End of Us

I stayed for three more days after the engagement announcement, mostly because leaving suddenly would have raised questions I wasn’t ready to answer, and partly because some stubborn, humiliated part of me kept waiting for him to knock on my door and take it all back.

He never did.

I watched the house rearrange itself around Selene instead, with Diane looping her into wedding talk over breakfast, and my father asking polite questions about her family’s territory like this was just another ordinary alliance instead of the thing that had quietly ended something I’d never gotten the chance to name out loud.

And then he was there too. Kade sat through all of it with the same composed distance he’d worn for six weeks, except now it had a fiancée attached to it, official and permanent in a way that made the terrace kiss feel almost like something I’d imagined.

He found me on the second day, alone in the upstairs hallway, and for one unguarded second I thought he might finally say something that mattered.

“Nadia.” Just my name, careful, like he was testing whether I’d let him say more.

“Congratulations again,” I said, and kept walking.

“That’s not—“ He caught my wrist, gentle, and I let him, hating myself a little for it. “That night on the terrace. I need you to know it wasn’t nothing to me.”

“It doesn’t matter what it was to you, Kade. You still stood in that room the next morning and let another woman’s ring speak for you.”

“I didn’t have a choice.”

“You had a choice.” My voice cracked despite everything I’d rehearsed. “You just made it before you ever kissed me, and you let me stand there and not know that. Or is there a reason you can say now that you didn’t?”

He didn’t have an answer for that. He just held onto my wrist a moment longer. His jaw was tight, and his eyes were doing that thing where they went soft and helpless right before he remembered he wasn’t allowed to let them, and then he let go, and I walked away, and neither of us said anything else about it for the rest of the time I was in that house.

—

I made the decision to leave on that same night, sitting alone in my room with one hand resting on the small, still-flat curve of my stomach, listening to the muffled sound of Selene’s laughter drifting up from the dining room below.

I thought, seriously, about telling him. I got as far as drafting the words in my head a dozen different ways. “I’m pregnant. It’s yours. I need you to know before I go.”

But it felt.. I went to find him instead.

I found him at the front door, alone, keys already in his hand like he’d been about to leave the house himself.

“You should be with your wife,” I said, and he turned to look at me.

“My fiancée,” he corrected quietly.

“I have something to tell you,” I said, my voice shaking now, the words about our baby finally rising up in my throat after weeks of holding them down. “It’s important, I need you to just listen to me for one second—“

“Don’t.” He was already turning away, already reaching for his coat on the hook beside the door, like he needed to be anywhere but standing in front of me. “Whatever it is, it doesn’t change anything.”

“Kade, please, just listen to me—“

“I can’t.” He wouldn’t look at me, his back to me now, one hand already on the doorknob. “The elders chose Selene for a reason. The pack needs a Luna who isn’t—“ He stopped himself before he finished saying what he was about to.

“Who isn’t human,” I finished for him.

He didn’t deny it. He didn’t say anything at all.

“So that’s it,” I said. “Three years of nothing, then this, twice now, and I’m still just the human stepsister who doesn’t count for anything real.”

“It’s not that simple.”

“It’s exactly that simple, Kade. You’ve made it simpler than ever.”

He turned again, looking at me like there was something else he wanted to say, something that might have changed everything if he’d let it out.

Then he opened the door and walked out without saying it, whatever it was, and left without looking back, and I stood there alone in the front hall with a truth in my chest he’d refused to even let me speak.

I understood, finally, with a clarity that felt like ice settling into my bones, that I could not stay in this house and watch him marry someone else while his child grew inside me week by week, month by month, in a home that would never once acknowledge either of us existed.

I packed a bag before the sun came up, moving quietly through the dark so I wouldn’t wake anyone. I didn’t leave a note. I couldn’t bring myself to say goodbye to Diane, who had given me more love than my own blood ever had and didn’t deserve what her son had done, but who also couldn’t be told the truth without it destroying the only family she had left.

I just left with the duffel bag over one shoulder, and the car keys in hand, the first gray light of morning barely touching the edge of the sky.

I didn’t look back either. Not once, not even when I passed the turn that would have taken me past his old apartment, not even when some small, stubborn, humiliating part of me wondered if he’d notice I was gone before it was too late to matter.

He didn’t come after me. Nobody did.

I drove until the house disappeared completely behind me, and then I kept driving anyway, because stopping meant thinking, and thinking meant remembering everything, and right now, that was the worst thing I could do to myself.