Chapter 5

"Come home," my father says, before I even get a word out. "Whenever you're ready. The gates are open."

I hang up before I can cry into the phone, and I don't tell Damon about the call.

He corners me in our room that night, catching my hand before I can pull away, his thumb tracing slow circles over my knuckles.

"You've been quiet lately," he says, soft, careful. "Is something wrong?"

I watch his eyes for the flicker underneath the softness, checking, testing, seeing if I've found the folder buried in his desk drawer. Divorce papers, drafted, my signature line still blank.

"Nothing's wrong," I say, and his shoulders drop, relieved.

Seraphine's already left a nightgown draped across our bed by the time he pulls me toward it—pale silk, unfamiliar, a scent under the fabric that isn't mine.

"Wear it," he says, not quite meeting my eyes. "For me."

I put it on because refusing costs more than wearing it does. His hands find the fabric and his breath catches on a name he doesn't say out loud, and I lie still beneath him and know exactly whose skin he's imagining under his palms.

It happens again the next night. And the next.

On the fourth night I stand in front of the mirror in that same silk, watching a stranger's nightgown hang off my shoulders, and something in me finally gives out. I drag it over my head, cross to the hearth, and feed it into the fire with both hands, watching the silk curl black and shrink to nothing.

I don't cry until it's gone. Then I can't stop.

The great hall doors slam open two mornings later, and Seraphine storms through them clutching her forearm, a bandage already soaked dark at the edges.

"Where is she?" Her voice cracks high, carrying to every corner of the hall, and every head turns—first to her, then, following her outstretched arm, to me. "There. There she is."

I set down the report I'm reading and stand, slow, watching her cross the room toward Damon with her limbs shaking on cue, timed perfectly to land in his arms the second she's close enough.

"She attacked me," Seraphine says, pressing her face into his shoulder, her voice muffled just enough to make the whole hall lean in to hear it. "In the garden. I only wanted to talk to her—about the pack, about being civil and she grabbed my arm and dug her claws in before I could even—"

"I haven't left this hall all morning." I keep my voice flat, even, though something in my chest is already coiling tight. "Ask anyone."

"Are you calling her a liar?" One of the elders, stepping forward, indignant on Seraphine's behalf before I've finished my sentence.

"Yes." No hesitation. "That's exactly what I'm doing."

Damon's arm tightens around Seraphine, and he lifts his head to look at me, and I watch something behind his eyes finish deciding before his mouth even opens.

"Show me the wound," he says to her, gentle, and she peels back the bandage just enough to reveal three shallow scratches, too clean, too evenly spaced to be anything but self-inflicted with careful hands and a mirror.

I almost laugh. I don't.

"Those aren't claw marks," I say. "They're not even close."

Damon crosses the hall toward me in four strides, and for one wild, foolish second I think he's coming to hear my side of it. Instead he reaches for the clasp at my throat and tears my Luna cloak straight off my shoulders, the fabric ripping loud enough that the whole hall goes silent around us.

"You will not touch her again," he says, loud enough for every wolf in the room to hear. "As of tonight, you hold no title in this pack."

The cloak hangs from his fist, torn, the silver thread of my rank catching the torchlight. Every eye in the hall swings to me, not with pity anymore. With satisfaction.

I don't cry. I don't beg. I don't say one more word in my own defense.

I reach up, unclasp the mating cuff from my wrist, the iron band that's bound my magic to his pack, to his name, to five years of my life folded down small enough to survive and I drop it at his feet.

"I am ending our bond," I say, and I feel it sever the instant the words leave me, a cold snap through my chest like something ancient waking up after a very long sleep. "Effective now."

Damon's face goes slack. "Elara—"

I don't wait for the rest of it.

I turn and walk out of the hall, out of the pack house, out through the gates I haven't crossed alone in five years, and I don't look back once to see if he follows.