THE HALF BLOOD'S CURSE

The chains on my wrists were new.

My mother had replaced them this morning. Thicker. Heavier. The kind of metal that didn't just hurt-it remembered you. I had been sitting in this cold, damp basement for three hours, listening to the waves of the Black Sea crash against the rocks below our house. The moon was rising. I could feel it in my bones, in my teeth, in the way my skin stretched too tight over muscles that wanted to change.

"Please, Mom," I whispered into the darkness. "Let me out. Just for tonight. I promise I won't-"

"Shut up!"

Her voice came from upstairs, muffled by the wooden floorboards but still sharp enough to cut. "You're not my daughter tonight. Tonight, you're a monster."

A monster.

I had heard that word so many times it had lost its meaning. Monster. Beast. Abomination. Half-blood. They called me all of those things-the villagers who crossed the street when I walked by, the few shifters who knew what I was, and most of all, my own mother.

She had loved my father once. A Turkish woman with fire in her blood and a wolf shifter from a lineage so old no one remembered its beginning. They had me. A half-breed. A mistake wrapped in flesh and fur. Then my father died-killed, they said, by rival shifters-and my mother's love turned to ash in her mouth.

Now she locked me up every full moon. Three days a month, I was a prisoner in my own home.

The first cramp hit me like a knife between my ribs.

I doubled over, biting my lip so hard I tasted copper. My spine wanted to bend the wrong way. My fingernails dug into the concrete floor, and I watched them darken, thicken, curve into something that wasn't quite human.

No. Not yet. Hold it back.

I had never been able to control the shift. It controlled me. It ripped through my body like a storm, leaving me broken and bleeding on the other side. But tonight... tonight something was different. Tonight, the wolf inside me wasn't just a wild animal. It was talking to me.

Let me out, it whispered. Let me breathe. I can help you.

"You'll kill someone," I gasped, sweat dripping from my forehead.

I'll kill whoever tries to hurt you. There's a difference.

Another cramp. My vision blurred. I looked down at my hands and saw the fur spreading across my knuckles-dark brown, almost black, the same color as my father's had been.

For the first time in my life, I didn't fight it.

I breathed into it.

The pain didn't disappear, but it changed. It became something I could shape, like clay in my hands. I focused on my fingers first. The claws retracted. The fur faded. Then my spine. I imagined it straightening, clicking back into place like the bones of a bird settling after flight.

Above me, the moonlight streamed through the small, barred window.

I looked up at