What's Left of her

Chapter Two: What's Left of Her

 I didn't sleep. I sat on the edge of the bathtub most of the night with the tap running so nobody in the hall would hear me, and somewhere around five in the morning I stopped crying and just sat there, empty, listening to water go down a drain.

 When the sun comes up I get to my feet because staying on that floor another minute feels like agreeing to something. I walk to the mirror and make myself stand in front of it a long time before I can look at it directly.

 Frizzy hair pulled back so tight it's given me a headache since seven this morning. Glasses too big for my face, the kind Derek picked out for me himself, said they made me look "respectable." My reflection stares back like a stranger wearing my clothes.

 I lift my shirt.

 The scar sits low on my left side, pale and thick, the skin around it puckered where they stitched me back together. I press two fingers against it the way I used to when I needed proof I was still real. I gave a piece of my own body to a man who called me the size of two cows before the sun even came up.

 Something in my chest stops aching and starts burning instead.

 I pick up my phone before I can talk myself out of it. Scroll past the contacts Derek knows about — the hairdresser, the pack physician, the school Jay attends — down to one saved under three letters and nothing else. Someone I met once at a conference I wasn't supposed to be at, back when I still let myself have a life outside these walls. He offered me something once that would have made me more money in a month than Derek's entire territory generates in a year. I said no. I told him I had a family. I told him that like it meant something.

 My thumb hovers over the contact for one second, then I press dial.

 It picks up on the first ring, like he's been waiting five years for exactly this.

 "Is the offer still available." My voice comes out sharp, laced with something broken clean off. No hello.

 A pause. Careful. "I'll admit, I'm confused. You turned this down last time. What changed?"

 "A lot."

 Another pause, shorter. "Well. We're always open to having you back." A small, satisfied exhale, like he already knew this call was coming eventually. "I'll have someone reach out with the details. Don't disappear on me again."

 I hang up before he can say anything else. Before I can hear myself change my mind.

 I start packing without deciding to. My hands just move — dresser drawers, closet, the bottom shelf where I keep a laptop nobody in this house has ever asked about, because nobody in this house has ever asked me anything.

 Word travels fast in a pack house. By the time I have the second bag closed, the hallway is full.

 They aren't pretending to be busy. They're watching.

 Mara stands at the front with her arms folded. Behind her are faces I've known for years — the cook whose daughter I drove to the hospital at three in the morning, the beta I trained when no one else would give him a chance, the girl whose first heat I helped her through when she was too frightened to ask anyone else.

 None of them move to help.

 One of the younger maids tilts her head. "She's actually leaving. I had a bet going she'd crawl back by morning." Someone snorts.

 Mara's voice cuts through, calm and final. "Pack only what you brought. Everything else stays with the pack." She steps forward, takes the handle of my larger suitcase out of my hand, and sets it back inside the room. "That one has pack funds in it. You're not taking what isn't yours."

 "I bought that bag with my own money before I ever married him."

 Mara doesn't blink. "Doesn't matter anymore. You're not Luna. You're not even pack. Master Derek's orders." She turns to the others. "Help her carry what's left downstairs. Then lock the suite."

 Two of them step forward. They don't look at my face as they take the remaining bags. One of them is the girl whose first heat I guided through. She keeps her eyes on the floor and mutters, almost to herself, "It's better this way. For everyone."

 I carry the last bag down the stairs myself.

 They're in the kitchen. Of course they are. Rachel's already in the chair that's been mine for five years, Jay on her lap, spooning cereal into his mouth like she's done it every morning of his life instead of five weeks. Derek's got his coffee in both hands, reading something on his phone, unbothered, like yesterday never happened.

 The cook — the same woman whose daughter I drove to the hospital — sets a fresh plate in front of Rachel without being asked. Then she looks at me, polite as anything. "Will you be needing something before you go, miss? Or should I clear your place setting permanently?"

 Jay sees me and slides off Rachel's lap. "Mum, are you leaving?"

 They all turn at once.

 "Where the hell do you think you're going, Rose?" Derek sets his mug down too hard. "Why do you always have to make a scene out of everything?"

 "A scene." I almost laugh. "I'm giving you exactly what you want."

 Jay runs toward me. "Mummy, are you going away?"

 I look down at him. The child I carried for nine months, the one who almost took my life coming into this world. I make myself say it steady.

 "Yes. I'm leaving." I crouch to his eye level, keep my voice soft even though nothing in me is soft right now. "You can be with Aunty Rachel now. Mummy won't embarrass you anymore."

 A smile breaks across his face, fast and easy, like I just told him summer break got extended. "Really? Aunt Rachel's my new mummy now?" He's already turning. "She's way prettier than you." And he runs back to her, back to the chair, back to the family he's decided he'd rather have.

 Rachel strokes his hair and smiles at the cook. "We'll need the Luna suite refreshed today. New sheets. My things moved in. And cancel whatever was ordered for her wardrobe. It won't be needed."

 "Already started, miss," the cook says.

 Derek's eyes stay on me. "You heard her. You're done here."

 I stand and walk for the door. He gets there first, grabs my wrist.

 "Let go of me, Derek."

 "You're really going to leave? Just like that?" His grip tightens. "Stop being stubborn. Both of us know you have no money, no job. How exactly do you plan on surviving?"

 I yank my hand out of his, harder than I mean to. "How I survive isn't your concern anymore."

 "So that's it. Five years, and you're just going to walk out over one mistake."

 "One mistake." I stare at him. "I watched you finish inside another woman while looking me in the eye. Which part of last night am I supposed to file under mistake?"

 He doesn't answer that. He never does, when the question actually costs him something.

 "Fine, then." His voice drops, flat and final. "You've made your choice, Rose. The second you walk out that door, don't bother coming back. You're dead to us."

 "My lawyer will send you the paperwork."

 I walk out.

 Mara follows me as far as the front door. She holds it open with one hand and, with the other, presses something small into my palm.

 I look down. My own wedding ring.

 Her voice is almost gentle. "He told me to give it back to you. Said he didn't want the reminder in the house." She pauses, searching for the right words, then finds them. "We all knew, Rose. For a long time. Some of us longer than others. You were just the only one who didn't."

 She steps back inside. The door closes. The lock turns with a soft, final click.

 The rain hits the second I step off the porch, hard and cold, soaking through my shirt before I've made it ten feet down the drive. I keep walking.

 "Luna Rose."

 I stop. Turn around despite myself.

 Rachel's under the porch overhang, dry, unbothered, watching me get drenched like it's entertainment. "Oops. Sorry." She doesn't sound sorry. "You're not Luna anymore. Just Rose." She tosses my old jacket at me, wet, before I can catch it right. "I should be a little kind to you. Since you literally raised me, after all."

 She steps off the porch under her own umbrella, close enough that I can smell her perfume under the rain. "Don't worry about a thing. I'll take very good care of this pack. As Luna." A pause, deliberate. "And of your husband. And your son."

 Something in me goes very still.

 I could tell her right now what I actually am. I could tell her the pack she's about to inherit is sitting on debt Derek has been hiding from the council for two years — debt I know about because I've quietly kept the books balanced enough that nobody noticed. I could tell her a hundred things that would wipe that smirk off her face.

 I don't say any of it. Some things are worth more said later, from somewhere she can't reach me.

 "Well." My voice comes out sharper than the rain. "Have fun being Luna."

 I walk to the cab idling at the end of the drive, five years of my life shrinking down to whatever fits in the trunk of a car I called myself. I don't look back at the house once.

 The driver doesn't ask where to. I gave him the address before I ever picked up that phone call this morning — some part of me deciding before the rest of me caught up. I climb in, shut the door, and for the first time since I smelled that room last night, I stop shaking.

 Forty minutes later the cab drops me outside a storage facility on the edge of the city, the kind with no sign and a keypad instead of a receptionist. I haven't been here in five years. My code still works on the door.

 Inside, under a tarp I put there myself back when I still thought I might need it, is a bag I packed the week before my wedding and never once unpacked. I kneel in front of it a long moment before I open the zipper, rain still dripping off me onto the concrete.

 A passport under a name that isn't Rose.

 A black card, no name on it at all, just a chip and a strip of matte steel.

 A phone, dead, that hasn't been turned on in five years.

 A sealed envelope with nothing written on the front.

 A single key, small enough for a lockbox, with no tag to say which one.

 And underneath all of it, face-down, a photograph. I don't turn it over. I already know whose face is scratched out of it, and I'm not ready to look at what's left of mine.

 I sit back on my heels and stare at the bag like it belongs to someone else. In a way, it does. I buried this life five years ago because I thought love was worth more than power. I shouldn't have to dig it back up. But Derek left me no choice.

 I close my hand around the phone and feel the dead weight of it, five years of silence sitting in my palm like something asleep and waiting to be woken.

 Somewhere behind me is a pack house with my son's laughter in it, a husband drinking coffee like nothing happened, a woman I raised wearing my title before the ink on my exit is even dry.

 Somewhere ahead of me is a version of myself I buried on purpose, because I thought I didn't need her anymore.

 I was wrong about a lot of things.

 I press the button on the side of the dead phone, and somewhere deep inside it, after five years, a small green light blinks awake.