Get It 26

The kitchen smells like lilies and fresh linen. Hope arranges flowers for the ceremony table, humming something low and tuneless while her fingers shape white roses into a centerpiece, and my stomach turns with every stem she trims.

“Hand me the shears, please.” She doesn’t look up, her voice light, pleasant—as if her daughter didn’t stand in her bedroom twelve hours ago and tear the foundation out from under both their lives.

I hand them over. My fingers brush hers and I search her face for a crack, a tell, a flicker of whatever I saw when I walked out last night—but there’s nothing there.

“The lavender goes on the outer tables.” She snips a stem at an angle and positions it without looking at me. “Richard wants the hall finished by four.”

“Got it.” I carry the lavender toward the dining room and my legs feel borrowed, functional but running on someone else’s instructions.

Hope Donovan, grieving widow turned devoted Luna, is putting on the performance of her career. She’s wearing the cream blouse Richard bought her, hair pinned the way the pack elders call “appropriate.”

She moves through preparations like she has never once rewritten a memory or buried her daughter’s wolf. I want to scream—instead, I arrange lavender stems and pretend my hands aren’t shaking.

“Will you be sitting with the family tonight?” She asks it over her shoulder, conversational, easy—like we’re discussing weather and not the controlled demolition of every lie she’s built.

“Where else would I sit?” My voice comes out flat, which is better than the alternative. She hums, satisfied, and goes back to her roses.

She pauses in the doorway, a basket of napkins on her hip. “Kylie, you look tired—maybe rest before tonight, you’ll want to look your best.”

She says it like a mother—a real one, the kind who worries about dark circles instead of detonation timelines. I nod because words require a functioning throat and mine has closed for business.

The academy is half-empty, most students already home preparing. I’m retrieving gear from my locker when footsteps behind me stop too deliberately to be casual.

“We need to talk.” Mina rounds the corner and whatever mask she’s worn for two years is gone. Her face is stripped to the bone beneath the beauty—all blade, no polish.

“Do we?” I close the locker and lean against it because my knees are doing something unreliable. “I thought we’d covered the territory, Mina.”

“That was warm-up.” She stops three feet from me, arms crossed, chin high—she wins her entire life and her posture reflects that.

“Whatever is happening between you and Max—whatever pathetic fantasy you’ve been nursing in that house—it ends tonight.” Her eyes don’t blink, and the corridor shrinks to just her voice and the blood pounding behind my ears.

My nails press half-moons into the strap of my bag. I keep my face arranged into nothing, because nothing is what she expects and nothing is what I’m best at.

“He’s going to stand in front of this pack and choose.” She steps closer, voice dropping into something that doesn’t bother pretending to be kind. “And when he does, you’re going to smile and clap and disappear back into the nothing you crawled out of.”

The irony is so sharp I could slice the conversation open with it. She’s threatening me with the exact night that’s about to undo every plan she’s made, and she has no idea—not one solitary clue—that the ground beneath her has already been detonated.

“You’re right.” I say it quiet, steady, giving her the tone she needs to hear. “Tonight changes everything.”

Her shoulders drop a fraction—satisfied, the predator confirming the prey has accepted its position. “Good. At least you have the sense for that.”

She turns and walks away, heels clicking the corridor floor with the rhythm of a countdown she doesn’t know she’s in. I watch her go and the laugh building behind my sternum tastes like rust and copper.

Pitying Mina Walker was never on my list of things to do before twenty-two. And yet here I stand, almost managing it—almost, because the part of me that still remembers being the girl she just described won’t quite let me.

The house is quiet when I return. Hope is already at the hall with Richard, and her absence is somehow louder than her being here would be.

I sit on the edge of my bed for ten minutes doing nothing. The nothing is strategic—if I move I’ll think, and if I think I’ll unravel.

The mirror waits. I stand in front of it in the silver dress I pulled from the back of my closet—simple, fitted, the kind of thing a girl wears when she’s not trying to be noticed but knows she’s about to be.

The reflection has grey-green eyes and dark hair and the particular blankness of someone who’s been performing “unremarkable” so long the mask and the face underneath have become the same thing. Thirteen years of that girl—holding her breath in rooms, dimming herself in hallways.

She made it this far by being nothing, by wanting nothing loudly enough for anyone to hear. In a few hours she stops existing whether the replacement is ready or not, and spoiler—the replacement is not ready.

My hands won’t stop trembling. My pulse is doing something that would concern a medical professional, and the dress is mocking me from the glass—because a monster in a nice outfit is still a monster.

I reach for the chain around my neck and close my fingers around Dad’s pendant, the wolf tooth worn smooth by years of exactly this. I press the metal against my sternum until the edges bite and give me something solid to count against.

Breathe. Just breathe and then walk—the same instructions I’ve been giving myself since I was eight, and they’ve never gotten easier, just more automatic.

Air in through my nose, four counts, release. Again, until my hands quiet enough to zip the back of the dress. Again, until my legs remember they were built for carrying weight and not just for buckling.

The mirror gives me one last look at the girl I’ve been—quiet, wolfless, invisible—and I turn away before she talks me out of what comes next. Somewhere under my ribs, my wolf presses forward, steady and patient and done waiting.

The great hall’s windows glow amber through the trees as I cross the courtyard. Strings drift toward me—something classical, the soundtrack to a ceremony built on tradition and the assumption that the future alpha’s mate is seated in the front row in black.

Two hundred wolves are filling those seats, expecting a night they understand. I carry my wolf tucked behind my ribs, a bond humming beneath my skin, and a secret that still whispers monster every time my pulse climbs.

And I walk toward those amber windows anyway, because the girl who would have turned around doesn’t live here anymore. Whatever is waiting inside that hall—I’m done hiding from it.