The Daughter They Forgot Twice

I was born under a curse that made my wolf’s presence so faint that everyone instinctively overlooked me. At the pack orphanage, the caretakers forgot to give me bread, leaving me hungry for three days. During a hunting exercise, my companions forgot I was with them, leaving me trapped in a hunter’s silver snare for three days and three nights. Then vampires attacked. The Alpha ordered everyone to evacuate through the pack link—everyone except me. They left me behind, and the vampires drained every drop of blood from my body. When I opened my eyes again, I was back at the pack orphanage, only weeks before the vampire attack that had killed me. After dying once, I no longer wanted to struggle. This time, I planned to wait quietly for death. Then, against all odds, the Alpha and Luna of the Silver Moon Pack found me. They told me I was the daughter they had lost seventeen years ago. My mother, Luna Eleanor, held me in her arms and wept. “You are our daughter, Ivy—the princess of the Silver Moon Pack. We will never let you suffer again.” My father, Alpha Marcus, gently touched my head. “Once you come home with us, even if the sky falls, we’ll hold it up for you.” They even gave me a blood-bound moonstone pendant that could send an emergency signal to my parents and my brother, Adrian. They swore they would never overlook me again. For the first time, I believed I had finally found a family. I decided I wanted to live. But when an earthquake buried me beneath the ruins of our family lodge, I activated the pendant with the last of my strength. My adopted sister, Brielle, claimed she had already seen me escape into the forest. My entire family believed her. They ignored my distress signal and abandoned me beneath the rubble. Only after they found my body did they realize I had never escaped. And by then, the daughter they had sworn never to forget was already dead. That was when they all lost their minds with regret. Chapter 1 My curse did not make me invisible. It simply made people forget me the moment they looked away. After struggling my entire life only to die alone, I no longer wanted to fight. If death came for me again, I would let it. When I opened my eyes again, I was back at the pack orphanage, only weeks before the vampire attack that had killed me. I expected to spend those weeks waiting for the same death to find me again. Instead, the Alpha and Luna of the Silver Moon Pack arrived and claimed me as the daughter they had lost seventeen years ago. On my first day at the Silver Moon Pack’s Alpha House, my adopted sister, Brielle, caught my wrist at the top of the stone staircase and deliberately threw herself backward. When I lost my balance, I did not scream or reach for the railing. I simply closed my eyes. But Brielle’s grip slipped before she could pull me down with her. She lost her footing and tumbled down the stairs alone, while I remained exactly where she had left me. I stared at my empty hand. I was still alive. Her cries soon echoed from downstairs. I went looking for somewhere quiet and found a disused storage closet beneath the back staircase, tucked behind the armory. The closet was barely wide enough for me to lie down. Broken chairs and old trunks crowded the walls, leaving a narrow gap between them. I turned sideways and squeezed into that gap, drawing my knees to my chest. The cramped space felt strangely safe because no one would look for me there or ask me to leave. If death came again, I could wait for it in peace. Brielle’s crying soon drew my parents and my older brother, Adrian, into the hall. She curled against Luna Eleanor with a large scrape across her arm and tears running down her face. “Ivy said there would be no place for me in this family now that she’s home. Then she pushed me down the stairs.” My family immediately rushed upstairs to find me. After searching several rooms, Adrian led a group of pack warriors through the armory and finally opened the storage closet beneath the stairs. Lantern light spilled into the cramped room and fell across me as I lay motionless between the old trunks. The room went quiet, and everyone turned toward Brielle, who was still clinging to Luna Eleanor. “You said Ivy pushed you,” my mother said hesitantly. Brielle’s face turned pale. A moment later, she buried herself against my mother again. “I might have been mistaken. After Ivy walked away, I tried to follow her because I wanted to talk. Then I heard something moving inside the storage closet. I thought an animal was trapped in there, and I lost my footing.” She tightened her grip on my mother’s clothes as her tears fell faster. “Ivy must hate me. She knows how easily I get frightened, so she hid in the closet to scare me. Does she want me to leave this family?” Adrian accepted her new explanation without questioning it. He looked up at me, and the suspicion in his eyes quickly hardened into anger. “The Alpha House has plenty of rooms, Ivy. Why did you crawl into a storage closet? Brielle fell down the stairs, and you hid in here while everyone searched for you. You knew exactly what you were doing.” I opened my eyes and looked at them through the lantern light. “I was trying to find somewhere I wouldn’t disturb anyone. If this room frightens her, I can find somewhere else and keep quiet.” I shifted farther into the gap. My shoulder scraped against the wall, and one of the old trunks gave a dull knock against the stone. My calm response exhausted the last of Alpha Marcus’s patience. He took a wooden staff from the weapons rack and struck the closet doorframe, making the crowded room tremble around me. “Brielle has lived in this house for seventeen years without suffering an injury like this. You arrived today, and now the entire household is in chaos.” He pointed the staff toward the opening. “Come out. Now.” I stayed where I was because I had no idea which room I was supposed to return to. At my father’s command, two pack warriors reached between the trunks and dragged me out. Dust covered my hair and clothes by the time they set me down in the hall. My mother kept one arm around Brielle and glanced at me. “Go and clean yourself up, then choose a room. This is your home now, but you cannot hide in storage rooms and frighten Brielle again.” To keep me from returning, Adrian ordered the staff to empty the closet and lock its door. After changing out of my dirty clothes, I walked around the second floor. The Alpha House did have plenty of rooms, but Brielle had her own bedroom, dressing room, music room, art studio, and private training room. There was one empty room at the far end of the corridor. Before I could enter, a member of the household staff stepped in front of the door. “That room was recently converted into Brielle’s meditation room. She doesn’t like anyone else going inside.” I nodded and did not ask her to find me another room. My parents had said plenty about welcoming me home, yet no one had remembered to prepare a place for me to sleep. Since there was no room for me in the Alpha House, I went outside to search for somewhere no one else would want. At the back of the property, I found the glass doors leading into the moonflower conservatory. Luna Eleanor grew moonflowers and medicinal plants there, but one long planting bed in the corner was still empty. The soil was soft and damp beneath my body. I lay down, folded my hands over my stomach, and closed my eyes, finally certain that no one would ask me to leave. Chapter 2 I woke in the middle of the night to the glass door opening. Brielle entered the moonflower conservatory with a lantern and soon found me lying in the empty planting bed. “So this is where you’ve been hiding.” I opened my eyes but said nothing. She covered her nose and mouth with a folded cloth, then took a dark bottle from beneath a growing rack and poured its contents into the irrigation channel. A bitter scent spread through the garden. It was wolfsbane extract. Wolfsbane suppressed a werewolf’s healing and could stop someone from breathing. Brielle knew I had seen her, yet she tossed the empty bottle beside me. “You want to die so badly. I’m only helping you.” She crossed the garden and pushed over several racks. Pots shattered, and white moonflower petals fell into the muddy water beneath her shoes. Mother had grown those flowers herself. An attendant had told me she planted them every year after I disappeared because they had been her favorite while she was pregnant with me. Brielle destroyed the last flower, stuffed her stained gloves beside me, and left. The glass door closed, trapping the fumes inside. My wolf’s presence had always been weak, and once the poison suppressed my body, even lifting one hand became difficult. I closed my eyes and let each breath grow shallower. The next morning, an attendant entered the garden. Her scream woke the entire Alpha House. By the time my parents and Adrian arrived, someone had pulled me from the planting bed. Mother did not look at me first. She knelt in the mud and lifted a crushed moonflower. “Who destroyed these?” Brielle entered behind Adrian and hurried to her side. “Mom, Ivy was upset because she didn’t have a room. Maybe she only needed somewhere to sleep. Please don’t blame her.” Mother looked at me with disappointment. “You can be angry that we failed to prepare a room, but what did these flowers have to do with it?” The wolfsbane had burned my throat, but I managed to force out a few words. “It wasn’t me. The conservatory has a recording crystal. Check it.” Brielle’s fingers tightened around Mother’s sleeve, and the color drained from her face. Every room containing rare herbs was protected by a recording crystal. It preserved images of anyone who entered, although it could not record their voices. Adrian looked at me coldly. “Then we’ll check it. Once it proves you’re lying, you will apologize to Brielle.” The head attendant brought the crystal from its locked cabinet and placed it against the glass wall. Silver light spread across the surface, revealing the conservatory as it had appeared the night before. Brielle appeared in the image with a cloth covering her nose and mouth. She looked around before pouring the dark bottle into the irrigation channel, overturning the growing racks, and grinding the moonflowers beneath her shoes. Before leaving, she pushed the stained gloves beside me. No one spoke when the image faded. Brielle sank to her knees and caught Mother’s hand. “I was angry. Ivy was lying in the dirt where the attendants would find her. It looked as though we had refused to give her a bed, and I thought she wanted the entire pack to believe we had mistreated her.” Her voice broke as she glanced toward the ruined flowers. “I only meant to destroy the garden. I didn’t know the bottle contained wolfsbane or that the fumes could hurt her.” Mother closed her eyes for a moment before pulling Brielle to her feet. “You should have come to us instead of losing control. What you did was wrong, but admitting it matters.” Father’s expression softened as soon as Brielle began to cry again. “She has never studied medicinal herbs. She saw an unmarked dark bottle and acted without thinking. She destroyed the flowers, but she did not mean to poison anyone.” No one asked why Brielle had covered her own nose before opening a bottle she claimed not to recognize. No one mentioned that concentrated wolfsbane trapped inside a glass room could have stopped my breathing before morning. Adrian helped Brielle stand, then turned on me. “None of this would have happened if you hadn’t chosen to sleep in the dirt. What were you trying to prove?” “There was no room for me.” Mother looked toward Father. “I thought you had arranged one.” Father frowned. “I thought you had.” For the first time, they seemed to realize that everyone in the Alpha House had welcomed me home without deciding where I would sleep. Adrian’s face flushed with anger. “Then you should have said something. First you crawled into a storage closet, and now you’re sleeping in a planting bed. You want the household to think we forced you into places no one else would use.” I lowered my eyes and stopped answering. A place where I could lie still was enough. It did not matter whether it was a closet, a garden, or the ground outside. My silence only made him angrier. He called the pack warriors inside. “Take Ivy to the moonless cell. She can come out when she admits that she has been using this family’s guilt to punish us.” Two warriors took me beneath the Alpha House and placed me inside the underground discipline room. Its thick stone walls dulled the pack link, but the room contained no silver and was not meant to harm anyone. Adrian stood outside the door while I struggled to remain upright. “You’ll come out when you’re ready to tell the truth.” After the stone door closed, I lay down beside the wall and listened until their footsteps disappeared. Near midnight, the lock turned again. Brielle entered with a cup of water and a small flask of lamp oil while the guard waited beyond the open door. “Mother asked me to bring this,” she said. “She wants us to stop fighting.” She set the water beside me, then complained that the room was cold and slid the cover over the narrow air vent. While pretending to refill the wall lamp, she emptied a second vial into its oil reservoir, keeping the movement hidden beneath her sleeve. As she passed me on her way out, she bent close enough to whisper, “This time, there isn’t a recording crystal.” The door closed behind her. As the flame warmed the oil, a familiar bitter scent slowly spread through the sealed room. It was wolfsbane. Chapter 3 I drifted in and out of consciousness as wolfsbane smoke gathered inside the moonless cell. Each time I surfaced, the room seemed to contain less air. The same burning that had filled my lungs in the conservatory returned, sharper now that the vent was closed. My chest tightened until every breath became a shallow gasp, and I knew death had found me again. I tried to raise my hand toward the door, but my arm fell back to the floor. Soon I could no longer knock or call out, so I curled against the cold stone and waited for my breathing to stop. I had no idea how much time had passed when the heavy door finally opened. A guard entered carrying the morning meal and a lantern. At first, he did not notice me lying beside the wall. He was about to leave when he saw the blood on the floor. He crouched to check my breathing, then rushed out and called for a healer. I was unconscious when they carried me back upstairs. The healer cleared the wolfsbane from my lungs and forced fresh air into them with moon-blessed water. It was late that night before I could breathe normally again. Mother sat beside the bed when I woke. “If you couldn’t breathe, why didn’t you knock?” I looked at her but remained silent. Father frowned. “There was a guard outside the cell the entire time. If you had made any sound, he would have checked on you.” “No one would have heard me.” It was always the same. I could call until my voice disappeared, and the moment people looked away, they forgot I had ever been there. Adrian came to the bedside, his expression grim. “You didn’t even try. How could you know he wouldn’t hear? You always lie somewhere waiting for people to find you, and then everyone is made to feel guilty afterward.” The healer stopped putting away her bottles. “The wolfsbane had already begun to paralyze her breathing. By the time the guard found her, she may not have been capable of making a sound.” Adrian said nothing more, though he did not apologize. A while later, he returned carrying a black wooden box. Inside was a silver moonstone pendant engraved with the Silver Moon Pack’s crest and surrounded by fine, blood-red lines. “This blood-bound moonstone was made for you.” Adrian pricked my fingertip with a silver needle and let one drop of blood fall onto the center of the stone. A faint red glow traveled along the carved lines before sinking into the moonstone. “It is bound to your blood now. Press the silver moon crest, and Father, Mother, and I will receive a distress signal through the pack link. As long as it remains active, we’ll know you’re in danger.” I held the pendant and felt warmth spreading from the stone. “Will it still work when my wolf’s presence is so weak?” “The blood bond doesn’t depend on your presence.” Adrian fastened the chain around my neck and made sure the moonstone rested against my chest. “Use it whenever you’re in danger. Stop lying down and waiting to die, and don’t expect us to realize something is wrong on our own.” Mother adjusted the blanket beside my arm. “We already lost you once, Ivy. We won’t let you face danger alone again.” Father also promised that the moment the signal appeared, they would come for me. In my previous life, no one had noticed that I was left behind the burning walls when vampires attacked the shelter. I had screamed and tried to follow the others, but all I could do was watch them vanish into the forest. In this life, they had forgotten me inside the storage closet, and I had nearly died in the moonless cell. The moonstone did not need anyone to notice my presence. As long as I had enough strength to activate it, they would know I needed help. I closed my fingers around the pendant. I had spent every day since my rebirth waiting to die. But with the moonstone warm in my hand and my family’s promise surrounding me, I made a different choice. I wanted to live. Over the next few days, my body gradually recovered. Then my parents came to the recovery room and told me they planned to take the family to the hunting lodge in the northern mountains. Mother adjusted the moonstone pendant around my neck. “You’ve only just returned to us, and you haven’t had time to become comfortable with your family. We’ll set aside pack business for a few days and go away together. It will give you time to get to know Brielle and Adrian.” Father stood beside her, his voice solemn. “We want you to feel that you truly belong in this family, Ivy. It will be only us, with no pack meetings and no one else demanding our attention.” I looked at them for a moment, then nodded. Chapter 4 The next morning, we traveled by carriage to the northern mountains. The hunting lodge stood beneath a rocky slope, surrounded by snow-covered pines. My parents left the household staff at the Alpha House and brought only a few pack warriors to guard us. Mother said that was the only way the trip would feel like a true family retreat. After we arrived, she and Father took Brielle and Adrian to see the frozen lake nearby. I walked behind them and lost sight of the group more than once, following their tracks through the snow until I caught up. By evening, the wind had strengthened and snow swept across the mountain. One of the guards warned Father that the snow on the northern slope had begun to shift and that we should return to pack territory. Father studied the storm and decided it would be safer to wait until the weather eased. After dinner, the fire burned low. I went to the storeroom at the rear of the lodge for more wood, but as I stepped down the narrow stairs, the floor lurched beneath me. A deep crack rolled through the mountain. Snow and stone struck the roof. The wooden wall split under the impact, and a heavy beam came down toward me. I raised my arms to shield my head before the collapsing boards buried me. Darkness closed in. The broken beam pinned my legs, while stone blocked the only exit. I tried to move the board across my chest, but my arms had no strength. Footsteps and shouts sounded beyond the wreckage. “Where is Brielle?” “She is with Luna Eleanor on the east side!” “Adrian is out. Find Alpha Marcus!” They called one another’s names, but no one called mine. Ignoring the pain, I reached beneath my collar and closed my hand around the moonstone pendant. Adrian had promised that it did not depend on my wolf’s presence. Once I activated it, my parents and brother would know I was trapped. I pressed the silver moon crest with my thumb. The moonstone glowed red, and the blood-bound markings warmed against my palm as the distress signal entered the pack link. The voices outside stopped for a moment. “That is Ivy’s moonstone,” Mother said. “She may still be inside.” Brielle answered immediately. “Ivy already escaped. Just before the slope collapsed, I saw her run through the back door and into the forest.” “Are you certain?” Father asked. Brielle nodded. “I called after her, but she ignored me. The storm is getting worse. We should find her before she goes any farther.” Adrian felt the signal continuing through the pack link, and his expression hardened. “If she escaped, why did she activate the moonstone?” Brielle lowered her eyes. “She may have pressed it by accident while she was running.” Adrian gave a humorless laugh. “On her first day home, she hid in a storage closet until the entire house searched for her. Then she lay in the conservatory waiting to be found. Now the whole family is here, and she is still using a distress signal to drag everyone’s attention back to her.” Mother looked toward the ruins. “Have the warriors make certain no one is inside.” Several pack warriors removed the outer boards and pressed their palms against the broken stone wall, searching for a living presence beneath it. My wolf was too faint to sense clearly, and the thick rock smothered what little presence remained. They could not tell whether anyone was below. Hearing them directly above me, I gathered the last of my strength and struck the moonstone against the board beside my head. A young warrior looked up at once. “There is a sound below us. Someone may still be inside.” I tightened my fingers around the stone and forced out a third knock. The warrior followed the sound and knelt beside the rubble. “It came from here. Lady Ivy may truly be underneath. We should keep digging.” Adrian listened for a moment, then looked at the glowing distress signal. “The slope is still moving. Falling stones make noise. Brielle saw Ivy enter the forest, so she cannot be here.” The warrior stayed beside the wall. “The sound came three times at even intervals. Loose rock does not fall like that.” “Can you sense a living presence?” Adrian asked. The warrior pressed his hand to the stone again before shaking his head. “Not yet, but the rock is too thick for me to be certain.” Adrian severed the moonstone’s blood-bound signal. The red light in my palm flickered twice and went out. Mother glanced at the place the warrior had marked. “Brielle, did you truly see Ivy enter the forest?” Brielle leaned against her and nodded through her tears. “I saw her. She was running so quickly that I could not follow.” Father looked toward the forest, already disappearing behind the snow. “If no one can sense a living presence, we cannot waste more time here. Search the forest.” The young warrior tried to object, but Adrian ordered him to obey the Alpha. The warriors stopped digging. I tried to lift the moonstone again so the one person who had heard me would know I was alive, but my fingers no longer closed around it. Their footsteps faded toward the forest. The young warrior looked back once before Adrian called him away. After everyone had gone, the beam across my chest sank lower. The moonstone slipped from my hand without making a fourth sound. Seconds later, the ruins became completely still.