Mina's POV
The next morning came gray and cold.
I was already awake before my alarm. I had barely slept — every time I drifted off, the silver forest pulled me back in.
The voice. The starlight. The feeling of something enormous standing just behind me, breathing slow and patient, waiting.
I washed my face with cold water, changed into my cleanest hoodie — dark green, two sizes too big — and sat at my desk with Damian's essay in front of me.
Six more pages.
I picked up the pen.
By the time I finished, the sun had come up properly and my landlady was banging pipes somewhere below me.
I read the essay back once, changed three words that sounded too much like me, and slipped it into a fresh envelope.
One day left.
I pushed the thought away and headed to school.
The hallways of Silver Moon Academy were already buzzing when I arrived. Louder than usual.
There was an energy in the air that I recognized — the kind that meant something had happened, or was about to happen, and everyone already knew except me.
I kept my head down and moved through.
"Did you hear?"
"The Awakening Ceremony is tomorrow night…."
"Early this year –"
“Because of the blood moon –"
I stopped at my locker and let the conversations wash over me without catching on anything.
The Awakening Ceremony. Of course. Once in a year, on the night of the blood moon, every pack member who had turned eighteen in the past month gathered in the ceremonial hall to shift for the first time in front of the Alpha and the Elders.
Tomorrow night.
My birthday was tomorrow.
I stood very still with my hand on my locker door.
I had spent years telling myself it wouldn't happen to me. That whatever was broken inside me — whatever made me silent, whatever made grown men go blank when I was seven years old — had probably destroyed the shifting gene along with everything else.
That I would simply not shift. That I would stand in that hall and nothing would happen and I would walk home alone the same way I did everything else.
I had almost believed it.
"Mina."
I turned.
It was Ms. Vern — my homeroom teacher. An average woman.
She was holding a folded slip of paper between two fingers like she didn't want to touch it any longer than necessary.
"Ceremony registration," she said. "You need to submit this by the end of the day." She pushed it toward me.
"I assume you'll be attending. All eligible pack members are required."
I took the slip.
She was already walking away.
Required. The word sat in my stomach like a swallowed coin.
The third period was biology. I sat in the back corner the way I always did — close to the window, far from everyone.
The teacher was talking about cellular regeneration, and I was taking notes automatically, my hand moving while my mind stayed somewhere else entirely.
A folded piece of paper landed on my desk.
I looked at it. Then at the person who threw it.
Ryder Kane was two rows to my left, arms folded on his desk, not looking at me. Deliberately not looking at me, which was its own kind of looking.
I unfolded the paper under the desk.
I heard you're registered for tomorrow. Don't embarrass the pack, Mute.
I folded it back up.
My jaw tightened. That stirring in my chest came again — quicker this time, less like something waking up and more like something standing up. I pressed my foot flat against the floor and breathed through it.
Not yet.
After class, I was the last one out. I had made it exactly four steps into the hallway when a hand closed around my arm and pulled me sideways into the alcove beside the water fountain.
Jace.
He let go immediately — like touching me had been accidental, like he was already annoyed at himself for it.
He stood in the alcove with his arms crossed and looked at me with those gray eyes that never gave anything away.
"You submitted your registration," he said.
I looked at him steadily.
"You shouldn't go tomorrow."
I blinked.
It was the last thing I had expected him to say.
Not clean the lab early.
He was looking at me differently than usual — not with contempt exactly.
Something almost like — concern. He killed it quickly, but I saw it.
"The ceremony is not for people like you," he said, and just like that the coldness was back, smooth and even.
"You'll shift into something weak. The Elders will document it. And It'll be on record permanently."
He paused. "Save yourself the humiliation."
He pushed off the wall and walked away.
I stood in the alcove for a moment.
People like you.
I had heard those words my whole life. Spoken in a hundred different tones — pity, disgust, boredom. I had learned to let them pass through me like wind through an open window.
But standing there, one day before my birthday, with silver threading slowly through my eyes every time I looked in a mirror, with a voice in a silver forest telling me I was almost ready—
Something inside me did not let those words pass through.
Something inside me caught them.
Held them.
And burned.
I unfolded the ceremony registration slip, walked to the administration office, and slid it through the door slot.
Then I went back to class.
