On my eighteenth birthday, the Moon Goddess gave me three husbands, and I told her to keep them.
I'd like to say that was courage. It wasn't. It was arithmetic. I had finally added up everything that had been done to me, and the total was too high to say yes to.
But the morning started with a bolt.
At four a.m. I was sitting on the cellar floor, counting. Counting is what you do in the Vance house when you can't change anything else. Eleven stairs to the kitchen. Six hairpins in my sock. Forty seconds to beat the top lock.
The bottom lock, the iron one, Dax's favorite, I had never once beaten. Ten birthdays. Ten years of listening to it slam.
I pushed on the door, and it swung open.
The bottom bolt was slid back. Oiled. A bright smear of fresh grease on the steel.
Dax doesn't forget locks. Dax certainly doesn't oil them.
Somebody had come down here after him, in the dark, and set me free.
I should have felt grateful. What I felt was a cold, small question: what do they want in exchange?
Nothing in this house is a gift. Everything is a loan, and the interest is always me.
I took the path behind the kennels, where the guards never look and the snow is deep enough to swallow footprints. The Moon Temple stood at the top of the valley, white and narrow, like a candle somebody forgot to light. Ninety steps. At the bottom, a man was sweeping snow that had already fallen off the stairs.
Ro, the caretaker. I had seen him a thousand times without seeing him. A broom. A limp. A face people forgot while they were still looking at it.
He didn't say happy birthday. He held out a man's wool coat, far too big, and watched my face while I took it. Not my hands. My face. The way you check a lock.
"Don't say yes," he said.
I stared at him. "To what?"
He went back to sweeping. "Whatever it asks."
The coat smelled of cedar smoke and something sharper underneath. Metal. Like a coin held on the tongue.
I climbed the ninety steps wondering how a caretaker knew what the goddess was going to ask.
By dawn the whole pack stood in the courtyard, their breath rising like a congregation of ghosts.
My stepfather, Gideon, stood at the front. Alpha of Silvercrest. Charcoal coat, folded hands, the face of a man who has never needed to raise his voice. The pack adored him. He had taken in a widow's orphan, after all, and he told that story beautifully.
Behind him stood his sons. Dax, tall, already smiling. Rhett, laughing at nothing. And Kade, the youngest, at the back, looking at everything except me.
Dax saw the coat. His smile slid off.
Who? he mouthed.
I smiled back. It was the best present I'd given myself in years.
Seven wolves were named before me. Seven bells. Seven gasps, seven laughs, seven people running into someone's arms. I counted them.
Then the old temple reader said, "Nyla Thorne."
No one cheered. They never do.
I stood on the center stone. The cold climbed through my boots. And the voice came.
Not from the sky. Everyone expects the sky. It came from underneath me, up through the stone and into my back teeth, slow as a bell dragged through water.
"Dax Vance."
A gasp.
"Rhett Vance."
Louder.
"Kade Vance."
Then nothing. I heard a candle gutter forty feet away.
Three names. In a thousand years, the goddess had never given anyone three.
Dax laughed first, a delighted bark, like a boy handed a trophy. Rhett joined him. Kade went the color of wet paper.
And everything I had counted came back at once. Dax's hand between my shoulder blades at the top of the stairs. Rhett burning my mother's letters in the kitchen stove and calling it warmth. Kade's silence, always Kade's silence, the politest cruelty in the house.
The goddess had looked over a whole valley and picked the three people who had made me smallest. And now she expected a thank-you.
You didn't refuse the Moon. Wolves who did were called cursed. They lost their place, their name, sometimes their minds.
Gideon stepped forward, gentle as a hymn. "Come, Nyla. Accept your blessing. We'll be family in every way now."
Every way.
My stomach turned over.
I looked for help, which was stupid. At the edge of the crowd, leaning on his broom, Ro wasn't watching the brothers. He was watching Gideon. Not with hatred. With something quieter and far worse.
Patience.
Don't say yes.
Somebody had oiled that bolt. Somebody had wanted me out of the cellar and standing on this exact stone, in front of every wolf in the valley. Somebody who knew what the goddess would say.
I had spent my whole life afraid of being unwanted. It had never occurred to me how much worse it is to be wanted for something you can't see.
"Nyla," Gideon said. Softer now. A warning wrapped in velvet. "Speak."
I took one breath of cedar smoke and asked myself a question nobody had asked me in ten years. Not what can I survive. What do I want.
"No."
It wasn't a shout. It barely counted as a word. It rolled across the courtyard, struck the temple wall and came back to me, and no one in Silvercrest breathed.
Dax stopped laughing. Rhett's mouth fell open. And Kade looked up at me for the first time in ten years, and it wasn't anger in his eyes.
It was terror.
I turned to Gideon, wanting his rage. I could have survived rage.
He was smiling. A small, private smile. The smile of a man who had set a trap years ago in the dark and had just heard the door shut behind the animal.
"Thank you, Nyla," he whispered, too low for anyone else to hear. "Now we can begin."
The stone shuddered under my boots.
The voice came again, and this time it wasn't one name.
"Then you shall have twenty-one."
