They threw me off a cliff the night I was born. They told my mother the baby was dead. They were wrong. I grew up in the Wilds — barefoot, wolfless, feared. Tonight I'm walking back through their gates. Every one of them is smiling down at me. They should be running. The woman who found me at the bottom of that ravine wasn't a wolf at all. Maeve Wilder was the last Moonwitch of the Old Blood — the healers the packs burned out three centuries ago because they knew too much about what runs in an Alpha's veins. She pulled a broken newborn out of the river rocks, warmed me against her chest, and refused to let the Goddess take me. She raised me on bitter root tea and older magic. She taught me everything. By sixteen I could stop a bleed with two fingers. By seventeen, they came up the mountain from four territories away, dragging half-dead sons and cursed daughters, whispering the same name into the pines. The Ghost Healer. I never gave them a face. Only hands. An old rogue who hadn't shifted in twenty years walked down my mountain on his own two legs, sobbing into his palms. "Twenty years," he kept saying. "Doctors, silver-purges, prayers — nothing. And you. You." I told him what Maeve always told me. Say nothing. Owe nothing. Disappear. She died on my eighteenth birthday. Her hand in mine, her breath going thin, and the truth finally coming out of her like a splinter she'd carried for eighteen years. "Your blood is Blackthorn," she whispered. "The strongest bloodline in the North. Your father is Alpha Dorian Blackthorn." I didn't move. "They never stopped searching for you," she said. "And there's a betrothal waiting. Sealed the year you were born. You have to go back, Sienna." "I don't want their name." "Then take mine." Her fingers tightened. "But listen to me. The world down there is more dangerous than any forest. Bury the Ghost Healer. Bury her deep." "Why?" Her eyes were already going far away. "Because the sharpest blade," she breathed, "is the one nobody sees." I buried her at dawn under the heartwood tree. The black car came that afternoon, tires grinding up a road that wasn't supposed to exist. The man who got out did not belong to my mountain. Charcoal suit. Shoulders like a war banner. A stillness that made the birds stop. "I'm Kian Draven," he said. "I'm here for the Ghost Healer." Draven. The bloodline that made Alphas kneel. "She doesn't take patients anymore." "My father is dying." His jaw flexed once. "Name your price. Any price." "There isn't one." He looked at me for a long moment — barefoot girl, dead woman's shawl, dirt under my nails — and something behind his eyes changed. Not pity. Calculation. "Then the Ghost Healer is a remarkable woman," he said quietly. "I'm sorry for your loss." He'd seen the fresh grave. He got back in the car. And that was when it happened. For eighteen years I'd carried silence where every wolf carries a soul. No claws. No shift. No voice in my head telling me to run or bite or want. Wolfless. That's what the rogues called me when they thought I couldn't hear. But when Kian Draven turned his back and walked away, something under my ribs moved. Once. Like a heartbeat. Then nothing. I came down the mountain in a borrowed car with two dresses, one black moonstone pendant, and a name that wasn't theirs. The Blackthorn estate had gates taller than my mother's cabin. I walked in barefoot, because the earth is the only thing that has never lied to me, and because I wanted them to see it. They were waiting on the balcony above the great hall. Twelve of them. Silk and diamonds and old money. My father didn't bother hiding his lip curl. My grandmother's smile arrived one full second too late. And the girl in pink — the one they'd raised in my place — pressed her hand to her heart like she was watching a stray dog wander into a ballroom. They thought a feral girl had come home to be civilized. I lifted my chin and let them look. Somewhere in that beautiful house was the person who had ordered a newborn thrown into a ravine. And they had just smiled down at me. Good. Let the game begin.