Ch. my pack erased me, the lycan king didn’t 3 my pack erased me, the lycan king didn’t 3

Chapter 3 

I gave them one last chance. 

My grandmother used to say you never close a door until you’ve knocked one more time. 

+45 Coins 

So on my last night, I put on a clean white shirt and walked into the packhouse dining hall for the first time in four 

months. 

Our housekeeper set a plate in front of me and didn’t even blink. Like a ghost showing up to dinner was a normal Tuesday in this house. 

My father walked in on a phone call. My mother walked in carrying three fat binders. My brothers came in arguing 

about flowers, of all the stupid things. Peonies versus roses. 

Then all five of them went quiet at once. 

And their eyes glazed over. 

Any wolf knows that look. It means they were talking in the pack link. Inside their heads. Where I couldn’t follow. 

Five grown men sitting at one table, having a whole conversation in total silence, while their sister ate soup three feet 

away. 

Talking around me. Over me. About me, maybe. 

Never to me. 

I ate every bite. 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. 

My whole starving heart lifted off the ground. 

Then she said, “Gabe, tell Marcus the lake lodge is booked,” and looked back down at her binder. 

I stood up before dessert. 

Nobody asked where I was going. 

I packed in nine minutes. A girl who’s been erased learns to travel light. 

Chapter 3 

I left three things behind. 

My grandmother’s moonstone necklace, on my mother’s vanity. 

My pack ring, on my father’s desk, right on top of the Chronicle. 

And a note on my mother’s pillow. 

I waited a year. Don’t come looking. – S. 

I crossed into North Dakota at 12:14 a.m. on my twenty–second birthday, and I did not cry. 

Four hundred miles later, under the buzzing light of a gas station, I did the one thing I swore I wouldn’t. 

I checked my phone. 

Five hours. Surely someone had gone to the cabin. Surely someone had seen the ring. 

No texts. 

No voicemails. 

Zero missed calls. 

+45 Coins 

I laughed until my ribs hurt. Then I laughed until I was sobbing, forehead pressed to the steering wheel. A trucker 

knocked on my window and asked if I was okay, and I told him I’d never been better in my life. 

Then I pulled the SIM card out and threw the phone in the trash. 

I kept the SIM card, though. I tucked it behind my driver’s license. 

Don’t ask me why. You already know why. 

Some pathetic part of me still wanted to know the day they noticed. 

I drove into the sunrise with my mother’s voice in my head from when I was little. Sienna, you are the best thing I ever 

made. 

Liar, I thought. Liar, liar, liar. 

At a diner in Montana, I ordered pancakes for my birthday, and the waitress stuck a candle in them without being 

asked. 

“Make a wish, honey.” 

Chapter 3 

I wish somebody would come looking for me. 

I blew it out, because I was twenty–two and I knew better now. 

They didn’t notice the empty chair the next morning. 

Or the morning after that. 

It took eleven days. 

+45 Coins 

On the eleventh day, my mother walked across the snow to my cabin carrying a shoebox. She opened the door and 

found a stripped mattress and a cold stove. 

The border guard told me later that the howl she let out brought every wolf in the territory running. It went on for an 

hour. 

She was screaming my name. 

I was already a thousand miles west, standing in front of the iron gates of Draven Hall. 

I didn’t know that the reason my family destroyed me was the only thing keeping me alive. 

I didn’t know that someone had been hunting me since the night of my ceremony. 

And I didn’t know that the King on the other side of those gates had known my real name for eleven days. 

Because he was the one who’d let me in.