Chapter 2

The storm hit before I even reached the gate, and I welcomed it. Rain came down in sheets, cold enough to sting, thunder cracking somewhere behind the tree line like the sky itself was furious on my behalf. I didn't run for cover. I wanted it. Let it hide whatever my face was doing. Let the pack think it was only water running down my cheeks.

My hand went to the pack link out of habit before I caught myself and pulled out my phone instead. The link belonged to pack business. I wasn't pack anymore — that had just been made official in ink. I hadn't called my father's private line in years, not because we'd drifted, but because I'd let myself get swallowed up in being a wife, a Luna, everything for everyone except his daughter checking in on a Sunday. My thumb hovered over his name. Then I pressed call, and it rang twice before he picked up.

"Elena?" Just my name, but I heard him go tense through the line.

"Dad." My voice cracked wide open on the single word.

"What happened? Tell me right now."

"We're divorced." I forced it out fast, like ripping off a bandage before I lost the nerve.

Silence. Then his voice came back low, dangerous in a way I rarely heard from him. "What. Why would he divorce you? After everything you've done for that pack?"

"I don't know, Dad." That wasn't entirely true, and we both knew it. "He's already marked someone else. Camille."

"*Camille?*" I heard something shift in his voice — disbelief curdling fast into fury. "Your Camille? The one who—"

"Yes." I cut him off before he could finish, because I didn't have it in me to hear the rest of that sentence out loud. "That Camille."

He went quiet for a moment, and I could picture him exactly — jaw tight, that muscle jumping the way it always did right before he said something he'd normally hold back.

"Tell me where you are," he said. "I'm coming to get you right now."

"No." I said it firmer than I expected. "Don't come get me, Dad. I need to do this myself."

"Elena—"

"Please." My voice broke again. "I just need somewhere to go. Somewhere he can't find me. Somewhere he can't find—"

I stopped myself right at the edge of it. I hadn't told him yet. I hadn't told anyone.

"Somewhere he can't find you," my father finished carefully, and something in the way he said it told me he already suspected there was more to that sentence than I was giving him.

"I want to go far, Dad. Far enough that this pack becomes something I used to know instead of something I have to see every day."

He let out a slow breath. "Okay." No demand that I fight, no insistence I march back and claim what was mine. Just that, steady and immediate. "Okay, sweetheart. Whatever you need. I'll have the old apartment ready."

That was my father. Since the day my mother packed two suitcases and left to go marry a human with money and magazine covers, he'd been the only steady thing in my life. He never argued when I told him what I wanted. He just showed up. Every single time.

"Thank you," I whispered, and hung up before the tears could turn into something louder.

I flagged down a taxi at the edge of the road, climbed in soaked to the bone, and gave the driver the old address. I watched the pack lands disappear behind fogged glass and didn't let myself look back at what I was leaving, because I already knew if I looked, I wouldn't be able to stop myself from turning around.

---

Back at the pack house, Ethan stood exactly where she'd left him, the pen still sitting on the table where she'd set it down.

Camille didn't waste a second. She crossed to the cabinet, pulled down two crystal glasses, and poured wine into both like she'd already rehearsed the motion a hundred times in her head. She pressed one into his hand, her fingers lingering.

"We're going to be living together now," she said, smiling like the storm outside, like the woman who'd just walked into it, didn't exist. "And I'm going to give you a true heir. A proper one this time."

Ethan didn't answer. He was staring at the signature on the papers — her signature, steady, no hesitation in the strokes at all.

"Why did she smile," he said, half to himself. "Why did she sign it that fast."

"Does it matter?" Camille's hand found his shoulder. "She's gone. It's just us now."

"It matters to me." He shrugged her hand off, not violently, but enough that she noticed, enough that her smile flickered. He walked to the window instead, staring out at the dark where the rain hadn't let up, in the direction she'd left, three years gone without so much as a backward glance.

"Do you regret it?" Camille's voice had dropped, quieter now, less certain she wanted the answer.

He let the question sit a long moment. Long enough that she shifted her weight, long enough that the wine trembled in her glass.

"No," he said finally. "I don't regret it."

Something in his tone made even Camille go still.

He turned to look at her then, and let the glass slip from his fingers. It shattered against the floorboards, wine spreading dark and wide like something bleeding out.

"I hope," he said, holding her eyes, voice dropping cold, "that what you're carrying is a male child. Because if it isn't, Camille, none of this was worth what I just gave up."

Her smile faltered — just a fraction, just long enough for him to see it — before she rebuilt it and nodded like his words were a gift instead of the warning they were.

She didn't understand yet what she'd actually signed up for.