The scent of blood clung to her fingers no matter how many times she scrubbed them raw.
Everly knelt beside the long stone hallway, pale morning light creeping through the narrow, arched windows of Ironfang Pack's Alpha estate. The mop in her hand dragged sluggishly across dried red streaks. Someone had bled last night. Someone always did.
But no one would ask her what happened. Slaves weren't meant to speak. Especially not the human ones.
That word still twisted like barbed wire through her chest.
"Human."
The reason they gave when they tossed her into the cellar as a child. When they made her sleep beside the furnace, without a blanket, her skin cracking from cold in the winter and blistering from heat in the summer. When the twin heirs, Alpha Kyran and Kalia, called her a mutt and threw scraps at her feet like she was less than the pack's hunting hounds.
Here, in Ironfang, status was everything. Wolves shifted at eighteen, some powerful Alphas as early as sixteen. Rank came with strength, with aura, with the ability to dominate others just by walking into a room.
And she? She had no aura. No strength. No shift.
They believed she was a human orphan the pack found wandering near the border fifteen years ago, barefoot, blood-slicked, with no scent or memory. The Luna had insisted she be spared and trained as a servant. The Alpha only agreed because she wasn't worth killing.
Now she was seventeen. One year from legally nothing, and already broken in ways no one could see.
"You're not nothing."
The voice whispered low and warm through her mind, threading its way between the fractures of her soul.
Selene.
Her wolf.
Her secret.
The one part of her that wasn't supposed to exist.
Everly paused, her breath catching. Her reflection shimmered faintly in the wet marble, bruised cheek, hollow eyes, hair tied in a blood-crusted knot. She kept her gaze low, always, like the Omegas taught her. Like the other servants who bore the mark of their rank—burned into the wrist with a silver brand shaped like a crescent moon.
She had no mark.
They never bothered to brand her.
She wasn't even an Omega.
She was nothing.
She closed her eyes. You're not supposed to be awake, she whispered back.
"And yet I am. I always am. They just can't feel me."
A shiver traveled down her spine. Four years ago, on her fourteenth birthday, Everly had shifted for the first time.
Alone. In the woods beyond the training fields, where wolves weren't allowed to hunt. The pain had been searing, her bones snapping and realigning in unnatural ways. She thought she would die.
But she hadn't.
Selene had emerged, glowing silver beneath the moonlight.
And when Everly begged her, please, don't let them know, Selene had cloaked them both. Wrapped her aura in shadows. Hidden their existence from every pack member, even the Alpha's seers.
It wasn't just survival.
It was protection.
Because if Ironfang ever found out their little slave girl had a wolf, an early one, no less, they would have torn her apart for daring to hide it.
So she scrubbed floors. Served meat. Bowed to children. Kept her wolf locked inside.
And shifted only in the shadows.
"They think you're weak." Selene's tone deepened. "Let them. The moon remembers who you are."
Footsteps echoed from above, the heavy stomp of the Alpha's son, Kyran, descending the carved stone staircase. His aura moved like a weight in the air, sharp and bitter, already stirring fear in the Omegas nearby.
Everly dropped her gaze, instinctively lowering into a crouch.
"Stupid mutt missed a spot!" he barked, kicking the mop bucket toward her. Water sloshed, cold and sharp against her bare thighs.
She didn't move. Didn't speak.
He scoffed. "Get up before you stain the floor with your filth."
She stood, numb. Numb was safer than angry. Numb didn't draw attention. Numb kept Selene from breaking through.
Selene growled low inside her.
"One day… I will rip the breath from his chest."
Not today, Everly answered.
But her hands clenched.
Ironfang Pack was more fortress than home, towers of black stone with silver-barred windows, nestled deep within the Whispering Pines. Other packs feared them. Rogues avoided them. Even the Moon Council rarely challenged them, despite rumors of cruelty and imbalance.
Their rule was absolute.
And Everly, the girl with no name in the records, no rank in the hierarchy, and no aura to detect, had survived it all.
But survival was a slow death.
And somewhere, far within, beneath Selene's protective silence and Everly's numb obedience, a second presence stirred. A shimmer in the dark. A soft, glowing breath not quite awake.
But watching.