The Forgotten Heiress : Rise of The Lycan Queen

She learned to vanish at a very young age.

Not with tricks or cloaks or spells. But in the stealthier ways-moving in and out of conversations, behind the lockers, behind the laughter, behind the thick, stifling silence of a town that never welcomed her. Invisibility was something she wore like a second skin, sewn together from years of indifference and half-remembered nightmares.

No birth certificate. No baby pictures. No tales told by tearful relatives. Only a pendant of dark stone carved into the shape of a crescent moon-and her name, whispered by the woman who left her on the Harrow family's porch like so many pieces of discarded mail. She was six years old and already someone else's ghost.

And the Harrows. They weren't nice.

The Morrow Street house creaked with secrets and reeked of stale smoke and spilled bourbon. Mr. Harrow worked at night and drank during the daytime. Mrs. Harrow chain-smoked through soap operas and ignored Elara except when there was something to clean or some mess to blame. Three years older and perpetually cruel, Garrett Harrow treated her like something malfunctioning in his reality-teasing her in the hallways, hissing "witch" or "freak" when the teachers weren't around to hear.

But Elara didn't cry.

No longer

She walked through the world in silence, numb and unseen. Her marks were perfect, but never complimented. Her sketchbooks were packed with things no one ever requested-twisted ancient trees with eyes, moons fractured like glass, wolves with star-filled mouths. Dreams that she could never recall. Silhouettes that never existed. And loneliness so sharp it sliced.

Until the day of her eighteenth birthday.

It began with the dream.

She stood barefoot in a sea of black flowers, swaying without the need for air. The sky above her was bottomless velvet, the stars between like lances of light in the dark. A silver-eyed wolf crept from the darkness, its presence terrifying and divine. It moved closer to her, as silent as a breath. Beyond it, a hooded figure stood in the shadows-tall, motionless, unreadable. The wolf lowered its great silvered head.

The figure disappeared.

And the flowers were reduced to ash.

She awoke with a gasp, stuck in her throat. And then a feral and raw scream tore from her.

Because something glowed just below her collarbone.

A mark.

Circular. Glowing. A crescent moon cut across its middle, incised not into her flesh but into the air over it-such was the will of the light to have a form and remain there.

She rushed to the mirror. Panic rose along her spine.

She scrubbed at it and it didn't budge. Covered it. It seeped through her shirt like a secret too massive to be hidden.

"Elara!" Mrs. Harrow's voice was like a whip cracking at her door. "What the hell were you doing in there?"

"Nothing," she fibbed, voice trembling. She grabbed a hoodie, the mark glimmering below her beating heart.

On that day, everything was different.

She stared, and people stared along with her. Garrett chuckled harder than ever before, as there was something wrong. Her hoodie was a coffin and armour all in one. Her skin crawled. The mark throbbed, another heartbeat. She could hear things before they occurred. Smelled things-fear like rotten meat, desire like cinnamon, anxiety like burned copper.

And worse, too. She was being followed.

Not by the classmates. By no one in this town.

Something starving. Something ancient.

Elara was running before the last bell ever tolled.

She didn't get very far.

The first appeared from the woods behind the school parking area. She was aware of him before he moved, walking, cloaked, and his eyes like molten gold. Too quick for humans. Too wrong.

He leaped.

She screamed. The mark on her shoulder seemed to burn like flames.

He pulled back with a hiss, staggering as though he had been burned.

Then another came.

And another.

They didn't say a word. They didn't pause. They arrived like predators sensing blood.

She ran into the woods, her lungs burning, her legs throbbing. Branches lashed at her. Mud pulled at her shoes. She didn't stop. Couldn't.

But they moved swifter.

She stumbled, heart thrashing, shadows closing in.

She was going to die. By herself. With no answers. No name to call her at all.

And then-he appeared.

A whirl of shadow and moonlight. A flash of steel sliced the air.

One Dropped.

The next attempted to escape. Was pulled back in. Silenced.

The last dissolved into mist.

Silence descended like snow.

Elara gasped, her body shaking, eyes wide.

He emerged into view-a figure clad in black and silver, eyes that shone like twin moons. He glided like a legend from times long passed, beautiful and deadly. His tone was deep, soothing, and underlain with something more sinister than foreboding or warning.

"You don't know who you are yet," he told her. "But they know."

She backed away, her heart tightening. "Who, who are you?"

He tilted his head to one side, as though recalling something deep-seated.

"Kael Thorne"

"Your protector. And if we don't go now, others will follow."

She needed to scream. Laugh. Demand some answers. Collapse.

But something deep in her bones whispered

"Trust him."

She certainly did.

And in that instant, Elara Moonstone ceased hiding.

And the world would never be the same again.