Chapter 3 — Zero Missed Calls

The voice came four nights before I left.

11:03 p.m. Singing. A woman's voice, low and amused, curling through the inside of my skull.

I sat straight up in the dark with my heart trying to climb out of my throat.

"Happy birthday, Wren."

"You're a week early," I said out loud, like an idiot, to my own head.

"You were born a week late, under a blood moon, in a storm, and your mother told the healer to write down the day she'd already sent the invitations for." A laugh. "Eighteen years of the wrong birthday. And you've never once been on time for anything in your life. Now you know why."

"Who are you?"

"Vesper. I'm the part of you they tried to bury."

I should have been terrified. I was, for about ten minutes. Then something horrible happened — I felt less alone than I had in a year.

That's how low the bar had fallen. A voice in my head was better company than six wolves who share my blood.

"I never shifted," I said. "I'm wolfless."

"You were never wolfless, my girl. You were muzzled." A pause, and her voice went cold as creek water. "Ask yourself who burned that mark behind your ear."

By the second night I could hear the kitchen radio from four hundred yards away, through two stone walls. I could hear the river moving under the cabin floor. I could hear the gate wolf's heartbeat change when he lied to dispatch about his cigarette break.

And then — worse.

I heard a second voice inside the groundskeeper as he walked past my window. Not his mouth. Something under it. Something older and simpler and unable to lie.

poor pup. nobody's fed that girl in months.

He never opened his mouth. His wolf did.

I threw up in the sink after that one.

"Wolves can't lie," Vesper said. "Men lie constantly. You'll never need a truth serum in your life. Congratulations. It's a nightmare."

On my last night, she asked me for one thing.

"Give them one chance. One dinner. Sit at that table and let me look at them. If I'm wrong about what I'm seeing, spend your whole life hating them. But look first."

So I put on a clean shirt and walked into my family's dining room for the first time in four months.

Here's the part that finished me.

The housekeeper set a plate in front of me and she wasn't surprised. Not a blink. Not a lovely to see you, Miss Wren. Like a ghost turning up at the table is just Tuesday in this house.

My father came in on a call. My mother came in with three binders. My brothers came in arguing about fabric samples, of all the stupid things, and then all five of them went abruptly, unnaturally silent, and started tapping at their phones.

Five men. One woman. All quiet. All texting.

Talking around me. Over me. About me, maybe. Never to me.

And underneath — nothing. No wolf-voices. Not one. Five shifters in one room and their wolves were locked down so hard it was like sitting with statues.

That, Vesper said slowly, takes training. And terror.

I ate every bite. I don't know why. Maybe I wanted to be able to say I gave them the full hour.

At minute fifty-eight my mother looked up. Right at my face. One entire second.

My whole stupid starving heart lifted off the floor.

Then she said, "Kai, tell Rafe the west clearing's confirmed," and looked back down.

I stood up before dessert.

"I'm sorry, love," Vesper said quietly, as I walked out into the dark. "I looked. I don't understand them either."

I packed in nine minutes. Everything I own fits in one bag, because a girl who's been erased learns to travel light.

I left three things behind: the green dress, the Voss crest ring, and a note on my mother's pillow.

I waited a year. Don't come looking. — W.

Then I rolled my bike down the fire road with the engine dead and crossed the territory line at 12:14 a.m. on my real eighteenth birthday, and I did not cry.

I made it two hundred miles before I pulled into a gas station under a buzzing yellow light and did the one thing I'd promised I wouldn't.

I checked my phone.

Eight hours gone. A year invisible. I told myself even a Voss would have noticed by now — the empty cabin, the missing bike, the note on the pillow.

The screen lit my face up in the dark.

No texts.

No voicemails.

Zero missed calls.

I stood in that lot and laughed until my ribs hurt, then laughed until I was crying, and a trucker asked if I was okay and I told him I'd never been better in my life.

Then I dropped the phone in the trash, got back on my bike, and rode toward the only people on earth who'd ever put my name in writing.

I had six days to reach the Iron Vow.

What I didn't know was that on the seventh — the day they thought was my birthday — my mother would walk into an empty bedroom and start howling loud enough to crack windows on two mountains.