Chapter 5

The sound of me slamming the door made the lamps in the hallway flicker.

I ran into my room and pulled out everything that carried Orion’s mark. The ceremonial claw ornament he gave me from the top shelf of the training rack. The outer cloak he left in the back of my wardrobe. The faded gathering tokens from the drawer. I shoved them all into a wooden chest.

A jar fell from the shelf and shattered on the floor. Orion had given it to me on my sixteenth birthday. Inside were protective charms he had carved my name into, each one strung on sinew.

I stared at the broken pieces on the ground. I picked up the chest, walked to the border of our territory, and threw the whole thing into the wild.

After that, I reached out to my mother through Pack link.

“Mother,” I said, “My engagement to Orion is over. We are done.”

When my mother returned to our house, she found me pressing a cold herbal compress to my face. She took one look at me, and her hands started shaking. “Who hurt you?”

I buried my face in her shoulder. All the pain I had held inside came rushing out. I whimpered like a wounded pup.

After I told her everything, my mother said nothing. She turned and walked out the door.

Orion’s mother opened her door with a half-finished herbal braid in her hands. “What is wrong?”

“Your son hurt my Sylvie for the sake of some girl from another Pack,” my mother said. Her voice was low, “My own daughter. I have never laid a hand on her.”

Orion’s mother stammered something about the boy not meaning it.

“Enough,” my mother said. “The alliance between our Packs ends here.”

That night, my mother held me by the window and ran her fingers through my hair, the same way she did when I had a fever as a child.

“Mother,” I asked. “Will this bring trouble to our family?”

“You only need to be safe,” she said. “Your father and I will handle the rest.”

The next morning, the mist had not yet cleared from the border of our territory when Orion’s footsteps landed on the steps outside my door.

I opened the door. He stood in the fog, his chest heaving, still holding the rain soaked wooden chest in his hands.

“Sylvie,” he said, his voice raw. “How long are you going to keep this up?”

I said nothing. I just lifted my face and let him see the mark of his hand on my left cheek.

Orion’s pupils shrank. He reached out to touch my face, but his fingers stopped in the air and fell back.

“I did not hit you that hard.”

I turned my head away. There was a time when I would run to him with a small cut from a training blade and ask him to put medicine on it. He would call me fragile, but he would chew the herbs and press them to my wound himself.

Now he was the one who had hit me.

“I came to tell you something,” I said, my voice flat. “From today on, the bond between us is broken. The alliance between our Packs is done. You go your way. I go mine.”

Orion stood frozen, like he could not understand what I was saying.

“Is it because I stood up for Lilith? Or because of that slap?” His voice rose. “When did you become so petty?”

“It is not about the slap,” I said, pulling his fingers off my doorframe. “It is about you choosing to stand on the side of someone who hurt me.”

The mist drifted between us. His eyes slowly turned red.

They were the same eyes that had once shielded me from an attack by another Pack, the same eyes that had smiled through the blood and said it did not hurt. But the girl standing across from those eyes was no longer the same girl from back then.

“I did not mean it,” he said, his voice dropping. “I was just angry.”

“I do not want to hear it.”

“Over one slap?” His voice rose again, thick with frustration. “You are throwing away more than ten years of history over one slap? When did you become so unreasonable?”

I looked into his eyes. Those eyes had once turned red for me, had once fought for me, had once taken a wound for me. Now they were red because he had come to fight me for another woman.

“Yes,” I said. “Over one slap.”

Orion’s face went still. He stepped back, like he did not recognize the person standing in front of him.

“Fine,” he said with a cold laugh. “Do not come running back to me.”

He turned and walked away. The mist swallowed his figure.

That night I had a dream. I dreamed of Orion at sixteen, standing under the moonlight, telling me that when he grew up, I would be his Luna. The firelight danced in his eyes, bright as stars.