Get It 5

The great hall is packed wall-to-wall, every seat taken, every face turned toward the raised platform where Richard Cornwell stands with my mother on his arm. She is wearing ivory, because white would be presumptuous and my mother never presumes anything she hasn’t already engineered.

Richard clears his throat and the hall drops to silence with the speed only an alpha’s voice commands. “I’ve asked you here tonight to share something that brings me more joy than I’ve felt in years.” His hand covers mom’s, and she dips her chin with a blush so perfectly timed I want to applaud.

“Hope Donovan has agreed to become my wife and your new Luna.” The words ring through the hall and the room erupts into cheering, clapping, a few howls from the back rows that ripple forward through the crowd like a tide.

I stand near the far wall with my hands clasped and my smile bolted on tight enough to ache. The applause washes over me and I clap along, performing the joy of a daughter whose world isn’t dissolving under her feet.

Mom accepts embraces from women she’s been deceiving since she walked into this pack, and each hug looks so natural I almost forget none of it is real.

She touches Richard’s arm, leans into his side, laughs at something an elder says with her whole body, open and radiant. Every gesture is a spell, and I don’t mean that metaphorically. The glamour wraps her in a scent she doesn’t own, a wolf she doesn’t have, a belonging she built from stolen parts.

My fingernails find each other inside my clasped hands and press until the sting grounds me. This is her masterpiece and I should feel something other than the sick twist behind my sternum that keeps asking when I stopped being a person inside my own life.

A couple from the front row approaches and mom takes the woman’s hands like they’re old friends, her warmth so convincing even I almost buy it. My mother doesn’t have friends. She has an audience, and tonight every seat in the house is full.

“Kylie!” Mina materializes at my elbow like something summoned, her smile wide and warm and absolutely loaded. “Congratulations, your mother must be so thrilled. I mean, Luna. That’s incredible for someone in her position.”

“It’s really something.” I keep my voice even, pleasant, the verbal equivalent of beige wallpaper. “She’s very happy.”

“And you’ll be living in the house now, right? With Max and everything?” Mina tilts her head, eyes bright with the concern that tells of sharpening a knife on your insecurities. “That must be so strange for you, going from your situation to the alpha’s household overnight.”

My back teeth press together behind my closed lips, grinding quietly against each other. “Strange is one word for it.”

“I just worry about Max, honestly.” She touches my arm, conspiratorial, girl-to-girl, like we’re sharing something tender instead of her sliding a blade between my ribs. “He has so much pressure with the deadline, and now he’s got a wolfless stepsister to accommodate.”

She sighs, tilting her head with rehearsed sympathy. “People are going to talk, Kylie. You know how they are.”

“People are already talking.” I glance toward the crowd, where three women are watching us with faces that could curdle milk at twenty paces. “That ship sailed, hit an iceberg, and sank with all hands.”

Her smile tightens by a fraction, not enough for anyone else to catch. I’ve spent my whole life reading the distance between what people show and what they mean, and Mina means every syllable as a wound.

“I’m just saying, you’ll be representing the alpha’s family now. That comes with expectations, with standards.” She smooths an invisible wrinkle from her dress. “I’d hate for you to feel out of place.”

I’m already out of place. I’ve been out of place since I was eight years old and my mother rebuilt our lives on a lie so thorough even the foundation is borrowed. But Mina doesn’t get that, so I arrange my face into gratitude and swallow another mouthful of glass.

“That’s really sweet of you, Mina. I mean that.” I deliver it warm, sincere, the kind of earnest that’s indistinguishable from surrender. She can have the win. I’m collecting something much worse.

“Of course. We’re practically going to be family.” She says family the way you’d say infestation, bright smile and zero intention of coexisting.

“Mina.” Max’s voice arrives behind her and every nerve I own fires at once, my ribs constricting around a breath I can’t finish. “Dad’s looking for you, something about the seating arrangement for the bonding dinner.”

“Oh, perfect.” Mina pivots toward him and her posture reorganizes, softer, warmer, her hand finding his forearm like it lives there. “I’ve been meaning to fix that head table situation. Save me a dance?”

“We’ll see.” He says it easily, already looking past her shoulder. At me. His gaze holds for one second, two, and my pulse slams against the base of my throat hard enough that the room narrows to him and the five feet of charged air between us.

“Congratulations,” he says. Just the word, nothing decorated, but his eyes don’t move from mine and the oxygen between us thickens into something my lungs can’t process.

“Thanks.” My voice sounds normal, which is its greatest performance to date, because under my collarbone everything is collapsing inward. “Big day for the whole family.”

“It is.” He’s still watching me, not the polite sweep he gives everyone else but something slower, something that lingers. Mina’s fingers tighten on his arm and her gaze flicks between us, her mouth pressing into a line.

My skin burns where it shouldn’t, a flush spreading up my neck. Something behind my ribs pulls toward him, insistent and merciless, and if I stay here thirty more seconds my face is going to betray every secret my mother spent twenty-one years burying.

“I should find Mom.” The excuse is tissue-paper thin and every person standing here knows it. “She probably needs me for photos or something.”

“Of course.” Mina’s voice is honey poured over a hairline fracture, her smile sharpened to a point I could cut myself on. “Go be with your family, Kylie.”

I turn and walk toward the crowd with steady, measured steps that cost me everything I have. The bond screams at me to turn around, close the gap, stop running from the only person who makes this performance feel survivable.

I keep walking, because walking toward Max Cornwell is a luxury reserved for girls who aren’t built on borrowed magic and buried truths. My heels click against the stone floor and each step widens the distance and narrows the air in my chest.

The exit is thirty feet away and I make it in twenty steps, pushing through the heavy door into the cool evening air. I lean against the stone wall while my hands shake against my thighs and my heartbeat tries to crack its way out through my chest.

Inside, the pack celebrates. My mother is becoming Luna, performing devotion so convincingly that the whole room is weeping with joy for their alpha.

And I just fled from my fated mate because Mina noticed him looking at me two seconds longer than he should have, which means she’ll watch closer now, dig harder, and the margin between my secret and the daylight just shrank by half.