Chapter 2: Gone!!!

Phoebe's POV

"Uhm, did I interrupt something?" Stella stood frozen in the shattered doorway, glass glittering around her boots like she'd stepped out of a nightmare wrapped in silk. Both our eyes had snapped to her, and for one suspended second, nobody moved.

She wasn't supposed to be here. She wasn't allowed to be here. And yet none of that mattered anymore — not with the paper still crushed in my fist, not with the words on it burning through my mind like acid.

"How dare you, Simon." My voice cracked as I turned on him. "You want to enslave the people of my pack. My people. The Starlight pack."

The remorse he'd worn only minutes ago was gone. In its place was something colder, sharper — a stranger's face stitched onto my mate's body.

"Wow." He let out a low, humorless chuckle, eyes locked on mine without a flicker of shame. "You finally know. So what exactly are you going to do about it, Luna?"

The pieces slid into place all at once, and the floor seemed to tilt beneath me. "Is that why you marked me? Because I'm next in line to inherit the Starlight throne?"

He clapped, slow and deliberate — the universal, mocking sign of you got me. "You know, Phoebe, not only are you an amateur. You're dumber than I ever gave you credit for."

The words hit like physical blows. Behind him, Stella still hadn't moved, staring at Simon with something between disbelief and hunger.

"You actually thought I'd marry you for you?" His mouth curled. "You fat, disembodied creature."

The words sliced through me cleaner than any blade. I stared at him, waiting for the punchline, waiting for this to be some cruel, elaborate joke he'd laugh off in the next breath. It never came.

I hadn't seen this version of him in five years of marriage. Not once. My crush since I was eighteen, my mate, my Alpha — the man who'd built me a glasshouse with his bare hands — was standing there calling me fat like the word was a weapon he'd been sharpening in silence for years.

"You're not right, Simon." My voice shook, but I forced it steady. "I should've never trusted you. Not for a single day of these five years."

He laughed — an ugly, delighted sound, like my heartbreak was the best joke he'd heard all night. "Look at you, finally figuring it out. Well, here's something else for you: today doesn't just mark five years of our marriage. It marks something bigger. Today, I officially become Alpha of both packs." He straightened his jacket, unbothered, as if my entire world wasn't collapsing three feet away from him. "So sorry for you, Luna."

And then he turned to leave.

I stood frozen, waiting — praying — that he'd stop, turn back around, tell me this was some sick test of loyalty. That he'd sweep me into his arms the way he always did and tell me none of it was real.

He did turn back.

My heart leapt, foolish and desperate even now, even after everything he'd just said.

But there was no apology in his eyes. Only one final, devastating blow, delivered with the same casual cruelty as the rest.

"I should've never rejected my fated mate for a bulldozer like you."

The words landed like a physical strike, and my knees buckled beneath me before I even understood what he meant. Fated mate. The two words echoed in my skull, refusing to make sense, refusing to fit into any version of the last five years I thought I'd lived.

I hit the glass floor hard, my palms scraping against shattered fragments, and I didn't care. My whole body had gone numb to everything except the two words repeating themselves over and over in my head.

A shadow slid across the floor toward me. I lifted my head, vision blurred, and saw Stella crouching down, her face far too calm for the chaos around us.

"What did I do wrong, Stella?" I choked out, and — foolishly, desperately — I let her draw my head against her chest, craving even a scrap of comfort in the wreckage of my own anniversary.

"Relax, Phoebe." Her voice had gone soft, almost gentle — and that gentleness was the most terrifying thing I'd heard all night. "You didn't do anything wrong. You just stole my fated mate. Watched me fall apart while you sat pretty as his Luna."

"What do you—"

The sentence never finished. A white-hot pain tore through my chest, straight into my heart, and I understood a half-second too late that her nails had already sunk beneath my ribs. I gasped, trying to raise my head, and found her watching my agony with something that could only be described as pleasure.

"You were never meant to be Luna," she whispered, twisting her claws deeper, until my vision fractured into shards of light and pain. My head spun, my ears rang, the glasshouse around me blurring into streaks of silver and gold. "Now I get to watch you fall apart. Piece by piece."

She shoved me backward, and I hit the glass floor with a sickening crack. Warmth spread beneath me instantly, pooling out in a widening dark stain, my own blood pouring free with a horrifying, effortless ease — as if my body had simply given up fighting to keep it inside.

The pain refused to dull. I forced my eyes upward, past Stella's satisfied smile, past the wreckage of the door she'd shattered, up toward the vaulted glass ceiling of the home Simon had built me with his own hands five years ago. Moonlight poured through it in fractured colors — silver, violet, pale gold — the same light that had once crowned our bonding ceremony now scattering across my dying body like some cruel, beautiful joke.

Five years, and this is how it ends

I thought distantly, the pain finally beginning to blur into something softer, something worse.

The colors kept shifting above me, further and further away, until even those began to fade.

And then there was nothing.

Everything went black.