Wren POV
The door did not open. It was kicked open.
Wren was already awake she was always already awake lying on her thin mattress staring at the ceiling when the bang came. Her heart jumped even though she expected it. It always jumped. That was the thing about living in fear for so long. Your body never fully stopped believing today would be the day it got worse.
Zane Reid filled the doorframe.
He did not need to say anything. He never did. The weight of him standing there was enough to shrink the room. Tall, broad, steel-gray eyes that had never once looked at her like she was a person. He was twenty-three years old and already the most feared wolf in the pack and he knew it with every bone in his body.
"Kitchen," he said. "Scrubbed clean before breakfast. Every surface. If I find one spot, you lose meal rights for a week."
Wren sat up. "It was already cleaned last night."
"Then clean it again."
He walked away. Did not wait for an answer. Did not need to.
Wren sat on the edge of her mattress for three seconds. Just three. Then she got up.
This was her life. She had stopped expecting it to be anything else.
The pack house kitchen was large and cold at three in the morning. Wren filled the bucket at the sink and got on her knees and started scrubbing. The stone floor bit into her knees through her thin sleep pants. She focused on the scratch of the brush, the smell of the soap, the slow square by square progress across the floor. This was how she survived. One small thing at a time. Do not think about the whole picture. Just the next square foot of floor.
Sixty-one days.
She had sixty-one days until her eighteenth birthday. She had been counting since she turned seventeen. She had a bag under her bed packed for nearly a year with everything she needed. A change of clothes, her mother's pendant, fifty-three dollars she had saved coin by coin, and a paper map she had drawn from memory of the roads out of pack territory. She had it all planned. The moment her wolf came, she would run so far that not one single member of this pack would ever find her.
If her wolf came.
She scrubbed harder and did not let herself think about that.
She heard footsteps behind her and kept her eyes on the floor. She knew who it was from the sound alone. Lighter than Zane. More careless.
Kai.
"Look at that," he said from somewhere above her. "Up early. Very dedicated."
Wren said nothing. This was also how she survived. She had learned a long time ago that responding gave Kai material to work with. Silence made the game less fun. Sometimes it worked.
Tonight it did not.
She heard the slosh of water a half second before it hit her.
The bucket came down in one smooth movement she saw it from the corner of her eye but could not move fast enough and the full weight of cold, dirty mop water drenched her from the shoulders down. She gasped. The cold was shocking even though she had been expecting something. Her shirt was soaked through instantly. Her hair dripped. The floor she had just cleaned was covered in dirty water again.
Kai laughed. Bright and easy, like this was the funniest thing he had seen in weeks.
The two pack members behind him laughed too.
Wren stayed on her knees. She did not look up. She did not give him her face. She reached forward, picked up the bucket, set it upright, and picked up her brush.
"Really?" Kai said. He sounded almost impressed. "You are just going to keep going?"
She kept going.
After a moment she heard him walk away, still laughing, telling the story already to whoever was in the hallway. Look what I did. Did you see her face. She just kept scrubbing.
Wren scrubbed.
Her shirt was soaked. Her knees hurt. The water was freezing and the soap burned a small cut on her right hand she had not noticed before. She focused on the square in front of her and counted down. Sixty-one days. Sixty-one days. You have survived this long. You can survive sixty-one more.
She was almost to the far wall when she felt it.
A warmth on her left wrist. Not the cold of the water or the ache of her knees something else. Something inside. She paused without meaning to, brush frozen mid-scrub, and looked down at her wrist.
Gold light.
A faint, soft, gold glow sitting just under her skin like an ember. Gone before she could fully focus on it. There and then not there, so fast she almost thought she imagined it.
Her heart stopped.
She pressed her thumb against her wrist. Nothing. Just cold skin. Just her pulse beating too fast. She pressed harder. Nothing.
But she had seen it.
She had definitely seen it.
Wolfless girls did not glow gold. Wolfless girls did not have whatever that was. That kind of light she had heard pack elders talk about it exactly once, in whispers, the way people talked about things too rare and too strange to say out loud. That was bond light. That was what happened when a wolf's mate was close and the connection stirred.
Wren could not breathe.
She was wolfless. She had no wolf. She had never shifted. She was the girl everyone in this pack called defective, broken, barely worth the food they occasionally let her eat. She could not have bond light. It was not possible.
Except she had seen it.
She stared at her wrist for a long time, kneeling on the wet kitchen floor in her soaked shirt, cold and alone at three in the morning.
Then something even worse hit her.
Bond light did not appear randomly. It appeared when a wolf sensed its mate nearby.
She was in the pack house.
The only wolves in the pack house tonight were Alpha Reid, his three sons, and the overnight guard rotation.
Her eyes moved, without her permission, to the hallway where she had just heard Kai's footsteps disappear.
No, she told herself. That is insane. That is impossible.
But her wrist burned like something was waking up.
And in the hallway above her, she could hear, very faintly, the sound of a wolf pacing.