Chapter 1

Reva's POV

"Please pick up. Come on, Mom, pick up."

"You've reached Caroline. Leave a message." An automated message replied.

"Hey Mom, It's me again." I pressed the phone harder against my ear, as if that could pull her closer. "You said you'd come this morning. You promised you'd bring Joan. I've been waiting all day."

My voice cracked.

"Something's changed. The doctor came by twice last night, and said things were getting worse," I drew in a breath.

"I need you, Mom. I need all of you here. Please, just call me back. Just tell me if everything is okay at the house."

The voicemail beeped and cut me off. Message full, or maybe message ignored. I couldn't tell the difference anymore.

I lowered the phone to my chest and stared at the white hospital sheets, the IV in my arm, the EKG counting every beat my heart made.

This was my life now.

It was only a matter of time till the cancer eating up my liver from the inside out, finished up its work and I closed my eyes in death.

I took a mirror and made myself look. Dark, sunken eyes. A scalp gone bare from chemotherapy. My teeth were a yellowing, breaking mess and my frame had thinned into a frail, withering skeleton.

I winced and put the mirror down.

I wouldn't dwell on the worst things. Every breath I took reminded me I was still alive, and as long as blood ran through my veins, there was hope.

Four in the afternoon. My mother swore she'd visit this morning and bring Joan, my husky, the one piece of home I'd been begging to see for months.

I closed my eyes and pictured her. That thick grey fur, the cold little nose pushed into my palm, the way she slept at the foot of my bed.

Every time I asked, my mother said the hospital wouldn't allow it, but that she'd sneak her in soon. Just so I could hold her again, for the last time.

Soon kept turning into next week. Next week kept turning into failed promises.

I dialed her number one more time. No ringing. Just a flat, empty tone. Switched off on purpose.

My hands started to shake. I set the phone down and folded them in my lap.

I told myself she was busy, that something urgent must have come up. But I'd been feeding myself lies like that for weeks, and I was tired of swallowing them just to make it through another night.

Once, this room was full of people who loved me.

Derick, my mate, sat by my bed every day and promised me we'd beat this together. My mother, Caroline, slept in the chair beside me, wiping my face when I was too weak to lift my arms. My stepfather, Ronald, came every weekend with cheap gas-station flowers, but he came. Even my sister, Pamela, called to check on me.

Then the cancer stopped being new, and I stopped being interesting.

Derick's daily visits shrank to weekly, then to a single text on a Sunday, then to silence. My mother spent fewer nights than before. Ronald's weekends faded, and Pamela's calls dropped to one message a month, and even that felt like a favor.

The doctors gave me six months to live. Most of it was already gone.

Now I was spending what time I had left alone, calling people who'd learned to let the phone ring out.

My phone buzzed against the blanket.

For one stupid, hopeful second, my heart lifted. I grabbed it, sure it was my mother calling back.

It was a notification. A livestream, going on national TV.

~ Live now: Derick and Pamela — Engagement Celebration at the Brickstone Estate.~

I read the words twice, sure I'd misunderstood.

Wait. Derick and Pamela were getting Engaged?

My thumb moved on its own and tapped the screen.

The video opened, and there they were. The grand hall of the Brickstone estate, filled with white flowers. My whole world, gathered in one room, smiling like the sun had come out.

Derick stood at the center in a dark suit, laughing at something. My Derick. The man who swore, in this very hospital room, that he'd marry me sick or well.

Beside him stood my little sister in a champagne gown, her arm looped through his like she'd always belonged there. She was glowing.

The camera turned to my mother in the front row, in a new dress she always claimed she could never afford, dabbing happy tears with a handkerchief. Ronald sat beside her, beaming like a proud father.

The room tilted around me.

This wasn't a party thrown together in a hurry. A live band. Hundreds of guests. Something like this took weeks to plan.

Weeks.

While Derick was still texting me on Sundays. While my mother was still promising to bring my dog. They kept pretending to hold my hand while building a whole new life around the empty space where I used to be.

They weren't staying away because they were grieving me. They were staying away because they were busy. I was already gone to them. They were only waiting for my body to catch up and make it official.

The phone slipped from my fingers and landed on the blanket.

I didn't cry. I thought I would, but the tears never came. What came instead was a silence so cold I could hear my own heartbeat, slow and frail, beating painfully.

Then I heard Derick's voice floating up from the speakers of my phone, "I hereby renounce any bond I hold, and become a lone wolf. Free to choose and free to mate."

The pain hit before his words ended. My heart squeezed as the bond between us snapped in half.

A tear rolled down my cheek. I clutched my chest, my body shaking. I tried not to scream.

My body was too weak from the cancer to survive the shock of what I'd just seen. My chest kept hurting after that.

Each breath came shorter than the last one, and I couldn't get enough air in no matter how hard I tried.

Panting hard, I turned my head toward the window. The afternoon light was fading grey, and somewhere out there everyone I'd ever loved was toasting to a future without me in it. My chest felt like it was being crushed. I couldn't catch my breath.

I looked to the sky beyond the clouds and felt the sting of their betrayal sear through me, hotter than anything I'd known.

"Please," I gasped, and my voice cracked in the empty room. "If anyone is listening up there, anyone at all. Give me a second chance. Let me make them feel one small piece of what I felt tonight."

I waited.

Nothing answered. Nothing ever did.

The machine beside me started beeping fast, faster than it should. I heard it, but it sounded far away.

My eyes grew heavy. The room blurred at the edges, soft and far away.

God, I was dying. No one was here to hold my hand.

Then the air changed. The room went so cold that goosebumps covered my arms. The curtains at the window swayed with a strange wind even though the glass was shut tight.

And behind the curtains, spreading slow across the wall, a shadow darkened the room. Tall. Shaped like a man.

Someone was here.