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I’m not even properly awake yet and I can already feel it: today is going to be miserable. I’ve survived enough awful days to recognize the taste of one before it even starts. If one more thing in my life falls apart, I’m done. I’ll leave, and I won’t ever step back into this territory. “Did it happen?” I ask Callista—my Lycan—because if the bond has formed, maybe the day won’t be a complete disaster. “It did,” she says. The words should have lifted me. Instead, the way she says them lands wrong, like a warning. I turned eighteen a week ago. A week ago, the connection snapped into place—with Nathaniel, the future Alpha. Nathaniel: one of the names carved into my personal list of people who have made my life hell again and again. No, he never beat me. Neither did anyone else. That isn’t what this is. You won’t understand why his name makes my teeth grind unless I go back. On my sixth birthday, I’d been at the lake with my father—our Pack’s Beta—along with the Alpha’s family and the Gamma’s. The adults talked. The older kids played their loud, boring games. I got restless. I drifted away from the group and slipped into the trees, because most of our territory is forest and I’d grown up treating it like a backyard. I knew to watch for the markings that show where the borders are. I’d been collecting wildflowers as I wandered, small hands full of color. Then I heard it—a tiny, broken sound. A whimper. Curiosity tugged harder than caution. Like the nosy little Beta I was, I followed it. If I’d known that day would become the birthday I’d end up hating most, I would have turned around and run the other way. I found a girl curled up among the trees. Later, we learned she was only a little older than me. I brought her back and led her straight to our Alpha. Her name was Lillian. She couldn’t tell us how she’d gotten into our territory, or where she’d come from. All she could offer was confusion and a scattered sense of time—her birthday had been a few days ago, or
