Alayah’s p.o.v. My name is Alayah, a sixteen-year-old Lycan. My father is dead. My mother looks like she wants to abandon me. This often puts me in a state of unrest. Now I’m sitting on the back porch, watching my mother lie near the flowerbed, lost in her own world as usual. She’s always been distant, drifting in and out of my life since I was little. According to Grandma, my mother cared for me when I was a baby, but as soon as I was old enough to react, she started pulling away. No one’s ever told me why. Dinner’s always the same when she’s around: quiet, tense. Grandma and I do most of the talking, though even she knows better than to expect much from my mother. After dinner, I retreat to my room to focus on my accounting studies. I chose this path because most Pack leaders don’t like doing it, and I want to help our Alpha. It’s my way of contributing, of finding some control in a life where my mother’s absence has always been constant. When I wake up the next morning, I already know—my mother’s gone again. She always leaves in the dead of night, and we just wait for her to come back, though a part of me hopes she never does. Another part of me still clings to the idea that maybe, just maybe, we could have a normal relationship. It wasn’t always like this. My father died in a Rogue attack six months after they had marked one another. Grandma told me they were Mates, and Mom was devastated after losing Dad, and even finding out she was with Pup couldn’t pull her from her depression, Grandma had to watch her twenty four seven. She stayed until I was eight, then began disappearing for months at a time, never caring about my life or asking about school. The only thing she ever did was sit by the flowerbed my father planted for her, staring at the sky. I keep that flowerbed alive—it's the only piece of my father I have left. Then, just a few days before I turned seventeen, something shifted. Mom came back after months away, looked at me for the first time in years, and simply said, "I am sorry but you remind me too much of him." She left again shortly after, and it was the last time I saw her. I finally understood—her pain was tied to me, to how much I look and act like my father. I had his jet black hair and emerald, green eyes. It sounded as if I was an exact copy of him, with of course the difference that I am a female. I wanted to know more about Dad and I was talking to Grandma’s Brother, Uncle Rex, and he let it slip that Dad was our Beta’s older brother, and I realized I had more family than I ever knew. Grandma never took me to the Pack-house, not even for huge celebrations. She never told me about the rest of my family. I wasn’t sure if Dad’s family knew about me, maybe they asked Grandma to keep me away from them, maybe Mom made her promise to never take me to the Pack-house. So I just decided to visit the Pack-house, searching for answers.