Chapter 3
ELARA
A hand caught my shoulder and spun me around before I'd taken five steps.
It was one of the younger wolves — Garrick, a low-Beta who liked to throw his weight around when he thought no one important was watching. Behind him stood two others, a girl named Petra and a boy I only knew by face. All three of them were grinning.
"Where do you think you're going, wolfless?" Garrick said.
"Back to the house," I said. "To work."
"To work." He laughed, looking back at his friends like I'd said something very funny. "Did you hear that? Her mate just rejected her in front of the whole pack and she's worried about the dishes."
"Let go of me."
His grip tightened instead. "You really thought the Goddess made a mistake naming you, didn't you. You actually believed for a second you'd be Luna." He shook his head slowly, savoring it. "Wolfless little nothing, standing there like she belonged."
"Garrick." My voice came out flatter than I felt. "Let go."
He didn't.
Petra circled around behind me. "I heard she doesn't even bleed right," she said, like I wasn't standing right there. "No wolf, no heat, nothing. Just an empty shell wearing an omega's face."
"Maybe that's why the Alpha couldn't stand to look at her," the other boy said. "Imagine being mated to that."
Laughter. Real laughter this time, ugly and easy, the kind that comes when people have already decided you don't count as a person who can be hurt by it.
Garrick shoved me — not hard enough to be called an attack later if anyone asked, just hard enough to make his point — and I stumbled back into Petra, who shoved me again, harder, the other direction. I hit the ground on my hands and knees in the dirt at the edge of the stone circle while half the pack was still celebrating twenty feet away and not one of them turned to look.
"Get up," Garrick said, sounding bored now, like the fun had already passed. "Go on. Crawl back to your little room. That's all you're good for."
I got up.
I didn't say anything. There was nothing to say that wouldn't make it worse, and I had learned that lesson a long time before tonight.
I walked the rest of the way to the pack house with dirt on my palms and my knees and my chin held as level as I could manage, and nobody stopped me again, but nobody looked away either. I felt every set of eyes on me the whole way across the grounds — some pitying, most simply curious, a few openly satisfied. The wolfless omega, put back in her place. The natural order of things, restored.
The walk back to the pack house was the longest of my life.
I made it to the side entrance, the one the staff used, the one that didn't require me to pass through any of the main halls. I made it up the narrow back stairs. I made it to the door of my storage room, and I went inside, and I closed the door behind me, and only then did my legs stop holding me up.
I sat down hard on the mat in the dark.
The bond was gone but the shape of it remained, like a wound in the exact form of something that had almost been mine. My palms stung where the gravel had bitten into them. My knees ached. None of it compared to the hollow place in my chest where something had been roaring to life only an hour before and was now simply, completely silent.
I waited.
I don't know what I was waiting for. Some part of me — some small, foolish, traitorous part — kept listening for footsteps in the hall. Kept thinking that maybe the bond wasn't done with him even if he was done pretending it mattered. That maybe he would come, the way wounded things sometimes come looking for the one thing that hurt them, because at least it was real.
The footsteps never came.
Outside, the celebration went on for hours. I could hear it through the thin wall — distant howling, distant laughter, the unmistakable sound of an entire pack rejoicing in its future. Somewhere out there Selene was being congratulated, admired, touched on the arm by wolves who would never once put their hands on her the way Garrick had put his on me.
I sat with my back against the cold concrete wall and I did not cry, because I had learned a long time ago that crying changed nothing and cost something — energy I didn't have, dignity I needed for tomorrow.
Tomorrow there would be work. There was always work.
The bruises on my knees would fade. The dirt would wash out of my clothes. Nobody would ask, and even if they did, I wouldn't tell them, because telling them would only prove what Garrick had already said — that I was the kind of person things happened to, and not the kind of person anyone bothered protecting.
I lay down on the mat without bothering to change out of my torn, dirty clothes.
The hollow place in my chest throbbed once, like a bruise finding its own shape in the dark.
I closed my eyes and waited for morning, the way I always did, because morning was the only thing in my life that had never once failed to come.
