Chapter 2

ELIRA POV

"Please. Talk to him for me."

Priya wouldn't look up from her nails. "Talk to who? Dad? Or Kian?"

"Either. Both." My voice cracked on the second word. "I don't want to leave home, Priya. This is all I have."

She finally lifted her eyes, and for one second, one small stupid second, I thought I saw something soft in them. Then it was gone.

"Fine," she said. "I'll ask Dad to let you stay. On one condition."

"Anything."

"You stay away from Kian. Forever. No looking at him. No talking to him. If he's in a room, you leave it." She stood, smoothing her skirt. "Can you do that?"

"Yes." I said it before she'd even finished. "Yes, I promise."

Priya smiled then, and it was the wrong kind of smile, the kind that didn't reach anywhere near her eyes.

"You're too naive." She said it soft, almost gentle, which somehow made it worse. "You're a bastard, Elira. You should have left this house years ago." She picked up my bag from the floor and dropped it at my feet. "Pack your things. Dad wants you gone within the hour. That was never up for discussion."

The floor tilted under me.

"You said—"

"I said I'd ask." Priya walked to the door. "I never said he'd listen."

She left me standing there with a bag at my feet and nothing left to beg with.

I packed in eleven minutes. I know because I counted every one of them, because counting was the only thing keeping my hands from shaking apart. Two jumpers. A photo of a mother I couldn't remember. My old university notes. A hairbrush. It didn't take long to pack a life nobody wanted.

I walked out through the side gate so I wouldn't have to pass the front hall where the staff would be watching. The cold hit my face first. Then I saw him.

Kian was leaning against the stone wall at the edge of the drive like he'd been waiting.

"You're really leaving," he said.

"Did you think I had a choice?"

He pushed off the wall. Up close his eyes were doing something I didn't have a name for. Not cold. Not exactly.

"I have a property. In the human world. I can send you there, help you get settled, get your paperwork sorted for a human life." His jaw ticked. "On one condition. You never come back to this pack."

For a second the offer almost sounded like kindness. Then I heard what it actually was.

"You want me gone," I said slowly. "Permanently."

"I want you safe."

"You want me invisible." My hands curled into fists at my sides. "You had a whole night to choose me and you chose her instead, in front of everyone, and now you want to pay me to disappear so your conscience stays clean."

"Elira—"

"No." Something in me finally caught fire, one small ugly flame in the middle of all that ash. "I'll find my own way. I don't need your money and I don't need your pity."

He studied me for a long moment, like he was waiting for me to break and take it back.

I didn't.

"Then you'd better leave quickly," he said, voice gone flat again, the door closing behind his eyes. "Priya and I are announcing the engagement soon. I don't want her upset seeing you around."

Upset. Like I was a stain on the carpet.

I picked up my bag and walked past him without another word, because if I opened my mouth again I was going to scream, and I refused to give him that too.

I made it three streets from the pack border before my legs stopped working and I had to sit down on a cold stone bench, bag hugged to my chest, breath coming in short useless bursts.

A full moon had done this. One night, one bond neither of us asked for, and it had cost me my home, my sister, my father, and whatever small hope I'd been carrying since I was fourteen years old.

I told myself it couldn't get worse than this.

I was wrong, and I would find out exactly how wrong within the week, when I discovered that the loss of my family was only the first thing that night had taken from me. There was a second thing growing quietly inside me that I hadn't even thought to check for yet, an

d it was going to change everything.