"Still dragging yourself to school, Cleo?"

I didn't stop walking.

Three years of Damien Cole, and I'd gotten very good at not stopping walking.

His friends laughed behind him — the same four who had been laughing at the same jokes since sophomore year, the same group who had once poured a bottle of water over my lunch tray and watched me sit there, soaked and silent, because what was I going to do about it.

What could I do? He was the Alpha-heir. I was the girl who couldn't shift.

"Hey." His voice got closer. "I asked you something."

I turned around.

Damien Cole was six-two and built like someone had decided one day that intimidation was an aesthetic. Dark hair, gray eyes, a jaw that looked like it had been designed specifically to make things harder for people like me. He stood in the middle of the school hallway with his arms crossed and that particular expression he'd been wearing at me for three years — the one that said he found my existence vaguely offensive.

"Last day," I said. "High school's over. So is this."

His eyes narrowed. Not angry — assessing. Like I'd said something interesting for the first time and he wasn't sure what to do with it.

"Is that right."

"Graduation's in four hours. I'm going to walk across that stage, collect my diploma, and then I'm leaving Cedar Ridge." I held his gaze. "I'm going to state university in the fall on an academic scholarship. Pre-vet. Boarding on campus." I smiled, and it was not a warm smile. "So yes, Damien. Today is the last day."

He stared at me.

I turned around and walked away.

Behind me, one of his friends said something low and amused. I didn't hear what. I was already through the double doors and into the courtyard, where the morning sun was doing its best and the graduation set-up crew was arranging chairs that I was going to sit in one final time and then never see again.

I sat down on the courtyard's concrete edge and let myself feel it.

Four hours.

I had been at Cedar Ridge Preparatory — the high school attached to the Cedar Ridge Pack's residential compound — for three years, since my mother's death brought me back to the pack she'd left when I was an infant. I had never wanted to be here. I had never fitted here. I had the pack bloodline — the old Alpha was my mother's uncle, which made me something like a third cousin to the current leadership — but I had none of the power that was supposed to come with it.

No shift. Eighteen years old and still no wolf.

In a pack, that's not just an embarrassment. It's a vulnerability. You're prey in a predator's world, and everyone can feel it.

Damien Cole had felt it from day one. He'd made sure I felt him feeling it.

"Cleo."

I looked up.

Remy, my best friend and one of the few humans in the pack-adjacent school system, dropped down beside me with two coffees. He handed me one without asking.

"Saw the hallway thing," he said.

"It's the last time," I said.

"Is it?"

"It has to be." I wrapped my hands around the coffee. "Rem. I have a scholarship. I have a room. I have a life that has nothing to do with this pack and these people and—" I stopped. "I am getting out."

He was quiet for a moment.

"The mating ceremony," he said. "It's this weekend. Your uncle's hosting it — all unmated wolves, eighteen and over. You're technically—"

"Not going."

"Cleo."

"I can't shift, Rem. I don't have a bond. There is nothing for a mating ceremony to find in me." I looked at the stage the crew was still assembling. "And even if there were, I'm leaving Sunday morning. Whatever the ceremony finds or doesn't find, it won't matter."

Remy looked at me with the particular expression of a boy who had spent three years watching someone be hurt in small, daily ways and never quite knowing how to stop it.

"Promise me something," he said.

"What."

"If the ceremony does find something — if the bond is there—"

"It won't be."

"If it is," he said, "don't make a decision based on three years of things that were done to you by someone who—"

"Remy." I looked at him. "I'm not having this conversation. There's nothing to find. I don't have a wolf. I'm going to state university and I'm going to become a veterinarian and I am never coming back to Cedar Ridge." I picked up my coffee. "That's the plan."

He looked at me like he knew something I didn't, and he'd decided not to say it, and it was going to matter.

I graduated at two-thirty, stood in the sun in my green cap and gown, and thought about the six months between now and January when I'd be far enough away from here to breathe properly.

I walked across the stage.

Damien Cole was three people behind me in line.

He didn't do anything. He just walked past when it was his turn, diploma in hand, and as he passed he glanced at me — a quick sidelong look, entirely unreadable — and looked away.

Four hours later I was packing.

Three days later, my mother's cousin-uncle knocked on my door and said the words I'd spent eighteen years being told would never apply to me.

"The mating ceremony is mandatory for all pack members of age." He didn't look at me when he said it. "Your mother left, but she left you here. That makes you pack." A pause. "Saturday night. Attendance is required."

I stared at him.

"I have a scholarship," I said. "I'm leaving Sunday."

"Then Saturday night is your last obligation," he said. And closed the door.

I stood in my half-packed room and felt something cold settling into my stomach that had nothing to do with dread.

It felt like it was already too late to run.