Get It 28

[Kylie’s POV]

Two hundred heads turn at once, and every face is a variation on the same theme—confusion folding into disbelief folding into something uglier. The wolfless girl. The nobody stepsister.

My legs are shaking so hard the silver dress trembles at the hem, my fingers wrapped around Dad’s pendant, knuckles bone-white. I don’t move toward the door. The girl who would have bolted died between last night and this courtyard, and whoever replaced her is standing on liquid knees with a jaw clenched tight enough to crack enamel.

Max steps off the platform—no hesitation, no glance at his father—and the crowd parts because nobody is stupid enough to stand between an alpha heir and the name he just detonated the evening with. His eyes don’t leave mine, and my chest does something arrhythmic behind the pendant.

“This is a joke—a fated bond with her?” Mina’s voice slices first, sharp and bright, composure split down the center. She’s on her feet, white dress catching candlelight, eyes on Max like she can drag the words back into his mouth.

“She doesn’t have a wolf—she has never had a wolf.” Mina turns to the pack, pitching her voice to the room. “Someone explain how a wolfless girl carries a mate bond, because I’d love to understand.”

“The bond can’t manifest without a wolf,” an elder calls from the front row. “It’s biologically impossible.”

“She has no scent.” A deeper voice, from the standing section near the pillars. “Not once in thirteen years.”

She’s not asking—she’s building, stacking bricks of doubt between Max and the name he just spoke, and the pack is handing her mortar with every nodding head.

Max is ten feet from me. Each step tightens something behind my ribs, and my throat closes around a sound I refuse to release.

Then it happens—not because I choose it, but because my body has run out of choices. The hostility, Mina’s voice sharpening into verdict, and beneath all of it the bond screaming loud enough to crack my teeth.

The pressure finds the fracture line my mother’s magic has been holding for twenty-one years, and this time it doesn’t leak—it shatters.

My scent pours into the hall—not a thread, not a wisp, but the full devastating flood. Wolf and bond and everything I’ve buried since I was eight, saturating the air until the nearest wolves flinch back. A gasp rolls through the room—collective, two hundred lungs at once—and three wolves in the front step backward.

My eyes burn, and the elder in the second row is staring at my face with his mouth open because they’ve gone gold—bright and visible to the entire hall. Congratulations to me—worst reveal party in recorded history.

My gaze finds the front row before my brain gives permission. Hope sits between two elder wives, spine straight, hands folded, and I watch the calculation happen—her eyes moving from me to Max to Richard, discarding options.

“She has a wolf.” Mina’s voice is ice now, all the disbelief burned away. “She’s been lying to every person in this room—this whole pack, for years.”

“Mina—” Max’s voice carries from six feet away, still closing the distance, and the warning in it stops half the room mid-breath.

“Don’t you dare defend her right now.” Mina’s jaw barely moves around the words, and her hands are fists in white fabric. “She tricked all of us.”

She rises. The hall’s chaos dims because my mother has never once failed to command a room when she needs it quiet.

“My daughter has been hiding a wolf.” Her voice carries—warm, steady, pitched to the back wall. “An unstable and dangerous wolf that I have been monitoring for years to protect this pack.”

My stomach drops through the floor—she’s doing it, right here, right now, reshaping the wreckage into a monument to her own sacrifice. Mother of the year, protecting the pack from the daughter she built the cage around. Someone get this woman an award.

“Kylie learned to suppress at a young age.” Her eyes hold mine, and the message is surgical: this is the story now. “The suppression was her body’s instinct—its way of containing something it couldn’t control. I have been managing the risk quietly, because exposing an unstable wolf would have endangered everyone in this room.”

She pauses—the performer’s pause, the kind that lets the audience supply the word hero themselves.

“I did what any mother would do.” Her voice cracks on mother, and it sounds so real that my nails carve crescents into my palms because I cannot scream in this hall. “I kept my daughter’s secret to keep all of you safe.”

The pack’s confusion is curdling face by face—shock thickening into hostility, assembling from the materials my mother just provided. Not a girl with a hidden bond but a dangerous wolf among us. She’s given them a villain and she’s wearing the mother’s mask while she does it.

“How long?” A sharp voice from the fifth row. “How long has that wolf been loose in our pack?”

“She was never loose—that’s exactly my point.” Hope turns, warm, patient—the reassuring protector. “I contained the risk so none of you would ever have to face it.”

“And you didn’t think we deserved to know?” Another voice, angrier, rising from the middle rows. A woman in the third pew grips her husband’s arm.

“I thought you deserved to be safe.” Hope absorbs the hostility and reflects back calm. “Those aren’t always the same thing.”

Two enforcers near the east wall shift their weight, positioning between me and the nearest exit, while a third moves along the far aisle with his eyes locked on me. The room is rearranging itself into a cage—lovely ambiance, really glad I wore the nice dress to my own public execution.

Max reaches me. He steps past, turning, placing his body between mine and the hall, shoulder blades inches from my chest. The heat coming off him is a wall I didn’t ask for and cannot afford to lean into.

“Nobody touches her.” His voice drops into something I’ve never heard from him—low, absolute, vibrating with authority that isn’t performed but born. “Not until I say otherwise.”

The enforcers pause—because challenging the future alpha’s mate means challenging the future alpha, and that math has only one answer.

But beneath Max’s shoulders, beneath Hope’s lies and Mina’s fury still burning from the steps—my wolf is pressing. Not the nudge I’ve spent years managing, but something tectonic, shoving against what’s left of the suppression with a force that buckles my knees and whites out my vision.

I grab the back of Max’s jacket to stay upright, fingers twisting into fabric. She’s coming—pressing through the last wall like water through a crumbling dam—and I have no idea what’s on the other side.

No memory I can trust, no experience that isn’t something my mother planted inside an eight-year-old who loved her too much to question it.

The pack sees a hidden wolf, Mina sees a trick, and Hope sees a story she can still reshape. I’m standing with my knuckles white in Max’s jacket and my vision going gold at the edges, and the only thing turning my blood to ice isn’t the two hundred wolves staring me down. It’s whatever lives inside me—and the fact that I’m about to meet her.