POV Sera:

I wake up in the stables with straw in my hair, horse dung on my bare feet, and a whip mark burning across my shoulders from yesterday's "lesson."

Today I turn eighteen.

Today, my wolf is supposed to emerge.

And today, like every day, I am nothing.

The morning air inside the Blood Moon Pack stables smells of hay, manure, and cold stone. I lie still for a moment, listening to the horses shift in their stalls — the only creatures in this entire pack who have never looked at me with contempt. Old Brutus, the chestnut stallion nearest my sleeping corner, leans his great head over the gate and exhales a warm breath against my cheek. I press my hand flat against his muzzle.

"I know," I whisper. "Happy birthday to me."

The wound on my back pulls tight as I sit up. I reach behind me and peel the thin shift away from dried blood, biting down on my lip so I don't make a sound. Sound draws attention. Attention draws punishment. At eleven years of living in the Blood Moon Pack's stables, I have learned this the way other children learn to walk — out of absolute necessity, one agonizing fall at a time.

I was seven when my parents died.

Or so I was told.

My uncle, Alpha Magnus, took me in that same winter. He gave me a roof and a role: servant. Not pack member. Not niece. Servant. I cleaned stalls, hauled water, scrubbed flagstones, mended boots, and slept in the stable corner on a pile of horse blankets. If I was quick and invisible and useful, I was ignored. If I was slow, or clumsy, or seen at the wrong moment by the wrong person, I was punished.

Eleven years of careful invisibility, and I am still here.

I stand, stretching muscles that protest every morning now, and begin my routine. Forty-three steps to the water trough at the stable's rear. Cold water over my face and hands. Six breaths. Then I begin.

Stalls first. Mucking out, fresh bedding, water buckets. The stable holds fourteen horses and I tend all of them. By the time the sun has crept a finger's width above the horizon, my arms ache and my back screams, and I have not eaten since yesterday's lunch — half a bowl of kitchen scraps that Luna Victoria decided were "too good for an omega anyway" and had thrown in the yard for me to collect off the ground.

I did not cry.

I have not cried in four years. There is no one to cry to.

I am hauling the third water bucket from the yard pump — my shoulders burning with each step, the fresh whip mark stretching into screaming protest — when I hear it. A rose, lying on my sleeping blanket. Red as an open wound, perfectly placed against the rough wool.

Beside it, a folded slip of paper.

I set down the bucket. My fingers tremble, just slightly, as I unfold the note.

For the birthday girl. — K

Something loosens in my chest. Something that has no name, or maybe just one I never let myself say out loud.

Kael. The stable boy. My only friend in this world, if servants are allowed to have friends. He has been here four years, this broad-shouldered boy with golden eyes who shovels muck without complaint and leaves bread crusts in my sleeping corner when he thinks I haven't eaten. He never asks for anything. He just... notices me.

No one else in the Blood Moon Pack has noticed me since I was seven.

I tuck the rose into my dress collar, where it presses cool against my collarbone. I allow myself exactly three seconds of feeling something — warmth, gratitude, a fragile, unnamed thing — and then I pick up the water bucket and go back to work.

The great hall is being prepared for the celebration by mid-morning.

I know this because I am on my hands and knees scrubbing the flagstones when the servants come to hang the banners. Blue and silver. The Ashborne colors. Prince Cassian has returned from the border territories, and the Blood Moon Pack — like every pack in the Northern Crown — is scrambling to impress its future Alpha King.

"Move faster, omega," a passing noble says to me without looking down. His boot narrowly misses my hand.

I move faster.

I keep my head down and my eyes on the stone and I scrub. Around me, the hall fills with sound: the clatter of fine china, the bark of orders, the soft excited murmur of wolves who have never had to scrub a floor in their lives discussing which gown makes their eyes look better and whether the prince's return means the Spring Mate Selection will be moved up.

I think about the rose.

I think about turning eighteen, and what it is supposed to mean. Today, my wolf should emerge. It is late — most wolves shift for the first time at sixteen, some at seventeen — but Omegas are always last. At least that's what I've been told. What they don't say, what I have pieced together from overheard whispers, is that some Omegas never shift at all. Their wolves are so crushed by rank and circumstance that they simply... don't come.

I press my knuckles harder against the flagstone and scrub.

Come, I think, for the hundredth time. Come, please. Whoever you are in there. I know it's terrible in here. I know there isn't much to recommend this life. But come.

Nothing answers.

I finish the flagstones. I move to the east corridor. I am invisible, and the celebration builds around me like a tide that has never once considered sweeping me up.

That is when the doors open.

The silence hits first — a ripple moving through the assembled nobles and servants and guards, a sharp collective intake that travels from the doors to the dais and back again. I am kneeling with my bucket and brush and I do not look up. Looking up is how trouble starts.