(Gianna's POV)
Gianna. My name is Gianna.
I said it every morning when the wake-up bell clanged through the mine shaft. Silently, behind closed lips, while my fingers sorted silver ore on the conveyor belt.
Gianna. Not Forty-one. Not "hey, you." Not the tin plate banging against my collarbone.
Four years, I have been locked in the mine for four years, yet I have not given up. I must hold onto myself.
The grey dust coated everything. Hair, skin, lungs. After four years of sorting raw silver barehanded, the particles had burrowed beneath my skin and traced my veins in grey lines, like a map drawn in ash. My fingernails had fallen off twice and grown back twisted. The mine physician called it silver scarring. The other prisoners called it dying slow.
The omega beside me coughed-wet, rattling. Silver lung. He wouldn't last the month. I kept sorting. In the Grey Bone Mines, silence was survival.
"Gianna."
My hands stopped.
Not Forty-one. My name. Spoken out loud for the first time in four years.
The overseer stood at the tunnel entrance, whip coiled but still. Hands clasped behind his back. Almost deferential.
Something was wrong. Or something had changed. In this place, those meant the same thing.
"The Rivers pack sent someone," he said. "You've been pardoned. Alpha King's order."
I set the ore down. Wiped my hands. Stood up. Knees cracking.
No relief. No hope. Hope was the first thing the mines killed. I'd watched a woman three tunnels down get told she was free, walk to the surface, breathe real air, then get dragged back for "attempted escape." She never spoke again.
So I walked the corridor toward the surface with my face empty and waited for the trick.
The memories came anyway. They always did in the dark stretches between the tunnels, where the torchlight thinned.
I was fourteen. The most cherished daughter of the Rivers pack. Alpha Jaxon and Luna Elizabeth raised me as their own-their only daughter, their pride. I ran my first moon ceremony at their side. I tended the moonflower gardens. I was loved.
Then the dying maid confessed she'd switched me at birth with the real Rivers daughter-Charlotte.
Charlotte was returned. My parents wept with joy-real, helpless joy I'd never seen them show for me. For a while, they promised nothing would change. "You're still our daughter." I believed them. I clung to those words like a drowning wolf clings to driftwood.
Then the Moonstone Tear vanished.
The Moonstone Tear-a sacred relic housed in the Moon Goddess's temple at the heart of the royal territory. An ancient crystallized tear of the first Moon Goddess, said to hold the blessing that kept the wolf bloodlines pure. Its disappearance shook every pack in the kingdom.
This was a precise strike, and Charlotte made sure every clue pointed to me.