Regan

Fenri

The mud under Mavro’s fingernails was impressive, really. A masterpiece. The amount of dirt suggested he hadn’t just fallen into a puddle but had conducted some kind of extended negotiation with the earth itself.

“Hold still,” I said, working the nail brush in small circles while he squirmed against the sink.

“It tickles.”

“It’s supposed to clean.”

“Same thing.”

I couldn’t argue with the logic of a five-year-old. I rinsed his hands under the warm water and watched the brown swirl down the drain like a tiny mudslide retreating in defeat. His skin came out pink and new-looking. 

Spending my twentieth birthday this way was, for lack of a better word, an experience I was more than used to.

Sighing, I dried his hands with the rough paper towels we kept in the supply closet, and the motion of rubbing them dry sent a wave of dizziness through me that I had to breathe out slowly through my nose. The light above the sink had been doing something hostile to my eyes all morning.

This was my life. Fenri Mansion-Oromach, daughter of the Alpha, scrubbing kindergarteners while her body staged a revolt.

I preferred Mansion. The second name never belonged to me anyways.

I had barely gotten out of bed this morning. That was the truth of it, the part I hadn’t told anyone, the part no one would ask about. 

I’d woken up with my sheets damp and my stomach burning from the inside, a deep, radiating heat that had nothing to do with warmth and everything to do with something going wrong. 

My limbs had felt like they belonged to someone else, someone who hadn’t agreed to this morning. I’d lain there shivering for a while, which made no sense given how hot my skin felt, and then I’d gotten up anyway.

In this pack, everyone had a role. Mine was this room, these children, this cart of supplies. I had learned early, young enough that the lesson had gone in deep and stayed there, that not showing up to earn your place was the kind of thing that got noticed. And the things that got noticed about Fenri Mansion were rarely the things that helped her.

So I’d gotten up. I’d pulled a clean shirt on, noticed my hands were shaking, ignored them, and come to work.

“Fenri.” Mavro tugged at my sleeve with his freshly cleaned hand, already looking for ways to ruin my work. “I still smell.”

“You don’t smell.”

“I do. I smell like mud and something else.”

“That something else is called outside. It’s what happens when you play in it.”

He sniffed himself with the theatrical dedication only a child could manage. My stomach rolled gently while I watched him, and I pressed one hand flat against the edge of the sink counter, just for something solid.

It was already four in the evening, and I had just two pups left with me, waiting for their parents to pick them up. 

“No. I smell bad.”

“You smell fine, Mavro.”

“You can’t smell it,” he said, very simply, very matter-of-factly, in the way children say things that are true and terrible at the same time.

He wasn’t wrong. My nose worked well enough for basic things, smoke, rain, the industrial cleaner I used on the pack hall floors twice a week, but the layered, nuanced scent-reading that every other wolf in the pack managed without thinking?

Mine was patchy at best. Decorative at worst. Though today everything smelled faintly like the inside of a fever, which was its own problem.

I folded the paper towel. “Then you’ll just have to trust me.”

From across the room, little Priya looked up from the puzzle she’d been systematically destroying rather than assembling. “My mom says your wolf is broken.”

Mavro looked at me with wide eyes, uncertain whether this required an apology from him even though he hadn’t said it.

“Your mom’s not wrong,” I said. My voice came out steady. I was proud of that. Less proud of the sweat gathering at the back of my neck despite the fact that the room was, by any reasonable measure, not warm.

Priya seemed satisfied and returned to the puzzle. Mavro continued studying me with that unnerving sincerity children had before they learned to look away from uncomfortable things.

“Does it hurt?” he asked. “Having a broken wolf?”

I thought about it. About the silence inside me that other wolves described as a second heartbeat, a second voice, a passenger who sometimes took the wheel. 

Mine was more like a room I couldn’t fully get into. I could sense something on the other side of the door occasionally, a barely there presence sometimes, as if someone was breathing through a wall, but the door had never opened. 

I had never shifted. Never would, probably. And at the age of 19, rather, 20 today, the pack healers had stopped offering opinions on the matter years ago, which was its own kind of answer.

Today the silence felt denser than usual. Or maybe that was just the fever pressing down on everything.

“Only when I think about it,” I told him, which was honest enough for a Tuesday evening.

I turned to collect the rest of the supply cart and had to pause, one hand gripping the handle, while the room swirled for a moment. 

I exhaled. My shirt was sticking to my spine. I had drunk half a glass of water this morning before my stomach had rejected the idea entirely, and I was starting to feel that decision in a very specific and unpleasant way.

The door opened.

She came in fast, the way people do when they’ve been building up speed in the hallway, and she had a child on her hip, her own son, Briett, one of mine, one of the pack’s kindergarteners, and an expression that made me uneasy already.

“Fenri Mansion.” Her voice carried the weight of a woman who had rehearsed this several times.

She used Mansion. People did that when they wanted to remind me I was the Alpha’s stepdaughter only by the Alpha’s “grace”. I stood up straighter and immediately regretted it as my vision went briefly white at the edges.

“Nessa,” I said.

“Briett came home yesterday without his bracelet.” She shifted him on her hip. The boy had the decency to look somewhere else. “His grandmother’s bracelet. Silver. Three charms. It was on his wrist when he arrived.”

She let the implication sit between us. I took a moment to breathe.

I looked at Briett. “Do you know where your bracelet went?”

He studied the ceiling with great focus.

“He says he doesn’t remember,” Nessa said, answering for him. “But he saw you looking at it.”

Of course I did. I looked at all of them all day. That was the role. Looking was essentially the entire position.

“I didn’t take it,” I said. My stomach pulsed with that deep interior heat again. I kept my expression where it was.

“You were the last one with him before he went home.”

“I’m the last one with all of them before they go home.”

“Don’t be smart with me.”

“I’m not being smart. I’m explaining how the end of a school day works.”

Her jaw tightened. Briett picked at the seam of his sleeve, the way children did when they wanted to disappear from a situation their parents had dragged them into.

Nessa was well known for being troublesome, it seems this time she was smart enough to pick the only target that could report her to the Alpha.

“Some of us,” Nessa said, shifting her weight, “have concerns about who is watching our children. A girl who can’t shift. Who doesn’t have proper control. Who doesn’t have a wolf, really—”

“I have a wolf.”

“You have no shame, even though you are the byproduct of your—” She caught herself just in time, smiling with her mouth only.

She didn’t need to finish. The rest lived in the space she left open, the thing no one in this pack was allowed to say out loud.

No one spoke of my mother. Never her name, not what she’d done, not the rogue she’d run to, not the pregnancy she’d returned carrying, not the way she’d died getting me out into the world. 

Alpha Dario had made the silence around all of it absolute, because the alternative was admitting that his chosen mate had looked at everything he was and ran away with a nameless man with nothing. 

That humiliation didn’t get spoken. But I was the only evidence of it still walking around.

“I didn’t take the bracelet,” I said. “But I’ll pay for another.”

The words tasted like chalk. My stomach was a furnace, a deep rolling burn behind my ribs, and the effort of standing still and speaking evenly was costing me in ways I couldn’t afford to show.

Something shifted in Nessa’s expression. “You’ll pay for it.”

“That’s what I said.”

“And you think you can afford it?” Her head tilted. “A bracelet like that. Silver. Handworked charms. Three of them.” She smiled. “Can you actually afford that, Fenri?”

She knew the answer. I knew she knew.

I thought, briefly, about the twin lines across my back. The whip left marks that faded slowly, and the ones from a month ago had only just softened from raised to flat. A month, the longest in years, because Alpha Dario had been consumed with preparations. Regan was coming home. 

His real son, born of his true mate, and second Luna, returning from Alpha Academy to take his place at his father’s right hand. Alpha Dario had been too busy to remember I existed, and I had spent four weeks sleeping without bracing for footsteps in the hall.

The best month of my life. I had no intention of ending it.

“Nessa.” I kept my voice even. “Today of all days. Regan Oromach is home today. The whole pack is meant to be presenting well. Do you really want to be standing in the children’s room starting something?”

The hesitation was small but real.

“You’ll reimburse me,” she said, landing on it like solid ground. “Full value. I’ll find out what it costs and you’ll—”

The heat in my stomach lurched sideways.

A sudden violent pressure from somewhere beneath everything, like every nerve had been struck at once, my skin suddenly felt too small—

“What are you….?” Nessa didn’t get to finish.

I moved before I decided to. Through the door, into the hallway, already running, my hands pulling at my shirt because something was happening under my skin, something enormous and long-suppressed, and I was very certain I was about to come apart at the seams.

It didn’t stop.

I hit the tree line of the running woods at full speed, bare feet on the cold ground, and the cold should have felt good against my soles but I barely registered it because that was when my leg broke.

That was what it felt like. A crack, sudden and total, that dropped me to my knees in the dirt. Then my spine. 

Then my hands, which were pressing into the earth and changing shape as I watched them, fingers lengthening and reshaping, and I understood what was happening with a clarity that arrived at the exact same moment as the pain.

My wolf.

After 19 years of silence. Every child in this pack who had shifted before me, after all of it.

Now.

The joy lasted approximately four seconds before the process reminded me it wasn’t finished with me.

First shifts were meant to be witnessed. The pack’s presence was an important thing during the first shift, a chorus of wolves holding you in place while your body rewrote itself. I had heard it described as brutal but bearable. Like being taken apart by hands that also caught you.

There were no hands catching me.

There was only the ground, which I gripped until my knuckles split, and the trees, which did not care, and the dark that was coming in fast as the amber light finished dying and night pressed in from the east. 

My bones broke and reset and broke again in sequences that had no mercy in them, and no pause for recovery. 

I bit down on nothing and made sounds I had no intention of making and kept going because there was no alternative to going, the body doesn’t offer a pause option in the middle of becoming.

It took a long time.

By the time it ended, the moon was fully up.

I was on four legs.

That was the first coherent thought. Four legs. A body that was lower and longer and more than the one I’d had this morning, and when I lifted my head the world came in like a door thrown open, scent and sound arriving in simultaneous floods, layered and specific and overwhelming.

The trees smelled like three different kinds of wet bark and something small and fast that had crossed this path an hour ago.

In the air was wood smoke from the pack hall, a mile back, and beneath it individual threads, bodies, food, fire, the particular smell of a large group gathered together.

Then a voice.

Hello.

Firm. Feminine. Coming from inside my own skull with the easy authority of someone who had always been there and was simply, finally, choosing to speak.

I went very still.

You took your time, I thought to her, because what else do you say?

She said something else then but I didn’t catch it, because a sound arrived from behind me, a single snap of a branch.

I turned.

The wolf was enormous. Grey, the deep layered grey of storm clouds with darker shades threaded through, and its eyes were a shade of green, vivid and lit from within, catching the moonlight and throwing it back.

On his chest, where the fur lay flat and close, two spears arranged in a circle.

I knew that mark. Every wolf in this pack knew that mark.

Mate, my wolf said.

It was not a question. The pull that came with the word was immediate and physical, a hook behind my sternum being drawn forward, and I wanted—

I ran.

My wolf didn’t argue. I think she understood the fear even if she didn’t share it. I launched forward into the trees and the grey wolf followed without hesitation, and I was smaller than him, I was built for speed in a way he wasn’t, I found gaps in the undergrowth that his size couldn’t exploit as easily, and it still took him less time than it should have to close the distance.

He hit me from the side. We went down together in a tangle of limbs and momentum, tumbling through leaves and cold dirt, and when we stopped I was on my back with a large grey wolf standing over me, one paw pressed to my chest, green eyes looking down with an expression that managed, somehow, to read as deeply unimpressed.

Shift.

The word arrived in my head in a voice I didn’t recognize. It was deep, and dripping with authority, and my body moved toward obeying before my mind had weighed in on the matter.

My wolf purred.

I had never wanted to be embarrassed on her behalf more than I did at that moment.

Don’t, I told her.

She purred again, louder.

Then the grey wolf descended to my now furry neck, clearly adamant on rubbing his scent against mine, scenting me.

I ignored my wolf as she purred again, watching as the grey wolf began to shift, and I looked away out of some reflex I hadn’t known I had, and when I looked back there was a man.

Dark blonde hair. Broad shoulders carrying muscle that suggested it had been built rather than inherited. 

A face that someone had clearly put thought into, sharp jaw, straight nose, bottled green eyes that matched the wolf exactly and were currently looking down at me with the same expression the wolf had managed.

My heart skipped at the sight of his human form.

He was swoon-worthy was my first thought.

Goddess. My stomach lurched, fear settling deep. Regan Oromach. Was my second thought.

“Shift,” he said. Out loud this time. With his mouth and his voice and the full command authority of Alpha blood behind it.

My body shifted.

It was faster this time, seconds rather than hours, and then I was on the cold ground and the moon was above us both and the air was very cold against skin that hadn’t been skin for hours. 

For a long moment, neither of us spoke.

Regan Oromach looked at me. I watched him work through it, the recognition arriving in stages, his bottled green eyes moving over my face, and I could see the exact moment it landed. 

The exact moment joy and something ranging from confusion, anger, fear and pulling collided with the information his brain was rapidly assembling.

He had just scented me.

His father’s stepdaughter.

His stepsister.

The girl his father hated most in the world.

His mate.

Pronounced Reh–Gan.