Chapter 1 - The Scraps Beneath the Rosemary
The kitchen garden of Wolfkeep at midnight smelled of frost-bitten thyme and damp stone.
Seraphina Pell adjusted the worn wool shawl over her shoulders, her fingers numb against the biting air. On the heavy wooden tray she carried rested a bowl of lukewarm vegetable broth—watery and salvaged from the Duke of Vane's supper—along with a crust of sourdough bread that was hard enough to hammer nails with. To anyone else in the castle, it was refuse. To the massive silver shadow breathing heavily beneath the low-hanging branches of the rosemary hedge, it was survival.
For nine nights, this had been her secret rhythm.
Upstairs, the high ceilings of the great hall thundered with the boots of visiting alpha lords, the clash of silver goblets, and the high, nervous laughter of twelve young noblewomen draped in silks that cost more than Seraphina’s family had seen in a lifetime. Down here, the world was silent, save for the wind whistling through the crenellations and the ragged, shallow breathing of a dying beast.
Seraphina knelt on the damp earth, ignoring how the cold bit through her thin apron.
"Easy," she murmured, her voice soft and steady.
On the first night, the wolf had snapped at her. Its jaws, large enough to crush a man’s skull, had caught the edge of her sleeve, tearing the coarse cotton. But Seraphina had not flinched. She had seen that look in a pair of human eyes before—the cold, feral defensive instinct of something that had been hunted, battered, and left to die by those it trusted.
Two years ago, she had stood in the sunlit courtyard of the Border Chapel, wearing a simple white tunic sewn by her mother’s hands. Kale, the son of the Western Reach’s primary border captain, had stood before her with his family watching. He hadn't yelled. He hadn't spat insults. He had simply looked down at her with a chilling, clinical detachment and stated that the Moon Goddess must have made a clerical error. An omega orphan from the mud-hut hamlets of the southern border could not sit beside an alpha who commanded cavalry.
He dropped her hand as if it were burning coal.
By nightfall, she was no longer Kale’s promised mate; she was an embarrassment to be tucked away. They stripped her of her white dress, handed her a coarse grey scullery shift, and banished her to the lowest tier of the castle staff. For twenty-four months, she had lived as a ghost. People looked through her, around her, or down at her feet.
That invisibility, however, had its advantages. It was why no one questioned why she carried an extra bowl out to the scullery door every evening.
"Come on," she whispered, nudging the wooden bowl closer. "You need this more than the floorboards do."
The silver wolf opened its eyes. They were not the yellow or amber of ordinary wolves; they were pale, metallic, shining like cold steel reflecting starlight. For a heartbeat, the animal stared at her with an intelligence that felt unnervingly human. Then, slowly, painfully, it lowered its massive head and began to lap at the broth.
Seraphina reached out, her fingers trembling slightly before they touched the coarse fur of its flank. Beneath her palm, she felt the jagged, heat-radiating line of a deep laceration—a wound torn by something heavy and vicious, perhaps a silver-tipped war spear or the jaws of a rival beast. With a strip of clean linen torn from her own shift two nights ago, she had bound the worst of it.
As the wolf finished eating, it let out a low, vibrating hum from deep within its chest. It wasn’t a growl. It felt like a physical pulse, a wave of steady warmth that traveled through her fingertips, up her arm, and settled directly against her breastbone, warming her from the inside out.
Seraphina frowned, pressing a hand to her chest. "That's... odd."
May you like
Before she could ponder the strange sensation, a deep, resonant bronze horn boomed from Wolfkeep’s high tower. Its metallic clang vibrated through the stones beneath her knees.
The selection ceremony had begun.
