Chapter 1 PROLOGUE 1

The first thing life taught me was that it owed me nothing, and it never would.You don’t realize how quietly a heart can break until you’re standing inside your own silence, wishing for someone, anyone to hear you. But in my world, the only thing that listened back was the echo of everything I’d lost before I even had the chance to hold it.I’ve always felt like I never belonged, not in this pack, and definitely not in the family I was placed with.The day I took my first breath, my mother took her last. My father, unable to survive the vacuum her death left behind, followed her soon after, leaving me orphaned before I could even form a memory, or so I was told. I know them only through a few faded photographs, and not once have I ever felt their absence as love lost.Alpha Joe, our pack leader, handed me off like an unwanted gift to Ama and Vargos. For a while, a sweet, cruel while, they treated me like their own. Until I was seven and Ama’s belly began to swell with new life.Then the world shifted. Suddenly, the arms that once cradled me grew cold. The eyes that once sought me out in a crowd turned past me like I was nothing more than air.