They Erased My Name. Now Every Alpha Kneels to Me Chapter 01

They Erased My Name. Now Every Alpha Kneels to Me Chapter 01 — The Girl They Unnamed
“I, Damon Vance, Alpha-heir of the Vance pack, reject you, Wren Ashgrove, as my fated mate.”

Four hundred wolves stood in that clearing and not one of them gasped.

That’s the part that should have killed me. Not the rejection. The silence.

The bond snapped behind my ribs like a bone breaking in reverse. I’ve been shot in the shoulder with a training round. I’ve had my wrist rebroken and set by a battlefield medic. Neither of those made me taste copper.

I stayed on my feet. I want that on the record. My knees shook and my vision went white at the edges and I stayed on my feet.

“Say it back,” Damon said. He wouldn’t look at me. He was looking at his father. “Say it back, Wren.”

Eleven minutes earlier, I had turned eighteen. The bond had lit up inside me like a struck match — warm, ridiculous, mine — and I had turned around in a crowd of four hundred and found him already staring at me with a horror I will remember when I’m ninety.

The wolfless girl. The one they don’t name anymore.

“I accept your rejection,” I said.

And then I did the only thing I’ve ever been good at.

I looked for my family.

My father, Alpha Rhodes Ashgrove, was standing forty feet away with a glass in his hand. He did not lift his head.

My mother was studying the hem of her dress.

Six brothers. Six. Cassian, Elias, Bram, Dorian, Kit, Silas — men who taught me to fight, to ride, to swear in three languages — and every one of them had found something fascinating in the grass.

Nobody moved. Nobody said that’s my sister. Nobody said that’s your Luna’s daughter, boy, mind your mouth.

They had been not-saying my name for three hundred and sixty-five days. Why stop for this?

So I did the walking out myself.

Through four hundred people who parted for me like I carried something contagious. Past the fire pits and the long tables and the banner with my family’s crest on it. Past the gatehouse, past the cameras my brother installed and never once checked.

At the end of the drive I stopped and looked back at the house I was born in.

Twenty-two windows. Every single one lit.

Not one of them looking for me.

“Goodbye,” I whispered. “You won’t miss me. I’ll miss you anyway. That’s the part that makes me pathetic.”

My name is Wren Ashgrove. I’m the seventh child and only daughter of the Ashgrove Alpha, and if that means nothing to you, it means everything to everyone who matters on this continent. Three centuries of old blood. Six older brothers. One father who used to call me his last good thing.

Used to.

Eleven days ago, a black envelope arrived at a post office box my family doesn’t know I have. One card inside. A silver crown pressed into the paper and three lines that rearranged my life:

Applicant W. Ashgrove: accepted. Report on your eighteenth birthday. Tell no one.

Tell no one.

Who exactly did they think I had left?

I dragged my bike down the gravel with the engine dead, because the wolfless girl learns to move quiet, and I crossed the county line at 12:14 a.m. doing eighty-two.

Four nights ago, something woke me at 11:03 p.m. A woman’s voice. Inside my skull. Low and warm and amused, curling through my head like smoke through a keyhole.

“Happy birthday, Wren,” she’d said.

“You’re a week early,” I told her, out loud, like an idiot.

And she laughed and said, “No, sweetheart. You were born a week late. They’ve been celebrating the wrong day your whole life.”

Tonight she was quiet until the county line. Then she stretched inside my chest like something enormous waking up in a small room.

“Good,” she said. “Now let them look for you.”

By sunrise, my family would have a house with an empty room in it.

It would take them seven more days to notice.

And when they finally did, my mother was going to walk into that room and start screaming — because by then, Alpha Cyrus Blackthorn would already know my name.