Rejected at Seventeen, Crowned by the Lycan King Chapter 03

Rejected at Seventeen, Crowned by the Lycan King Chapter 03 — Zero Missed Calls
The voice came four nights before I left.

11:03 p.m. Singing. A woman’s voice, low and warm, curling through my skull like smoke through a keyhole.

I sat 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. Your father was in Rotterdam. Your mother told the registrar to write the day she’d already sent the announcements for.” A laugh. “Eighteen years of the wrong birthday, and you’ve never once been on time for anything. Now you know why.”

“Who are you?”

“Nyx. I’m your wolf. I’ve been asleep. I’m not anymore.”

I should have been terrified. I was, for about ten minutes.

Then something strange happened: I felt less alone than I had in a year. And that fact broke my heart worse than anything my family ever did.

Because that’s how low the bar had fallen. A voice in my head was better company than seven people who share my blood.

Nyx isn’t a fantasy. I need you to understand that.

By the second night I could hear the housekeeper’s radio from four hundred yards, through two stone walls. I could hear the water moving under the boathouse floor. I could hear the gate guard’s heartbeat change when he lied to dispatch about his cigarette break.

And once — just once — I heard a thought that wasn’t mine.

The groundskeeper walked past and I heard, clear as a bell, poor kid, nobody’s fed that girl in months, and he never opened his mouth.

I threw up in the sink after that one.

“It settles,” Nyx said. “By the end of the first week. It always does.”

“How would you know?”

“Because you’re not the first.”

She wouldn’t explain that. She still won’t.

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, you can spend the rest of your 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 was 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 six of them went abruptly, unnaturally quiet and started tapping at their phones.

Six wolves who share a mind-link, sitting at one table, texting.

Because they’d cut me out of the link, and they’d stopped speaking out loud.

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

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

At minute fifty-eight my mother looked up. Right at me. One full second, her eyes on my face.

My whole stupid, starving heart lifted.

Then she said, “Colton, tell Asher the west clearing’s booked,” and looked back down.

I stood up before dessert.

“I’m sorry, my girl,” Nyx 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: the green dress, the pack crest ring, and a note on my mother’s pillow.

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

Then I crossed the county line at 12:14 a.m. on my real eighteenth birthday, and I did not cry.

Two hundred miles later I pulled into a gas station under a buzzing yellow light and did the one thing I’d promised myself I wouldn’t.

I checked my phone.

Eight hours gone. A year absent. Surely. Surely.

No texts.

No voicemails.

Zero missed calls.

I 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.

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

Six days to reach the Ravenguard.

I didn’t know that on the seventh — the day they thought was my birthday — my mother would walk into an empty bedroom and start screaming.