Lena looked up through a haze of crimson and dirt.
Victoria already had her back turned, her shoulders relaxed in the arrogant posture of someone who had just delivered a clean, one-hit knockout.
But when Victoria glanced back over her shoulder, her entire frame froze.
Normally, the crushing weight of an Alpha’s command pressure forced an ordinary wolf into immediate unconsciousness.
However, Lena was still conscious.
Her vision was fracturing into dark spots, and blood was pooling in the back of her throat, but her eyes were wide open.
A low, uneasy murmur rippled through the chain-link fence.
"Why is the weakling still breathing?"
"Did Victoria miss?"
Sensing the crowd’s sudden shift, Victoria’s expression cracked. A flash of raw panic crossed her features. She couldn’t let them see her stumble. Not again like last night.
A fated wolf bond was so powerful that no ordinary wolf could come between it.
Yet this useless bitch had somehow–
Victoria’s breath caught in her throat. Was history repeating itself? Victoria felt the sickening weight of her mother’s failure crushing her own shoulders.
"It’s okay, guys! I barely even tapped her," Victoria called out to the fence, forcing a loud, awkward laugh that sounded entirely hollow. "Just playing with my food."
The moment she turned back to Lena, the smile died. Victoria leaned down, grabbed Lena’s collar, and violently yanked her off the ground until they were nose-to-nose.
"Let me make myself clear," Victoria hissed, her breath hot and sour against Lena’s face. "You. Are. A. Breeding. Tool. You’re going to remain in this pack, churning out useless pups with whatever low-ranked idiot you bond with, and eventually die a miserable death. You will be missed by abso-fucking-lutely no one. But me?"
She smirked, her fangs scraping Lena’s cheek. "I am born to dominate. Don’t you ever forget your place."
It took seven more calculated, brutal blows to the face to finally turn Lena’s world entirely black.
...
When Lena finally drifted back to consciousness, the left side of her face was a map of throbbing pain!
Her eyelids were swollen so tightly she could barely crack them open to see the white ceiling of the school infirmary.
The clinic was entirely dead silent. No school healer. No icy compresses.
Fine, Lena thought, swallowing down the copper taste of old blood. She just wanted to grab her backpack and disappear.
But the moment she pressed her right hand flat against the thin mattress to push herself up, heat flared in the center of her palm.
She gasped, snatching her hand back and flipping it over.
Her breath caught in her throat.
Eared deeply into her skin was a shimmering, silver silhouette of a snarling wolf. It wasn’t a superficial wound; the mark had tunneled into her flesh, glowing faintly like cooling embers.
The mark of the Awakened!
Before her brain could process the impossibility of it, the heavy clinic door swung open.
Panicking, Lena balled her hand into a tight fist, pressing it firmly against her thigh.
Principal Neil-bottom marched into the room, her expression carved from stone, followed by the school healer, who looked so pale she might vomit.
Again...
Lena naturally assumed the principal who never glanced at her was only here because she had openly fought–which technically wasn’t a fight–the school’s pride.
To avoid expulsion, she opened her mouth to defend herself against the fight. "Principal Neil, I can explain—"
Neil-bottom didn’t listen. She walked straight to the bedside, reached down, and clamped her fingers around Lena’s wrist.
Without a single word, Neil-bottom forcefully pried Lena’s fingers open, exposing her flat palm to the light from the lamp by the bedside.
Neil-bottom stared down at the silver wolf crest for a long time, checking the edges for ink or fraud, before letting out a humorless scoff.
"Principal Neil..." the healer stammered from the doorway, wringing her hands into knots. "It... it has to be a mistake, right? There is absolutely no way they chose her. This is..."
"What is done is done," Neil-bottom cut her off, releasing Lena’s wrist with a rough shove. She looked down at Lena, her lips twitching into a cold, hollow sliver of a smile.
"You know what this means, don’t you, Miss Louvel?"
...
"At this point, I don’t fucking understand how this whole thing works anymore. Because... Why the fuck her?"
"It feels like some sort of glitch in the pack system. Like a broken tool that needs fixing."
Lena leaned her forehead against the cool metal of her locker later that afternoon, trying to block out the gossip.
She wondered if the Awakening came with real power, because these pack girls desperately needed a pair of brains. It would be fun to make everyone bow for a change.
"I mean, look at her," another whisper drifted over. "Aside from her perfect tits, she’s a literal nobody."
The girls were standing less than three feet away, not even bothering to lower their voices.
Thanks to Victoria’s neat handiwork, her left eye was completely swollen shut, making it almost impossible to see the dial on her lock.
Principal Neil’s orders had been absolute: Clear out your locker. You don’t belong here anymore.
She slammed the metal door shut and turned down the corridor toward the administrative wing to collect her transfer papers.
But as she neared the principal’s frosted-glass door, reaching out to open the door, a sharp voice made her freeze.
Lena narrowed her eyes.
Wasn’t that Luna Satire? Victoria’s mother.
"This is an absurdity! How could a wolfless stray, out of the entire North Ridge lineage, awaken?" Luna Satire snapped. "Did you even inspect her hand properly, Principal Neil? Did you verify the brand?"
"I did—"
"You clearly didn’t look close enough!" Satire hissed. "Some wolves are meant to be bloodline anchors. My Victoria carries the pure Alpha strain. But Lena doesn’t even classify as a canine! The Academy’s screening process has made a catastrophic error. If anyone carries the divine spark, it is my daughter."
Luna Satire of the North Ridge Pack had arrived the exact second she heard the news. Victoria had been crying on the phone about the useless orphan girl.
But what about the prophecies? How was she going to show her face to the other packs if it wasn’t Victoria who awakened?
Outside the door, Lena kept her face neutral. Luna Satire was still in denial, she was too. However, could the Moon Goddess make mistakes?
It didn’t seem like it.
And for the first time in seventeen years, Lena didn’t feel like the breeding tool everyone says she was.
And everyone, including Luna Satire would have to accept it. Waiting for the strict principal to put the Luna in her place, Lena smiled.
"Actually," Neil-bottom paused, her tone dropped into a cold rhythm that made Lena’s smile instantly vanish. "You raise a valid point."
"Care to explain that?" Luna Satire asked.
"The Academy’s marking is absolute... But the universe cannot waste a sacred mark on an empty vessel. A girl with no inner wolf cannot harbor a god-spark. It is a biological impossibility. It has never happened in our entire history."
The principal’s cold words re-echoed in Lena’s head. Had she been wrong all along?
She looked down at her right palm.
All her life, she had been the pack’s punching bag. She had lived under a constant cloud of disdain, where all an outcast had to do was belittle her just to gain approval from the rest. She was the baseline of worthlessness.
She had all the reasons to believe this wasn’t real, yet she had ignored it. Why?
Perhaps the Moon Goddess looked down on her with that same cruelty. Maybe the deity just wanted to hold her hopes high for a single, fleeting second, only to strip that moment away and completely shatter the illusion.
"Exactly," Luna Satire agreed. "We cannot rely on a standard Academy screening for an anomaly like this. We are taking her to the Pack Elders tonight. If anyone can tear open her mind, read the true will of the Goddess, and expose a fake... it is them."