(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.

First: three servants from different posts each testified they'd seen me near the temple at specific times on the night of the theft. Their timelines interlocked perfectly-too perfectly for coincidence, too detailed for fabrication. Or so everyone thought.

Second: a search of my room turned up a cloth pouch hidden behind a loose stone in my wall, containing traces of moonstone dust and a silver thread from the temple's inner curtain. I'd never seen either before in my life.

Third: a letter, supposedly written in my hand to a friend, in which "I" confessed to envying Charlotte's return and resenting the attention she received. "She gets everything. I'll take the one thing they can't give her." The handwriting was nearly perfect-close enough that even I had to look twice. But I knew. I hadn't written it.

Three chains, woven together into an iron cage. Witness testimony. Physical evidence. Written confession.

The only people who could've given me an alibi were Alpha Jaxon and Elizabeth. They knew where I was that evening-with them, organizing books in the family study, while Charlotte said she wasn't feeling well that day and wanted to go to bed early. They must have known, or at least suspected, that their real daughter had orchestrated the whole thing.

They said nothing.

When the Alpha King interrogated me himself-his eyes cold, there was not a trace of warmth in his tone as there once had been-I saw the exact moment he stopped seeing me as a person.

When I was merely a maid's daughter, no one took my words seriously. Whether I admitted to the crime or not didn't matter-they could torture me for a confession, or they could simply sentence me anyway.

I was fourteen. They dragged me to the Grey Bone Mines in silver chains, and not a single wolf spoke for me.

The first day, two older prisoners shoved me into an open shaft. I fell thirty feet into a pool of liquid silver runoff at the bottom.Someone wants to kill me to silence me.

Three days. I was down there three days before anyone pulled me out.

My wolf Gina had already awakened-small, silver-furred, still learning to speak inside my mind. The liquid silver flooded her like a hammer to a candle flame.

She went silent.

In four years, she'd surfaced maybe a dozen times. A flicker of warmth behind my ribs. A faint whimper when the pain peaked. Once, in the second year, she managed a single word: "Run." But there was nowhere to run to, and she didn't have the strength to say it again.

The sunlight hit me like a fist.

I shielded my eyes. Snow everywhere. Sky pale. Trees bare. Cold so sharp my teeth ached, but after four years underground, cold from above felt almost like freedom.

I thought they'd send a Beta. A servant. I hadn't dared think further than that.

Charlotte was standing beside the supply truck.

She wore a cashmere coat. A scarf wrapped just so. A thermos held in both hands. Two mine guards stood behind her, faces respectful-for her, not for me.

When she saw me, her eyes went red. She crossed the distance quickly, one hand reaching for my face.

"God, your skin-your hands-" Her voice trembled. Perfect grief. Perfect sister. She held out the thermos. "I brought soup. For the road."

I didn't take it.

I looked at her eyes. Those emerald eyes-the last time I'd seen them was at my trial, from the gallery, holding something carefully hidden. Satisfaction.

"Why did you come?" My voice was sandpaper on stone.

Not a crack in her expression. "I begged Father to let me. I wanted to come myself. These four years-I thought about you every day." Her voice broke on the last word.

I said nothing. I walked around her and started down the mountain road.

Behind me, Charlotte stood with the thermos still raised. The warmth on her face slowly hardened. Then she said something quietly to the guards.

I hadn't taken fifty steps.

Two guards caught up. One grabbed my arm, the other locked my neck from behind-standard prisoner-control grip, the kind they used in the mines. I knew it too well.

I fought. But four years of silver toxin, silver scars, and a leg that had never healed right made my struggle small. Like a bird with broken wings beating the ground.

They hauled me into the truck bed. Charlotte had already taken the passenger seat. She didn't look back.

But in the rearview mirror, I saw her mouth. The angle of it.

I stopped struggling. Leaned against the seat. Closed my eyes. Somewhere deep in my chest, Gina flickered like a dying wick-and sank back down.

The truck drove for forty minutes. Through the window I watched the road change. Not the main route back to Rivers Pack territory. A narrower path. Trees closing in on both sides.

"This isn't the way back," I said.

Charlotte turned around. The grieving sister was gone. What replaced it was older, more honest. She hated me for stealing her identity for fourteen years. I had always known.

"I asked the driver to take a detour," she said. Easy, like commenting on the weather. "I wanted you to see the scenery. It's been four years."

The truck stopped. The driver got out and opened the back.

Charlotte didn't move.

"We're here," the driver said.

Dense forest. Deep snow. No road markers. No buildings. Nothing.

I looked at Charlotte. She looked back at me.

"I'll tell Father you insisted on getting out halfway," she said. "You know how stubborn you've always been."

The guards pulled me down and dropped me into the snow. It swallowed my ankles.

The truck turned around. The engine faded.

I stood up slowly. Alone in the forest, in a prison uniform too thin for the cold. The sky was going dark.

I started walking. No direction. Just forward.

My left leg buckled every third step. The silver-scarred lungs seized in the cold air like something was squeezing them.

Twenty minutes in, I heard growling. From more than one direction.

Rogues. Cast-out wolves, gone too long without a pack, too long without reason. Only hunger left.

I pressed behind a boulder and made myself small. My hands were shaking-not only from cold. Gina didn't stir. She hadn't been able to help me since the silver pool.

The largest rogue lowered its head and walked toward my boulder.