I had not slept.
There had been no time for sleep. By the time I left the east chamber and made it back to my own room, the sun was already pressing pale and insistent through the gap in my curtains and the packhouse was beginning to wake up around me, footsteps and voices and the particular energy of a day everyone had been waiting for.
Everyone except me.
I stood in front of my small mirror and looked at myself for a long moment. The girl looking back at me was tired in a way that went past the eyes, the kind of tired that lives in the jaw and the shoulders and the slow way you breathe when you have been carrying something heavy for a very long time. My body ached in ways I was not going to think about. I had gotten very good at not thinking about certain things.
I washed my face. Brushed my hair until it lay flat and clean and unremarkable. Pulled on the simplest dress I owned, plain and pale and the kind of thing nobody looks at twice, which was exactly the point.
Then I got down on my knees beside my bed.
Not to pray. Not anymore.
I reached underneath and pulled out the bag.
It was not much. It had never needed to be much. A change of clothes, folded small. The little money I had managed to put aside over months of careful invisibility. A single photograph I was not going to look at right now because I did not have the reserves for it. Everything I owned that actually mattered fit into something I could carry in one hand, and I had packed it weeks ago and kept it ready because I had learned a long time ago that hope was only useful if you were prepared for it to actually arrive.
Tonight the ceremony would come.
Tonight the Moon Goddess would look down at this pack and pull the threads and somewhere in that great hall there would be a man I had never met who would feel a cord pulling him toward me and not away, and I would take his hand and I would walk out of here and I would never sleep in this room again.
That was the plan.
I put the bag back. Stood up. Smoothed my dress.
Just get through today.
The packhouse was alive when I stepped out into it. Genuinely, vibrantly, annoyingly alive. Pack members moving in every direction, decorated and bright and buzzing with the kind of anticipation that fills a body so completely there is no room for anything else. Unmated wolves my age were clustered in groups, talking over each other, laughing, adjusting each other's clothes. Someone had woven flowers into the railings along the main staircase. The whole building smelled like cedar smoke and something sweet and the particular electricity of a night everyone believed would change their life.
I moved through it like a stone through water. Around me, not part of it.
The training yard was busy too when I crossed it, taking the longer route around the side of the packhouse because the longer route meant fewer people and fewer people meant fewer eyes and fewer eyes meant I could get through one more hour of this day without becoming anyone's topic of conversation.
I heard her laugh before I saw her.
Aurora.
She was standing near the far end of the yard with all three of them. Kai, Mike, Luke. Surrounding her easily, naturally, the way they always did, like she was something that belonged in the center of wherever they were and they had simply arranged themselves around that fact. She was laughing at something Luke had said, her head tilted back slightly, completely at ease, completely at home in her own skin in a way I was not sure I had ever been in mine.
She looked like she belonged there.
She always looked like she belonged there.
I kept walking.
I was almost past when it happened. Kai's eyes moved, just slightly, just a fraction, like something had shifted in his peripheral vision and he had turned toward it without deciding to. His gaze found me across the yard and for exactly one second, across all that distance and noise and morning light, he looked directly at me.
One second.
Then he looked away.
Back to Aurora. Back to whatever Luke was saying. Back to the version of his morning that did not include me in it.
I kept walking.
I counted it as a victory because he looked away first. Because in the small, careful economy of my life here, that was what a victory looked like. He looked away first and I had still been walking and I had not stopped and I had not shown anything on my face.
I hated that this was what I had learned to count.
I hated it quietly, the way I did everything, and I kept moving.
And then I stopped.
Not because I decided to stop. Because something happened that had not happened in two years and my body simply went still before my brain caught up with it.
It was warmth.
The faintest, most distant warmth, somewhere in the hollow place inside my chest where Lue used to be. Like an ember so small you could not be sure you had not imagined it. Like something that had been cold for so long it had forgotten it was capable of heat and was now, just barely, just for a breath, remembering.
I pressed my hand against my sternum.
Is that—
Gone.
Just like that. Gone before I could hold it, before I could be sure of it, before I could do anything with it except stand in the middle of the yard with my hand pressed to my chest like a fool while the pack moved around me full of ceremony-day joy I had no access to.
I stood there for another second.
Then I put my hand down.
And I kept moving.
The bag was under my bed. The ceremony was tonight. And somewhere out there, someone I had never met was going to pull me out of here.
I just had to get through today.
The kitchen was mostly empty by the time I got there. Everyone else was too busy decorating themselves and each other to think about eating, too full of ceremony anticipation to notice something as ordinary as hunger. But my body was running on nothing and I knew myself well enough to know that if I walked into that great hall tonight on an empty stomach after the morning I had just survived, my legs would not hold me through the whole thing.
I needed to still be standing when my mate's thread appeared.
I found bread on the counter and ate it standing up, quickly, without sitting down, without making it a moment. A heel of cheese beside it. A cup of water from the jug by the window. Nothing that required effort or time or anything I did not have left to give.
I ate like someone who was fueling a machine, not feeding herself. Because that was what today required. Function. Endurance. Just enough to get through the ceremony on my feet and with my eyes open.
I finished. Put the cup down.
Looked out the kitchen window at the yard beyond, already filling with color and movement and the beautiful noise of people who believed tonight was going to give them everything they had been waiting for.
I straightened my dress and walked towards the hall.