Chapter 3: The Door Between Us

 

I shouted until my throat gave out. Banged on that door until my hands ached and my lungs couldn't scream anymore. Nobody came.

Eventually I slid down into a corner of the dark, knees pulled to my chest, and let the anger burn down into something quieter and worse. Above me, faint through the stone, I could still hear it — music, laughter, a celebration getting ready to happen without me.

The first footsteps came fast, careless, two sets moving together. I recognized the rhythm before I recognized the voices.

“You awake in there?” Marcus.

“What do you want?”

“Emilia's a mess,” he said, like that was an answer. “She was inconsolable, trying to hurt herself because of you.”

“Cried so hard Mom had to sedate her.” Jared, from just behind him. “You know what she gets like, but you still have to fight her for everything.”

“She's done that before,” I said. “Every time she wants something and isn't sure she'll get it. Ask yourselves why it always happens right when it's most useful to her.”

“How can you still be slandering your sister after everything?” Marcus's voice climbed, incredulous, like I was the one who'd done something unthinkable. “This whole mess is your fault, Raven. Dad's furious with you. We came down here because we feel sorry for you — but it's clear you haven't learned your lesson yet.”

“Learned my—” I pressed my hand flat against the door, disbelief sharper than the anger underneath it. “What lesson, Marcus? That I'm supposed to smile while my sister takes my mate?”

“That you don't get to tear this family apart because you didn't get your way.” Jared's voice, quieter, but no gentler. “You'll stay down here until after the ceremony.”

Their footsteps retreated together, and I'd already stopped hoping for one of them to save me by the time my mother arrived — her footsteps slower, lighter, the kind that never had to justify themselves to anyone.

“Raven.” Tired, flat. “You need to stop this.”

“Stop what? Existing? Being upset that you locked me in a cellar?”

“It's not your wedding day anymore.” Each word landed like something dropped from a height. “Emilia needs this. She needs him. You've always been strong enough to survive without a mate bond, Raven. She isn't.”

I pressed my palms flat against the door, as if I could push straight through it. “That's not how fated mates work, and you know it.”

“Fated mates are biology. Family is choice. We're choosing Emilia. We need you to choose her too.”

“And if I don't?”

“Then I hope, someday, you understand why we had to.”

Her footsteps faded, unhurried, like she'd said everything she'd come to say. The silence stretched long after she'd gone — long enough that I let myself believe no one else was coming.

Then I caught his scent before I even heard him on the stairs.

Michael.

“Michael.” I was on my feet before I'd decided to stand. “Open the door.”

Nothing. But I could hear him breathing on the other side.

“I know you're there. I can feel you through the bond.” My voice cracked despite everything I did to hold it steady. “Please. Just talk to me.”

“I can't.” Barely a whisper. “Raven, I can't.”

“Can't, or won't?” I leaned my forehead against the wood, so close and so impossibly far. “We're fated mates. Doesn't that mean anything to you anymore?”

“It means everything. That's why this is killing me.”

“Then don't do it. Don't marry her.”

“She'll hurt herself if I don't.” The words rushed out of him. “You don't know what she's like when she doesn't get what she wants.”

“I know exactly what she's like,” I said, and something in my voice must have carried the years behind it, because he went quiet. “Better than you do. She's been playing this exact card since we were children. Ask yourself why it always works on people who love her.”

“You're stronger than she is,” he said instead, like he hadn't heard me at all. “You'll survive this. You won't be Luna, but you'll still be my mate.”

For a moment I couldn't even find words. The gall of it — the sheer nerve — sat in my chest like something physical.

He'd betrayed me, and somehow, in his mind, I was supposed to stay anyway. Not as his wife. Not as his Luna. As something smaller, something kept in the margins of the life he was about to build with someone else. The mistress. The other woman. As if I were the one intruding on a bond that already belonged to somebody else.

When the truth was the exact opposite. I was his fated mate. His destiny, chosen by the moon herself, long before Emilia had ever looked at him twice. She was the other woman. She had always been the other woman. And somehow, standing on the other side of this door, he'd found a way to make it sound like it was me.

“Say that again,” I said quietly. “Tell me again that I'll still be your mate. That I'm supposed to be grateful for the scraps of you she doesn't want.”

Silence.

There it was again. That phrase. You're stronger. As if my strength were a debt I owed everyone else — permission for them to keep taking.

“What if I don't want to be strong anymore?” My voice dropped to nearly nothing. “What if I want someone to choose me because I matter — not because I can be counted on to survive being left? Not because I'm supposed to wait quietly in the shadows while you build a life with the woman who stole mine?”

The silence went on so long I thought he'd already gone.

“I'm sorry, Raven. I'm so sorry.”

His footsteps retreated, heavier going up than they'd been coming down — back to her — and the last set of footsteps that came after his were lighter than all the others combined, quick and certain, like she'd never once doubted she'd be welcome at this door.

I didn't say her name. I wasn't going to give her that.

“Raven?” Soft. Sweet. The voice that made everyone else melt on command. But there was something underneath it tonight — something bright and satisfied she wasn't bothering to hide. “Are you comfortable down there?”

“Say what you came to say, Emilia.”

She laughed, low and pleased with herself. “You always were so perceptive. Fine.” A pause, like she was savoring the words before she let them out. “As long as they believe me, I can have anything that's yours. That's the part you never understood, even after all these years. It was never about what was true. It was only ever about who they chose to believe.”

“You're proud of this.”

“I'm good at this.” No shame in her voice at all. “Watch. I cry a little — not too much, just enough — and Mom comes running. Dad comes running. The whole pack comes running to comfort poor, fragile Emilia.” Her voice caught, theatrical, practiced, and then smoothed back out into something colder. “Even Michael. The one you thought would never leave you. He's leaving you for me, Raven. Right now. Tonight. And there's nothing you can do about it from down there but listen.”

Something in me went very still.

“You're going to wear my dress,” I said quietly.

“It fits me better anyway.” No pretense of shyness this time. “Mom had it altered days ago. We all knew how tonight was going to go before you ever walked through that door.”

Something in me didn't break. It hardened instead — clean and cold and final.

“Get away from this door, Emilia.”

“Raven—”

“Get away from this door before I say something neither of us can take back.”

“There's nothing you could say that would matter.” Her voice was almost gentle again, almost gleeful in how gentle it was. “That's the part I actually feel sorry for you about. You still think the truth is going to save you. It never has. It never will. Not against me.”

“GET AWAY!” The scream tore out of me and echoed off the stone.

A soft laugh, retreating up the stairs. “You'll forgive me eventually. You always do. You don't really have a choice.”

I sat back down in the dark once the last of them was gone, and for the first time all night, I wasn't crying.

Every one of them had come to this door with a story already decided — my brothers with their borrowed certainty, my mother with her cold arithmetic, Michael with his guilt that changed nothing, Emilia with her open, gleeful cruelty.

Every one of them expected the same thing from me in the end. Forgiveness. Silence. The quiet, familiar shape of a daughter who always, eventually, gave way.

I sat with my back against the cold stone and understood, with a clarity that felt almost peaceful, that I was done being that shape.

Whatever I became after tonight, it wasn't going to be forgiving.