Seven Deaths Before He Called Me Luna

Lena Frost died on the night of the Blood Moon. Then she woke up — three days earlier, alive, with the memory of the silver blade still burning in her chest. Six more deaths taught her the truth: she is the last True Luna of a slaughtered bloodline, the Alpha's fated mate, and the one wolf the Moon Goddess will not let stay dead. *A Werewolf time-loop romance about the Omega who died seven times to rise a Luna.*

Chapter 1: The Twelfth Toll

The Blood Moon hung low over Blackpine Hold, fat and red as a fresh wound. Through the Infirmary window, I watched the Pack stream toward the Moonstone Clearing: warriors with their heads high, elders draped in ceremonial gray, she-wolves in silver-threaded gowns. All of them going to watch Alpha Kane choose his Luna.

I stayed behind.

An Omega does not attend the Mating Ceremony. An Omega stays where she belongs: in the shadows, in the Infirmary, in the spaces the Pack forgets exist. I had spent twenty-two years learning this. It was the first lesson Blackpine taught me, before the herbs, before the healing, before old Willa took my hands in hers and said *You are more than they see.* I had never believed her.

"Lena." Rina's voice came from the doorway, hushed and urgent. She was the only other Omega who spoke to me without the edge of pity that the rest of the Pack wore like a second skin. Her dark curls were pinned back, a thin silver chain at her throat, the closest an Omega could get to ceremony dress. "I saved you a spot at the edge of the Clearing. Behind the eastern torch. No one will notice."

I looked down at my hands, stained with wolfsbane residue from the afternoon's work. Old Willa had taught me that a healer's hands were never truly clean, and she had been right. Even now, three winters after her death, her lessons clung to me like the scent of dried moonpetal that never quite left the Infirmary walls.

"I have the night watch," I said. "Blood Moon means every warrior will be at the Ceremony. Someone has to mind the Infirmary."

Rina gave me a look that said what neither of us would speak aloud. *They gave you this shift because no one else wanted it. Because you're the lowest Omega in Blackpine, the pale-haired healer with the weak wolf, and no one will miss you if you spend Blood Moon night alone with your herbs and your ghosts.*

"The Alpha might choose tonight," she said instead, her voice dropping. "They say Seraphine of Silverpine crossed the Ashfall Range with twelve warriors as an honor guard. Her father wants the alliance sealed before winter."

Seraphine. The name drifted through Pack gossip like smoke: the Alpha's daughter from the neighboring territory, bred for leadership, raised to be a Luna. Golden-haired and fierce-eyed, if the warriors' talk was to be believed. Everyone said it was only a matter of time before Kane made the alliance official. A strong Alpha needed a strong Luna. That was the way of things.

Something tightened in my chest at the thought, low and strange. I pushed it away. Blood Moon restlessness. Nothing more.

"Go," I told Rina. "Watch for both of us."

She squeezed my hand and slipped into the stream of bodies moving toward the Clearing.

I stood alone in the Infirmary. The shelves of dried herbs cast long shadows in the candlelight: wolfsbane, silvermoss, moonpetal, nightshade root. Each jar held a remedy for something that could kill a wolf. I had spent seven years memorizing their names, their doses, their dangers. Seven years since Willa found me as a scrawny pup with hair the color of winter moonlight and grey-green eyes that everyone said marked bad blood.

*Silver hair*, the other pups used to whisper when they thought I couldn't hear. *Defective. Weak wolf. Probably won't even shift.*

They were half right. I could shift, but my wolf was small and pale, a runt by Blackpine standards. She paced beneath my skin now, restless in a way she hadn't been in years. The Blood Moon did that. Even to the weakest among us.

I touched the leather pouch at my belt: ground wolfsbane, my own blend. Willa's last lesson, given in the thin voice of her final winter: *Always carry it, child. You'll know when to use it.*

The first chime of the Blood Moon bell rolled across the mountains, deep and resonant. The old bell in the Moonstone Clearing tower rang only on this night, and it would ring twelve times before midnight. Each toll was said to carry the Moon Goddess's ear closer to the earth.

I should have stayed in the Infirmary. But my feet carried me out the door and along the shadowed path to the edge of the Clearing, where the lowest of the Pack stood watching.

The Clearing blazed with torchlight. Iron brackets lined the ancient stone circle, their flames licking at the darkness, casting dancing shadows on the faces of a hundred wolves. At the center, on the raised platform where Alphas had stood for seven generations, Kane Blackwood waited.

I had seen him a hundred times before: at Pack gatherings where I stood at the back, at the Alpha's table where I served but never sat, passing through the training grounds where I delivered salves to injured warriors who never met my eyes. But under the Blood Moon, he looked like something the mountain itself had carved. Broad shoulders beneath a black ceremonial cloak, dark hair cut close, amber-gold eyes that caught every torch in the Clearing. His wolf was close to the surface. I could feel the pressure of a dominant presence that made every Omega's wolf want to drop its head and bare its throat.

His gaze swept the crowd.

It stopped on me.

One heartbeat. Two. Fifty paces and the entire weight of Pack hierarchy between us, but in that moment, something pulled. A thread I didn't understand, tightening somewhere beneath my ribs. My wolf lifted her head for the first time in years, ears pricked forward, and a scent reached me across the distance: pine and something darker, something that made my breath catch in my throat.

*His scent.*

Kane's eyes narrowed, as if he'd felt it too. As if he was trying to place something he couldn't name.

Then Seraphine stepped onto the platform beside him, tall and golden, exactly what a Luna should look like, and the moment shattered. Kane's gaze moved on. The thread went slack.

Blood Moon, I told myself. The Blood Moon made every wolf restless. Made them scent things that weren't there. That was all.

I turned and walked back toward the Infirmary, my pulse still uneven, my wolf still prowling beneath my skin like she'd caught the edge of something she couldn't let go.

The path wound through the dark edge of the Hold, past the warriors' compound with its empty training rings, past the elders' lodge where candlelight flickered behind shuttered windows. I kept my head down, as I'd been taught. An Omega did not walk these paths after dark. An Omega did not linger where she wasn't wanted.

The voices stopped me cold.

"...before she lives to awaken."

Damon Vale. The Beta's voice was unmistakable: smooth and measured, the kind of voice that made you want to lean in and trust it. But something in his tone tonight was different. Lower. Sharper. The voice of someone who thought no one was listening.

I pressed myself against the cold stone wall, my heart slamming against my ribs. The shadows of the Hold's eastern wing swallowed me.

"The bloodline can't be allowed to surface." Damon again, his words barely above a murmur. "Do it clean. Tonight. The Ceremony will cover the sound."

A second voice answered, too quiet for me to catch the words. A figure in a dark hood stood half-hidden by the archway, slight and perfectly still. I couldn't see a face. I couldn't even tell if it was male or female.

Damon's hand rested briefly on the hooded figure's shoulder, a gesture that was almost gentle. "The Infirmary. She'll be alone."

My blood turned to ice.

I must have made a sound. A scrape of boot on stone. A breath pulled too sharp. Because Damon's head turned, and his grey-blue eyes found me in the dark.

For a long moment, neither of us moved. The Blood Moon bell tolled somewhere behind us, the fourth chime, the fifth, and still Damon held my gaze with that calm, measuring look.

Then he smiled. It was the same smile he gave everyone in the Pack: warm, easy, the smile of a Beta who had earned his place at Alpha Kane's right hand through years of loyalty and service.

"Little healer," he said. "You should be resting."

I opened my mouth. Nothing came out. My wolf was frozen inside me, too weak to even whimper.

"The Blood Moon makes everyone restless," Damon said, stepping toward me with the easy grace of a born predator. "Even our Omega healer, wandering where she shouldn't be."

"I was just..." My voice came out thin. "I was returning to the Infirmary."

"Good." He stopped close enough that I could smell him: cedar and something metallic beneath it. "The night watch is important. Especially tonight."

He didn't touch me. He didn't need to. His presence alone was enough to press me back against the stone.

"Run along, little healer."

I ran. I hated myself for running, but my wolf was too weak to do anything else. I felt his eyes on my back all the way to the Infirmary door.

Inside, I locked it, a pointless gesture in a Pack where any wolf could break through wood and iron, and pressed my forehead against the cool stone wall, breathing hard.

*She'll be alone in the Infirmary.*

Who was she? What bloodline? And why would Damon Vale, Beta of Blackpine, Kane's right hand, want anyone dead on Blood Moon night?

The bell tolled again. The eighth chime. Then the ninth. The sound rolled through the mountains like a heartbeat, steady and inexorable.

I pulled the wolfsbane pouch from my belt and held it in my shaking hands. Willa's voice echoed in my head: *You'll know when to use it.* But I didn't know. I didn't know anything: who the hooded figure was, what Damon was planning, why anyone would target an Omega healer who had spent her entire life being invisible.

The tenth toll. The eleventh.

At the twelfth, the door crashed inward.

I spun, and the silver blade was already inside me.

The pain was cold. Colder than the mountain winter. Colder than the years I had spent being invisible. Colder than the hollow place in my chest where my wolf should have been strong enough to fight back. I looked down and saw the hilt: simple, unmarked, silver that burned against wolf flesh like acid. Then I looked up at the figure holding it.

The dark hood. The dark cloak. And beneath the hood's edge, a strand of dark hair catching the moonlight through the shattered door.

My knees hit the stone floor. The twelfth toll of the Blood Moon bell rang out over the clearing, and in the last of the moonlight, I saw it — a strand of dark hair beneath the killer's hood.

Then the world went black.

Chapter 2: The Moonlit Veil

I opened my eyes to silver.

Not moonlight through the Infirmary window. Not the glow of dying candles. Silver everywhere, beneath me, above me, stretching in every direction like I was suspended inside a cloud of frozen light. There was no floor. No walls. No sound except the faintest hum, like a bell that had stopped ringing but hadn't quite fallen silent.

I tried to breathe and found I didn't need to.

My hand moved to my chest. The place where the silver blade had gone in. The skin was smooth. Unbroken. I pressed harder, searching for the wound, the burn, anything, and found nothing.

Then I looked down, past my own body, and saw myself.

My corpse lay at my feet. Still. Pale hair fanned across stone that wasn't there. Silver hilt still buried in my chest. Eyes open and fixed on nothing.

I couldn't scream. I couldn't look away. I had seen death before; I was a healer, I had held the hands of dying wolves, I had closed Willa's eyes myself. But I had never seen *myself* like this. Empty. Gone. A body that used to be someone.

"This is the veil."

The voice came from everywhere at once. Not loud. Not soft. It simply was, the way moonlight simply was, the way the mountain wind simply moved.

I turned, and She was there.

I couldn't see Her face. It was there, I knew it was there, but my eyes slid off it like water off stone, unable to hold the shape. What I could see was the light that moved around Her, not around Her body, because She didn't seem to have a body, not exactly. The light *was* Her form. Silver and white and the deep blue that lived at the very edge of the moon's glow.

"Am I dead?" My voice sounded small in the endless silver space.

"You are." The Moon Goddess, because who else could She be, inclined Her head. "And you were not meant to be."

The words landed in my chest like a second blade. Not meant to be. I had spent twenty-two years being invisible, being weak, being the Omega everyone forgot existed, and now a goddess was telling me my death was a mistake.

"Who killed me?" The question came out raw. "I saw the dark hair, the hood, a glimpse of silver."

"That is not a question I will answer."

"Why not?"

"Because it is not a gift I will give."

I stared at Her. "Then what are you giving me?"

The light around Her shifted, deepened. When She spoke again, Her voice carried a weight that pressed against my bones. "A chance. Seven deaths to find what was taken from you. Seven lives to claim what has always been yours."

"Seven?" The number hung in the silver air.

"Seven, child. Not eight. The Blood Moon does not bargain twice." The Moon Goddess's form flickered, and for the briefest moment I thought I caught the edge of something ancient in Her gaze, something that had watched wolves live and die for a thousand Blood Moons.

"What was taken from me?" I pressed. "Give me something. A name. A shape. Anything."

She was quiet for a long moment, long enough that I thought She would not answer at all. When She did, Her voice was softer: a sound like moonrise over still water. "You were given a gift the night you were born. It was stripped from you before you drew your second breath. The wolves who knew say nothing. The wolves who speak don't know. The thread is yours to find."

"And if I don't? If I spend all seven and still don't have the answer?"

"Then you will rest," She said. "The world is not required to wait for you, Lena Frost."

"I don't understand. Claim what? What has always been mine?"

"That, you must find yourself."

Frustration flared in my chest. "You're a goddess. You could tell me who killed me. You could tell me why. You could tell me what any of this means."

"I could." There was no cruelty in Her voice. No impatience. Only a patience so vast it was almost unbearable. "But if I gave you the answers, you would never find the wolf you are meant to become. And that wolf, Lena Frost, is the only thing that can save you."

Before I could answer, the silver light began to pull. Not fade; *pull*, like a tide retreating from shore, drawing me with it. My body, the living one, the one that still felt heat and cold and fear, lurched backward.

"Wait."

"Seven," the Moon Goddess said, and now Her voice was fading too, the silver light thinning into threads. "Remember, child. Seven."

I fell.

I hit stone. Real stone. Cold and solid and gritty against my palms. The Infirmary floor. I was on my knees, gasping, my heart slamming against my ribs like a trapped animal, my hands flying to my chest. No wound. No blood. No silver blade.

I was alive.

I raised my head and looked through the window. The Blood Moon hung in the sky, but higher now, earlier, the deep red of dusk bleeding into the horizon. The Clearing bell was silent. The torches hadn't been lit yet.

Time had moved backward.

I sat on the cold floor for a long moment, trying to make sense of it. The moonlit veil. The goddess. The words She had spoken, etched into my memory like claw marks on stone. *Seven deaths. Seven chances.* It was impossible. It was a dying hallucination: my mind's last desperate grasp at something before everything went dark.

That was what I told myself. A hallucination. A fever dream brought on by silver poisoning and blood loss.

But when I looked at my hands and saw them shake, I couldn't make myself believe it. The details were too precise. The exact quality of that light: not warm, not cold, silver the way a blade is silver before it enters flesh. Her voice carrying a weight that no dying brain could manufacture, patient and immovable as the mountain itself. And beneath my palms, right now, the rough grit of the Infirmary floor, a sensation my body hadn't had time to notice when I was dying, only when I was alive again, when my nerves had reason to report such things. Hallucinations frayed at the edges. This had no edges. It simply was.

The evening passed like a dream I had already lived. Rina came to the door: "Lena, I saved you a spot at the edge of the Clearing," and I heard the words with a shiver of recognition. The same offer. The same hushed excitement in her voice. The same reports of Seraphine and her twelve warriors.

I went through the motions. I smiled when Rina expected me to smile. I said the same words I had said the first time: *I have the night watch. Go. Watch for both of us.* But my voice sounded distant to my own ears, and my hands kept finding the wolfsbane pouch at my belt.

I didn't go to the Clearing. I didn't walk the shadowed path where I had heard Damon's voice. I stayed in the Infirmary, barricaded behind a locked door that I knew wouldn't hold, waiting for midnight to prove me wrong.

The bell began to toll.

Not a hallucination. Please not a hallucination. Let me wake up in my bed with the sunrise and laugh at my own foolishness.

The tenth toll. The eleventh.

At the twelfth, the door crashed inward. The same splintering wood, the same sharp smell of iron flooding ahead of the hooded figure who stepped through the frame. I turned to face them already, my body remembering the shape of what was coming even as my mind refused it.

I tried to dodge this time. I threw myself sideways, my hands reaching for the shelf, for anything, but I was too slow, my wolf too weak, my body still caught between disbelief and the impossible reality of dying a second time.

The silver blade found my chest. The same blade. The same cold. The same burn of silver against wolf flesh, spreading outward from the wound like frost claims glass: slow at the edges, inexorable at the center, leaching warmth from every nerve at once until the Infirmary, the torchlight, the figure standing over me all narrowed to a single point of dark.

And as I fell, I looked up and saw it. The same strand of dark hair beneath the hood's edge. The same moonlight catching the same darkness.

The world went black.

I opened my eyes in silver light.

The veil again. My corpse at my feet, two deaths now, two bodies overlapping in the strange geometry of this place. The Moon Goddess stood before me, patient and silent.

"It's real," I whispered. "This is real."

She said nothing. She didn't need to.

"How long?" My voice cracked. "How many times do I have to die before I figure out who's doing this?"

"Seven," She said. "You have six now."

The silver light began to pull again, dragging me back toward the world of stone and blood and midnight bells. But this time I didn't fight it.

This was no nightmare. I had died twice, and the Blood Moon was not done with me.

Chapter 3 — The Killer's Hood

I came back different.

Not in the way the Pack would notice. I was still the same pale-haired Omega, still the same healer they forgot existed. But when I opened my eyes on the third Blood Moon dusk, something had shifted inside me. The disbelief was gone. The hope that this was a nightmare had burned away with the second silver blade. What remained was cold and clear and sharper than any of Willa's scalpels.

Someone was killing me. Someone would keep killing me. And if I didn't find out who, and why, I would run out of chances.

The Infirmary became my fortress. I moved through the familiar motions of the evening: lighting candles, organizing herbs, answering Rina's knock with the same quiet refusal. But underneath the routine, my mind was racing. I had watched myself die twice now. Both times, the same attacker. Both times, the same dark hood, the same slight frame, the same strand of dark hair. Both times, I had been caught off guard.

Not this time.

I emptied my wolfsbane pouch onto the workbench and sorted the powder into two smaller doses. One went into the hollow of my sleeve, pressed against my wrist where I could reach it in an instant. The other I mixed with crushed silvermoss, a paralytic compound Willa had taught me to make for wolves who went feral, strong enough to slow even a warrior's reflexes. It wouldn't kill. I was a healer, not a killer. But it might buy me time.

The bell began to toll.

I stood in the center of the Infirmary, feet braced, facing the door. My wolf was awake beneath my skin for the first time in years: not strong, not fierce, but *watchful*. She had been silent during the first two deaths. This time, she was waiting.

The eighth toll. The ninth.

*Come on*, I thought. *I'm ready for you.*

The tenth. The eleventh.

At the twelfth, the door crashed inward, and I was already moving.

The hooded figure lunged through the doorframe with the same silver blade, the same killing precision, the same assumption that I would be frozen in place like the weak Omega she had killed twice before. But I wasn't frozen. I threw myself to the side, rolled hard across the stone floor, one shoulder cracking against the base of the herb shelf. Pain flared hot through my arm. I ignored it. I came up on my knees with the silvermoss powder cupped in my palm, ready.

The figure spun toward me faster than I expected. The blade sliced through the air half a hand's width from my cheek. I felt the displaced cold of it brush my skin, close enough to make my breath catch. She had adjusted. She had learned from the last two times, the way a hunter adjusts after a missed shot, and for one lurching heartbeat I thought I had misjudged this.

Then I threw the powder directly into the space beneath the hood.

A sharp intake of breath. A stumble. The silver blade wavered as the silvermoss hit her lungs, her blood, her shifting muscle. For one long second she staggered sideways, one gloved hand slapping against the wall for balance. Her knees buckled under the weight of it. The blade arm dropped.

I didn't wait. I lunged forward, grabbed the edge of the hood with both hands, and tore it back.

The world stopped.

She was young. Younger than me. Twenty, maybe, and not a single day more. Her face was narrow and sharp, hollowed at the cheeks in a way that had nothing to do with hunger and everything to do with grief. Dark hair fell in uneven strands around her jaw, cut roughly, the way someone cuts their own hair when they've stopped caring what they look like. The ends were ragged and uneven, like she had done it with a hunting knife in the dark without once glancing at a reflection. Her skin was pale, slightly wind-burned across the bridge of her nose, and her eyes stopped me cold.

I had expected hatred. I had expected the cold fury of a paid killer, the detached emptiness of someone who murdered for coin. But what I saw in her face was something else entirely. Something I recognized.

Her eyes were hollow. Not empty — *hollowed out*. The way a tree is hollow after a fire has burned through its center. The way a Pack territory looks after everyone has fled. She was looking at me, but she wasn't seeing me. She was seeing something else. Someone else. A ghost I didn't know. Her jaw was clenched, the tendons along her throat standing out like rope, and yet her expression held no rage. It held no hatred. It was the face of someone who had exhausted all their feeling a long time ago and was now operating on something colder and more mechanical than emotion.

And beneath that hollow stare, on her right arm where the sleeve had torn during our struggle, I saw it: a tattoo. A wolf's head in dark ink, surrounded by a circle of thorned vines. The Ashborne mark. Old ink, thick-set and deliberate, the kind that wasn't just decoration but identity, the kind you earned rather than chose.

Something flickered in my chest. A memory, or the shadow of a memory, pulling at me from a place I couldn't reach.

The Blood Moon. Kane's eyes finding me across the Clearing.

The Pack had gathered at the ritual site, shoulder to shoulder, their breath fogging white in the cold night air, torches cutting orange light across their faces. I had stood at the edge of the circle where I always stood. Peripheral. Present but not counted. Kane had been at the center, firelight tracing the sharp line of his jaw, the controlled stillness he carried like a second skin. His gaze had swept the assembly, methodical, an Alpha accounting for his territory, and then it had stopped. On me. Not the empty survey of a leader scanning for threats, but something deliberate. Something that held and did not move on. I had felt the pull of it beneath my ribs, not fear, not recognition, but something older. Something that felt like the first note of a song I had known before I was born. The whole world had narrowed to that gaze, the torchlight and the crowd falling away, and when it finally broke I had stood there breathing too fast and understanding nothing at all.

*His scent on the cold air. Pine and something darker. Power and restraint folded into the same breath.*

The image shattered and reformed into another: Willa.

Not the old Willa who couldn't lift her hands anymore, but the Willa of my childhood, the one with steady fingers and eyes that caught everything you tried to hide. We had been in the Infirmary late, the candles burned down to their last inch, shadows pooling in the corners of the room. She had been teaching me a compounding technique, her hands guiding mine through the motions, murmuring corrections in that dry unhurried voice. And then she had stopped. Gone still, the way she only went still when something mattered. She had reached into the pocket of her apron and pressed something into my palm without a word. Something small and heavy and cold. A pendant. A silver crescent moon on a chain so thin it was almost invisible, the metal warm from being carried against her body for what felt like years.

"Keep it hidden, child." Her voice had come out rough, urgent in a way I had never heard from her before, nothing like her usual dry instruction. She had wrapped both her hands over mine, her eyes dark and intent, fixed on my face with an intensity that had frightened me without my being able to say why. As if she was trying to press something into me through the skin. "It's who you are."

I had been ten years old. I had not understood. I had tucked the pendant under my tunic and never taken it off, and I had never understood what she meant.

The flashback broke. I was back in the Infirmary, on my knees, the rogue's hood still clutched in my hands. The silvermoss was wearing off. I could see her muscles tensing, watch her grip on the blade begin to steady.

I let go of the hood and held up my empty hands.

"I know that look," I whispered.

She froze. The blade stopped halfway to my throat.

"Someone took everything from you too." My voice was steady, steadier than I felt. "But it wasn't me."

For one heartbeat, something shifted in her hollow eyes. A crack. A flicker of something that might have been confusion, or recognition, or the first fracture of a lie she had believed for too long. Her blade hand trembled once, almost imperceptibly. I watched her throat move as she swallowed.

Then her jaw tightened, and the crack sealed shut.

She moved faster than I could track. The blade came up, but it wasn't silver she reached for. Her free hand shot out and snatched the wolfsbane pouch from where it had fallen during our struggle. My pouch. My own blend. The one I had spent seven years perfecting under Willa's patient instruction.

She slammed the powder into my face.

I choked. Wolfsbane burned going down, not like silver, not like fire, but like ice spreading through your veins, paralyzing muscle by muscle, shutting down every wolf instinct one at a time. I knew the progression because I had treated it a dozen times. I knew exactly how long I had.

Not long enough.

I collapsed onto the stone floor, gasping. The cold seeped through my palms and cheek. My vision narrowed to a tunnel, the edges going dark and soft. The rogue stood over me, the empty pouch still in her hand, her face unreadable as stone. For a long moment she didn't move. She simply looked at me the way you look at something you have already decided to leave behind. Her chest rose and fell with even, controlled breathing. Her hollow eyes did not waver, and there was nothing in them that looked like victory.

"You don't know anything about what was taken from me," she said.

Her voice was low and rough, the voice of someone who hadn't spoken much in a long time. There was no triumph in it. No satisfaction. Just a weariness so deep it made my bones ache in sympathy even as the wolfsbane finished its slow work through my blood.

"I could," I managed. "If you'd let me."

The bell tolled above us. The final toll. The twelfth.

She didn't answer. She pulled the hood back over her dark hair, turned, and walked through the shattered door into the Blood Moon night.

And I lay dying on the Infirmary floor for the third time, with wolfsbane in my lungs and her words ringing in my ears, and the image of her hollow eyes burned into the back of my mind.

A girl who had lost everything. A girl who had been told a lie, and was killing for it.

She thought I was her enemy. But I knew that look. I knew that hollow. I had seen it in my own reflection every day since Willa died and left me alone in a Pack that would never accept me.

Someone had taken everything from her. Someone had pointed her at me like a blade.

And I was going to find out who.

I closed my eyes as the silver light of the veil rose up to meet me. The Moon Goddess waited in the distance, silent and patient, holding my fourth chance in her outstretched hands.

"I know that look," I whispered into the dark. "Someone took everything from you too. But it wasn't me."