CHAPTER ONE

I learned a long time ago that silence was safer.

If you don’t speak, they can’t twist your words. If you don’t look them in the eyes, they can’t see how much it hurts. If you don’t fight back, maybe, just maybe they’ll get bored and leave you alone. But that was wishful thinking.

“Hey, freak!” a voice snapped behind me the moment I stepped through the academy gates. I braced myself.

Here we go again, a day hardly passes without me getting bullied.

Three girls in tight black uniforms strutted toward me, led by none other than Annie Raine, the Beta’s daughter and everyone’s favorite spoiled princess. Her perfectly curled blonde hair bounced with each step, and her fake smile curved like a dagger. How do you smile so much when all you do is torment lives.

I kept walking, head down. Hands in my pockets. Don’t react.

“You deaf now too, wolf-less?” Annie sneered, loud enough for everyone in the courtyard to hear. Several students stopped to watch, their laughter so loud like what's so funny, laughing at someone’s pain?

I hated mornings, especially at the elite Darkpine Werewolf Academy where power was everything and I had none.

“Aw, don’t ignore us, Lyra,” one of Annie’s followers, Marnie, added, twirling a strand of her black hair. “We’re just curious. Have you tried howling lately? Or do you just bark at mirrors like a mutt?”

I kept walking. My aim was to peacefully enter the academy building. But that didn’t work out. A hard shove hit my back. My books went flying.

Papers scattered across the ground like feathers from a torn pillow. My sketchbook landed face-up, pages flapping in the wind. I scrambled to grab it before…..

“Oh, what’s this?” Annie cooed, snatching it before I could.

My heart dropped.

“No, please give it back,” I said, voice tight.

I didn’t draw for them. I didn’t share that part of me. My drawings were of my safe places, imaginary wolves, dreamscapes where I was powerful, fierce, whole.

Annie flipped through the pages, smirking. “Wow. Look at this one. You really think you’d look like this if you shifted?”

I stood still. Every muscle in my body screamed to act. But I’d learned better.

She held up a sketch of a white wolf with glowing eyes, my imaginary self. The version of me that wasn’t broken.

“You’ll never be this,” she said softly. No matter how soft and calm she spoke she still sounded evil. “Because you don’t have a wolf. You’re nothing.”

Laughter erupted around us.

I bent down slowly, gathering my books one by one, pretending their words didn’t touch me. Pretending I was somewhere else.

They got bored eventually, like they always did. Tossed my sketchbook in the mud, high-fived each other, and disappeared down the steps toward the arena.

I waited until they were gone before picking it up. The cover was torn. One page ripped halfway down the center. A smear of mud stained the edge.

It wasn’t just paper. I spent hours sketching this. And they’d ruined it again.

Breathe, Lyra. Just breathe.

I walked the rest of the way to class with my head down and heart armor on. Every student in the hallway whispered. Every face I passed turned away. Some smirked. Some pitied. No one spoke.

Because I was the girl who never shifted.

In a world where every werewolf had their first transformation at thirteen, mine never came. I had the instincts, the senses, I could hear heartbeats from across the room and outrun half the school on track, but I never felt the surge. The bones  breaking. The shift. The howl.

I wasn’t human. But I wasn’t a wolf either.

I was in-between.

A limbo girl.

The classroom buzzed with quiet chatter when I slipped in and took my seat at the far end of the back row. The teacher, Mr. Greaves, didn’t look up. He never did. Not when I was shoved into lockers. Not when someone “accidentally” erased my assignments. Not even when they changed my seat to “avoid distractions for others.”

I opened my book and stared at the same page I had read three times this week.

Nothing stuck. My mind was still back in the courtyard, in the mud, holding stained pages and broken pride.

“She probably won’t even get a mate,” someone whispered ahead of me.

“Who’d want a wolf-less mate?”

“She’s cursed.”

That one hit harder.

Because deep down… I wondered the same.

What if the Moon Goddess made a mistake? Or worse, what if She didn’t?

What if I was never meant to shift?

What if I wasn’t meant to belong anywhere?

My heart ached. Not the sharp kind of pain from bullying but that deep, slow kind. The ache of loneliness that no one else saw.

I didn’t want to be special. I didn’t want to be feared or praised or chosen. I just wanted to be normal.

One shift. That’s all I ever asked for.

Just one.

But the days passed. The full moons came and went. And nothing.

I used to cry under the moonlight, begging my wolf to wake up. I thought if I believed hard enough, if I wanted it more than anyone else… it would happen.

It never did.

The bell rang. Class ended.

I moved through the rest of the day trying my very best to be invisible but also blend with the crowd so i won’t be approached by Annie.

At lunch, I sat alone. In the gym, they “forgot” to pass me the ball. During combat class, they made sure I got paired with the largest boy in the room.

Brent. Six foot four. Full-blooded wolf. Smiled like he was already Alpha.

He didn’t hold back.

My ribs still ached by the time I made it home.

Home was a one-bedroom cottage at the edge of the woods, gifted to me by the pack after my parents died when I was a baby. No one visited. No one checked in.

But I didn’t mind. Silence was better than lies.

I ran a bath, soaked in hot water until my bruises faded from red to purple. Then I curled up by the window, staring at the rising moon.

One more day, one more sunrise until I turned eighteen, the day I’d meet my mate, the day everything would change, the day someone would finally choose me, I held onto that like it was my last breath, because if that didn’t happen… if even my mate rejected me… I didn’t know how I’d survive it.