Chapter 4

(Seraphina POV)

Six years.

Seventy-two dragging, suffocating months of living as a phantom in my own childhood home.

If I harbored any naive hope that the passage of time would heal the gaping wound Gwendolyn’s death left in the Obsidian Crest Pack, the reality was a brutal awakening. The pack hadn’t moved on; they had crystallized her memory into an immovable religion. The scale of her martyrdom was nothing short of fanatical. Routine municipality updates had renamed the intersecting roads near the packhouse to Gwendolyn Lane and Gwen Avenue. Local coffee shops unironically sold seasonal drinks named in her honor. Most bizarre of all, two of her favorite boutique dresses were permanently displayed in reinforced glass cases in the public library's main atrium, as if she were a fallen deity.

Her birthday and the anniversary of her death had been forcefully decreed as mandatory pack holidays. Except for the low-ranking Omegas forced to prepare the vast feasts, everyone else was off from work, school, and combat training to participate in hours of somber, repetitive remembrances.

I had once made the profound mistake of asking my parents if this was a normal reaction to the death of a single, unmated she-wolf. We could love her, we could miss her, but treating her like an infallible saint and erasing her human flaws seemed deeply unhealthy. The pack revered only three ancient historical Alphas with this level of ceremony.

My questions were rewarded with blistering accusations of jealousy, topped by a severe, bone-bruising beating from my mother. It was at that moment I realized the truth: the worst part of losing Gwendolyn wasn't the tragedy of her death. It was the complete, violent destruction of my relationship with my parents.

Before her violent end, I knew Gwendolyn was the beloved favorite. It was an unspoken but accepted dynamic. But my parents still loved me; they praised my decent grades and occasionally indulged me. They had never once raised a hand against me.

After she was buried, my parents couldn't physically endure looking at me. And when their eyes did occasionally find mine, they were dark with the unmistakable, soul-crushing wish that it had been my shredded body they found in the woods, not hers.

By the time I was seventeen, I was entirely self-sufficient, surviving by scrubbing crusted grease off the grills at a roadside diner located two towns over, just to afford basic necessities. I hadn't celebrated a birthday since I turned fourteen. No one in the pack had bothered to ask if I had received my wolf. Instead, a vicious rumor had taken root and spread like wildfire: I was a "wolfless" defect, an anomaly whose wolf had withered away from the crippling guilt of getting her saintly sister killed.

That specific, venomous theory had originated directly from Sebastian. He had publicly declared that Gwendolyn had been in the woods tracking me down because I had secretly snuck out to whore myself around with a rogue boy. I had no idea why he fabricated such a vile lie, but to defend myself meant calling the future Alpha a liar and tarnishing the dead Luna’s pristine image. It was an immediate death sentence.

So, I pushed through the abuse in silence. I graduated high school a full year early and fled. I actively overloaded my semesters at Crimson Peak, entering a grueling, specialized werewolf medical program to ensure I possessed a skill set that would buy my independence. I stayed away, only returning under the absolute mandate of Alpha Maximilian’s decree requiring attendance at the twin holidays of my sister's birth and passing.

Tonight is the eve of my twentieth birthday—the monumental milestone when a werewolf is biologically meant to identify their fated mate. Staring at the ceiling of my cramped room, I close my eyes. *Please,* I whisper to the Moon Goddess. *Please do not let my mate reside in the Obsidian Crest pack. And if he does, please give me the strength to convince him to run away with me.*