The Lycan Heir's Forbidden Healer.

Linnet's pov

I knew something was wrong the moment I heard the laughter, because in all my twenty years of living in Silverbrook House, that sound had never once been meant for me.

It spilled out of the dining room as I stepped through the front door with rain dripping from my braid and my satchel pressed against my ribs as I stood in the hallway with a foolish, trembling hope blooming in my chest. Today was the day the Moonvale letters were due. Three months of sleepless nights over healing texts had led me here, and I had bled my fingertips raw grinding herbs and sat beside my grandmother's sickbed until dawn memorizing the pulse points of a wolf's wrist.

If anyone in this family deserved good news tonight, it was me.

I walked into the dining room smiling.

"I'm home," I said softly. "Did the letters come?"

My mother turned with her wine glass lifted and her cheeks flushed with joy, and my smile wavered, because that joy was not aimed at me. It was aimed past my shoulder at the girl seated at the head of the table, small and pale and wrapped in a borrowed shawl, with silver hair curling around her face like a halo.

"Seraphine got in!" Mother cried. "Our Sera has been accepted to the combat academy in the central region! After everything she has suffered, can you imagine?"

Seraphine ducked her head with a shy little smile, and the whole family cooed over her as though she had won a war.

My heart lifted and fell in the same breath. Seraphine was my younger sister, returned to us only last spring after nine years of wandering outside the pack, and I had wept with pure happiness the day she came home. I had given her my warm bedroom and my winter coats and the best of every meal, and I would have given far more if anyone had thought to ask.

"That's wonderful," I said, and I meant it, even as a strange cold crept up my spine. "Congratulations, Sera. But where is mine? I was expecting the Moonvale healing letter today."

Nobody answered. Father studied his plate as if it held the secrets of the world, and my brother Corvin leaned back in his chair and watched me with that flat, weary look he wore whenever I had disappointed him.

Then I saw it.

Two envelopes lay side by side on the polished table. One was thick cream paper stamped with the silver crescent of the central academy, already torn open and handled many times. The other sat apart from it, thin and grey and sealed with black wax, and the name written across the front was mine.

I picked it up with shaking fingers and broke the seal.

*Northfang Combat Academy, Frostmere Territory. We are pleased to inform Miss Linnet Averly of her placement.*

I read it once, and then again, and then a third time while the room went strangely quiet around me.

"This is wrong," I whispered. "I never applied here. I applied for healing at Moonvale, and my acceptance was supposed to be right here on this table."

"It was," Father admitted at last, in the tone of a man confessing he had misplaced his keys. "But Seraphine had been placed at Northfang first, and she found the climate far too cold and the schedule far too harsh. So we spoke to the registrar and exchanged the two places."

"You exchanged them." My voice cracked on the word. "You gave away my future without asking me?"

"Don't be so dramatic," Corvin said, and he rolled his shoulders with a sigh that I felt like a slap. "Sera has spent nine years sleeping in barns and forests. Her body is frail and her wolf hardly stirs. She would not survive a single winter in Frostmere. You are strong and healthy, Linnet, and your wolf can adapt anywhere. It is simply the sensible choice."

"Sensible for whom?" I asked, and the effort of keeping my voice low made my hands shake. "I spent three months preparing for healing. All of you watched me do it."

"And you will have plenty of time for healing later," Mother said gently, as though soothing a fussy child. "Your sister needs this chance now, darling."

I laughed, and the sound came out thin and wounded. "I have understood everything in this house for years. I understood when you gave Sera my bedroom and my coats. I understood when you asked me to cover her chores and her tutors and her debts, and I never complained once, because I love her."

"Then prove it," Corvin said, and his eyes turned cold as river ice. "Stop being so selfish over a piece of paper."

Seraphine lifted her glossy eyes, and her lip trembled so prettily that every head in the room swung toward her.

"Please don't fight because of me," she whispered. "Linnet, if it hurts you so badly, take Moonvale back. I will go to Northfang. I will freeze if I have to. I truly don't mind."

The effect was immediate. Mother wrapped both arms around her, and Father patted her hand while Corvin dropped to one knee beside her chair with a tenderness I had not seen on his face in years.

"Don't you dare, Sera," he said fiercely. "Nobody is sending you anywhere that will hurt you. Linnet is the strong one, and she will manage."

Then he looked up at me with open disgust, and the look landed like a fist. "Look what you did. You made her cry on her first night of celebration."

I stared at the four of them, huddled together like a single creature with no room left inside it for a fifth, and I felt something that had been bending inside me for years go perfectly still.

"Did any of you think to ask what I wanted?" I said.

The silence that followed was not awkward. It was the plain, honest silence of people who had never once considered the question.

I nodded slowly, as if the answer had been spoken aloud. I folded the grey letter along its creases and tucked it into my satchel beside my healing notes, and I turned and walked out with my spine straight and my eyes burning.

I did not slam the door. I closed it softly behind me, and somehow that was worse.

Upstairs, in the narrow little room they had moved me into after Seraphine arrived, I sat on the edge of the bed with my phone clutched in both hands and my whole body trembling as I scrolled to a name I had been avoiding for weeks.

Professor Halden Valdez, Northfang Combat Academy.

He had approached me at the regional healer trials last autumn, a weathered man with a scarred jaw and tired, kind eyes. He had told me the border garrison needed healers who could fight, and that a special enlistment path existed for those willing to skip the academy years entirely. I had laughed politely and refused, because I had a dream and a family who needed me close.

I drew one shuddering breath, and I typed.

Professor Valdez, this is Linnet Averly. If your offer still stands, I accept. I do not want the academy program. I want to join the garrison unit directly.

His answer came within minutes, steady and careful.

Miss Averly, are you certain? Once you join the unit, you cannot return home whenever you wish. Your life will no longer belong to your family. It will belong to the border.

I looked at the thin wooden door of my room, and at the muffled laughter drifting up through the floorboards, and a warm, stubborn spark kindled beneath the ache in my chest. It was small as a candle flame, but it was mine.

I have already made up my mind, I wrote. Please send me the arrangements.