I began folding his clothes anyway, smoothing fabric with hands that felt numb. Then my elbow brushed the side table, and a folder slid free, scattering its contents across the floor.
Cruise tickets.
I read the names once.
Then again.
Each letter cut sharper than the last.
Thorne Darkhowl.
Camillerette Hartclaw.
Julian.
Corinne.
Ken.
Nolan.
My name was nowhere to be found.
The journey I had carried in my chest for three decades—the promise whispered into my hair when I was eighteen—had been handed to Camille as casually as tossing a bone to a favored hound.
It was for her birthday.
He remembered hers.
He never remembered mine.
I folded the tickets slowly, carefully, as though paper could bleed if mishandled. Then I packed his suitcase anyway. Shoes buffed. Shirts pressed. Cufflinks gleaming like silver fangs. Julian barged in without knocking, beer in hand, and ordered me to pack for him too. And the twins. Corinne’s perfume. Snacks with neat labels. They dropped their needs at my feet and left without a word of thanks.
I complied.
Obedience had been driven into me over decades—the way one breaks a wolf until it forgets the taste of its own blood.
Later, alone in my room, shaking, my thoughts drifted backward.
To eighteen.
To Thorne, when his touch had been a vow instead of a weapon. When his eyes had not yet hardened into cold steel. He had promised to protect me always. To build a future untouched by pack politics or prophecy. His words had burned brighter than a blood moon, and like a fool caught in its glow, I believed him.
I believed him even when it meant defying my father—the Alpha of the Mira—whose fury was ancient, whose wolf carried the weight of centuries.
“You are no daughter of mine,” my father had roared, his voice shaking stone, his beast raging beneath his skin. The earth itself seemed to bow beneath his dominance. “Take that boy if you choose. But know this—our bond is severed. If you return to my gates, I will tear out your throat before I ever call you kin again.”
I had stood before him, trembling but unbroken, and whispered through his storm, “I love him.”
“You love a shadow,” he spat, eyes blazing silver. “And shadows always consume their own.”
Thirty winters later, his curse had come true.