My True One

Neva’s POV

Tomorrow I turn eighteen, and I am cursed to share the day with the three wolves who have made my life a misery.

In Nightpine Pack, no one remembers my birthday. They remember the Kane triplets. Dorian, Cassian, and Lucian, the pride of the whole pack, born on the eleventh of November just like me, except the whole world stops for their day and no one has ever once stopped for mine. Tomorrow they turn twenty-one and ascend as our new Alphas. Tomorrow I turn eighteen and shift for the first time. Only one of those things matters to anyone here.

I slid out of my cot before sunrise, the way I do every morning. My room is a converted storage closet off the kitchen. The shelf above my head still holds the spare cleaning supplies, because the girl who scrubs this pack house should sleep near her mop.

I was nine when my parents went rogue and vanished, leaving nothing behind but a mountain of debt. The Kanes took me in the way you take in a stray you intend to make useful. Food, a cot, and a ledger of everything I owe. I have spent nine years working it off in cooked meals and scrubbed floors and swallowed pride. Seven more months, until I finish school and turn eighteen for real in the eyes of the law, and the debt clears. Then I am gone from Nightpine forever.

I pulled my pale hair into a tight knot so no one could grab it, and I went to make breakfast for a family that has never made anything for me.

The kitchen was the only warm place I had. I had the bacon crackling and the coffee poured when I heard them thunder down the stairs, three sets of heavy feet, three booming voices shoving at each other like pups half their age.

Cassian swept in first. The middle brother, the loud one, always performing. He plucked a strip of bacon from the pan and yelped when it burned his fingers, then grinned like he had meant to do it. “Smells good, Charity.”

Charity. Not my name. My name is Neva. They started calling me Charity as a joke when I was nine, a jab at the debt and the pity of it, and they said it so often that half the pack forgot I was ever called anything else. I stopped correcting them years ago.

Then Cassian reached out and tugged my hair tie loose, and my knot came tumbling down around my shoulders.

“Give it back,” I said.

He tossed it to Dorian instead.

Dorian caught it without looking. The eldest, the cold one, the one who will rule. Where Cassian fills a room with noise, Dorian empties it. He looked at me, then at the breakfast, like both were chores he was tired of, and he slid my hair tie into his pocket where I could not reach it.

“You are slow this morning,” he said. “The house will be spotless before the party. All of it.”

“It will be.”

“It had better be.”

Lucian came last. The youngest. He set a stack of plates on the counter without being asked, which from a Kane is nearly a miracle. “Morning, Neva,” he said quietly.

He is the only one who ever uses my real name. I never let it show how much that small thing lands, because a scrap of kindness from a Kane is still a Kane.

They shoved me back and forth between them for a while, laughing, playing catch with a girl instead of a ball, until Lucian muttered that they would be late and they lost interest. By the time I finished the dishes, the three of them had eaten everything but one cold pancake.

I reached for it. I had not eaten.

Cassian’s hand shot out and took it first, fast as only an Alpha can move.

“You will thank me later,” he said around a mouthful, looking me up and down. “Wouldn’t want to ruin that figure before your big shift.”

I said nothing. I have a vow. I made it the year I turned ten, after crying almost every day of my ninth year. I will never let a Kane make me cry again. I have kept it for eight years, and I was not going to break it over a pancake.

School was worse only because it was louder. Nightpine High was strung end to end with silver and blue, every banner screaming the names of the three boys who already had everything. Tomorrow at midnight I would have my first shift, and if the old stories were true, I might catch the scent of my fated mate somewhere in the crowd at the ascension party.

I told myself I did not care. Werewolves meet their mates at eighteen, and mine could be anyone, and it did not matter, because in seven months I would be leaving him behind with everything else. I was not trading one cage for another. Not even a cage that loved me.

The one good hour of my day was math. Mr. Hale slid my test onto my desk with a wink. “Top of the year again, Frost.” For a moment I felt like a whole person, worth more than my hands.

The feeling did not survive the hallway.

Two girls stopped me at my locker after last bell. Mara and Tess, the pack’s reigning beauties, glossy and matched and usually too important to see me. Today they saw me.

“You know,” Mara said, tilting her head, “you’re not actually hideous, Charity. Under all of that.”

“With money,” Tess added, studying me like a problem, “she’d be dangerous.”

I did not understand the look they traded. Mara pulled the tie from my hair, and my pale waves spilled loose, and both girls went quiet in a way I had never heard from them.

“Big shift tonight,” Mara said, suddenly sweet. “Same as the triplets. You’ll be at the party.”

“I’ll be serving at the party,” I corrected.

“Then let us do you a favor.” She smiled. “A birthday makeover. A real dress. A mask. For one night, no one would even know it’s you.”

That last part caught in me, sharp and bright.

No one would even know it’s you.

For one night, I could walk through that hall and not be the charity girl. I could be a guest. A stranger. Anyone. On the one birthday of my life that someone had actually noticed, I could feel, just once, like I was worth looking at.

“What’s the catch?” I asked, because there is always a catch.

“You’re the smartest girl in school,” Tess said. “We have a make-up assignment we’ll never pass. You do it. We make you beautiful. Even trade.”

I should have said no. I knew better than to owe anyone in this pack anything.

But tomorrow was my birthday, and no one would remember, and I was so tired of being no one.

“Deal,” I heard myself say.

Mara’s smile widened, and for just a moment, before she smoothed it away, it did not look like kindness at all.