent curled on that mat, my body never adjusted. I always woke up battered... muscles knotted, joints grinding, skin tender where stone had pressed too long. Perhaps that was the point. As if my body itself refused to adapt.
Maybe that was a good thing.
A reminder that I wasn't meant to get used to suffering.
Maybe that stubborn refusal was the only rebellion I had left.
"Guess I'm still not broken enough," I whispered to the empty air. A dry, bitter laugh escaped me; it bounced off the walls and came back sounding small and hollow.
That was when I heard her.
"Nyx!"
My name cracked through the quiet like a whip. My spine locked instantly. I didn't need to look toward the doorway to know who stood there.
Only one person said my name with quite that blend of irritation and disdain, as though pronouncing the syllable physically disgusted her.
Lysera.
My twin sister's replacement.
The door groaned open on unoiled hinges. She stepped inside without knocking, without hesitation, her nose wrinkling the moment the stale air hit her.
"Didn't you hear me calling you?" she snapped, planting both hands on her hips.
I pushed myself up slowly, biting back a groan as every protesting muscle screamed in protest. Standing upright always seemed to irritate her more. Perhaps she preferred me smaller. Lower. Invisible.
"I heard you," I answered, voice level.
Lysera carried herself with the unshakable confidence of someone who had never once doubted her place in the world. To anyone watching from the outside she looked every inch the true daughter of the house... poised, lovely, entitled. And I looked exactly like what the rumors claimed: the charity case. The charity case who had somehow outlived the golden child.
The irony was almost poetic.
"What do you want, Princess Lysera?" I asked, brushing gray dust from the front of my worn shirt as I rose to my full height.
Her mouth tightened at once. There it was—that quick flicker of annoyance I could summon with three little words.
I only called her "Princess" when I wanted to needle her. And somehow, after all these years, she still hadn't figured out that I did it on purpose.
"It's my birthday," she said, taking a deliberate step backward as though the space between us had suddenly become contaminated. "And here you are, still sleeping."
Not just her.
Everyone did it.
The moment my name passed someone's lips, shoulders shifted. Feet moved. Subtle distances opened. Across the entire Bloodcrest Pack territory, no child had been named Nyx in nine years and those who named their children before already changed the names. Not since the rumors took root and grew thorns.
"You mean our birthday, Princess?" I asked, keeping my tone deliberately light.
When my parents had decided to adopt Lysera, they'd simply declared her birthday the same as mine and Eira's. Triplets, they announced to the pack. Convenient. Clean. Easier for everyone.
After Eira died, though, my birthday quietly vanished.
I never fought to reclaim it.
Celebrations had a way of cutting deeper than any punishment.
"It's my birthday," Lysera snapped, jabbing a finger against her own chest for emphasis.
A soft laugh slipped out before I could catch it.
She frowned. "What's funny?"
"Nothing," I said. "Just… happy birthday."
Her eyes narrowed, clearly sensing mockery but unable to prove it. She moved on anyway.
"What do you want?" I asked, dropping the lightness. Exhaustion was already pressing against the backs of my eyes.
I wasn't in the mood for another useless skirmish.
I would lose. I always lost.
If I so much as bruised her, even by accident... the punishment would double. Triple. I had no desire to collect new welts on top of the ones already blooming across my ribs.
"Mom said you should help in the kitchen if you want to eat," she informed me.
"Fine," I answered at once. "I'm not eating, so I won't help."
Stubbornness had always been my sharpest weapon.
It had also carved most of the scars I carried.
Lysera's lips curved into a thin, victorious smile. "Really? Should I go tell Mom what you just said?"
She pivoted toward the door.
"You don't have to," I sighed, the fight draining out of me as quickly as it had arrived. "I was just joking. Can't you tell?"
People were always confused by the contradiction.
I could be impossibly, infuriatingly stubborn.
And I could fold so easily it looked like cowardice.
Why make the day harder than it needed to be? Why earn fresh pain when obedience cost only a few hours of dishwater and silence?
I stepped past her and walked out.
Lysera followed at once, close on my heels.
She hated being left alone in that room.
Because of Eira.
Because the portrait felt too alive.
They all said it... the way those painted eyes seemed to follow you, the way the smile never quite reached the stillness behind it.
It didn't frighten me.
It felt personal.
Intimate.
As though, even after everything, Eira was still the only one who bothered to watch over me.
And somehow, against every reasonable expectation, that small, impossible attention felt like the closest thing I had left to love.
---
The kitchen thrummed with controlled chaos the moment I crossed the threshold. Heat rolled out in thick waves. The air was dense with cinnamon, crushed garlic, browning butter, and the rich, iron scent of simmering venison. None of it woke even the faintest flicker of hunger in me.
My mother stood at the long central island, arms crossed, eyes sweeping over every movement like a general inspecting troops.
"Good morning, Mom," I said quietly.
Silence.
I had long since stopped expecting anything else.
The absence still cut, though, sharp and familiar. I had learned to swallow the hurt before it could rise into my face. Most days I succeeded. Some days a little of it leaked through anyway.
"As a grown lady," she said at last, turning to fix me with a stare that could have frozen summer, "is this the time you wake up?"
"I'm sorry, Mom," I answered automatically. The words tasted like ash.
"MOM!" Lysera's voice burst into the room, bright and sweet as spring honey. She darted forward and wrapped both arms around our mother's waist.
Instantly the ice melted.
My mother's face softened into something warm, something proud, something tender. She bent and pressed a kiss into Lysera's shining hair.
"Happy birthday, sweetheart."
The difference was so stark it bordered on absurd.
The way she cradled Lysera, gentle, adoring, complete.
The way she regarded me, cold, remote, perpetually disappointed.
Sky and earth.
I opened my mouth.
The words were right there, burning behind my teeth.
Today is my birthday too.
Just once, look at me the way you look at her.
And more than anything...
I wanted her to hear the truth.
That I didn't kill Eira.
They scorched my throat, thick with years of unsaid things.
But I said nothing.
Because in this house my voice had stopped mattering long before Eira's coffin was lowered into the ground.
And some truths, it seemed, were destined to stay buried.