Chapter 4: Disowned

My father's hand came up fast.

I saw it in slow motion, the way his fingers curled into an open palm, the way his arm pulled back with the weight of eighteen years of broken dreams loaded behind it. I did not flinch. I did not close my eyes. Some part of me believed I deserved it.

But my mother threw herself between us.

"Richard, no!" She grabbed his wrist with both hands and hung on like her life depended on it. "She is still your daughter! You do not hit your own child!"

"She stopped being my child the moment she let some nameless wolf crawl into her bed!" His voice cracked on the last word, and that crack was worse than any blow could have been. I had never heard my father's voice break. Not once. Not in eighteen years.

"Richard, please. Please. We can figure this out. We can find another way."

"There is no other way!" He pulled his arm free from her grip and stepped back, his chest heaving. "I gave her a way out. I gave her the only path that could save this family. And she chose a bastard child over her own blood."

The word hit me like a punch to the stomach. Bastard. He was talking about my baby. His grandchild. And he had already decided what it was before it even had a chance to become anything.

"Dad." My voice came out small and broken. "Please do not call my baby that."

He looked at me then, and for one terrible second I saw it. Beneath all the rage and the pride and the iron control, I saw the father who used to carry me on his shoulders when I was five. The father who taught me to read the moon phases and told me I would be the greatest Alpha the Bright Moon Pack had ever seen. He was still in there, somewhere behind those cold blue eyes that matched mine perfectly.

But then the shutters came down, and the father I knew disappeared.

"If you will not end this pregnancy," he spoke slowly, each word measured and final, "then you are no longer my daughter. You are no longer part of this family. You are no longer a member of the Bright Moon Pack."

My mother let out a sound that was not quite a scream and not quite a sob. It was something in between, something animal, the kind of noise a person makes when they watch something precious shatter and cannot catch the pieces.

"Richard, you cannot do this." She clutched at his arm. "She is our firstborn. Our baby."

"She made her choice, Eleanor. Now I am making mine."

I looked at my mother, crumpled and trembling against my father's side. I looked at my father, rigid as a pillar with his jaw locked and his eyes fixed on the wall behind me. They looked old. They looked broken. And I had done that. I had taken two of the strongest wolves in Evermont and broken them with one reckless night.

But even as guilt clawed through my chest, even as every instinct told me to give in, to agree to anything that would bring the warmth back to my father's eyes, I felt something deeper pulling at me. Something primal and fierce and older than pack law. The tiny life growing inside me. My child. Innocent, helpless, and completely dependent on the one choice I made right now.

I could not kill my own baby. Not for pride. Not for legacy. Not even for the father I worshipped.

I lowered myself to the floor and pressed my forehead to the cold wood. The impact sent a sharp ache through my skull, but I did it again. And again. Three deep bows, each one heavier than the last, until I felt something warm and wet trickle down between my eyebrows.

"I am sorry, Dad." The blood dripped onto the floor. "I am sorry, Mom. I cannot sacrifice this child. I cannot carry that sin. But I will carry every other punishment you give me without complaint."

"Serena, get up." My mother reached for me. "Get up, baby, please. You are bleeding."

"I will leave tonight." I kept my forehead pressed to the floor. "I will go quietly. No one in the pack will know why. You can tell them whatever you want. I will not bring any more shame to this family."

"Serena, please." My mother was sobbing now, her hands shaking as she tried to lift my face. "Please, just think about this. Just take one more day to think."

I raised my head and looked at her through the blood and the tears. "I have thought about it, Mom. I have thought about nothing else for three weeks. And every time I close my eyes, I feel this baby's heartbeat inside me, and I know I could never forgive myself if I stopped it."

My mother's eyes rolled back and her body went limp. My father caught her just before she hit the floor, sweeping her up against his chest with the reflexes of a man who had spent his life protecting the people he loved.

"Mom!" I scrambled forward on my knees, reaching out to touch her face. "Mom, wake up. Mom!"

My father shifted his body, blocking me. His shoulder turned like a wall coming down between us.

"Leave."

"Dad, please, let me just make sure she is okay."

"I said leave." His voice was quiet now. Quiet was worse than shouting. Quiet meant he was done. "Walk out that door and do not come back."

"Dad."

He did not turn around. He stood there with my unconscious mother in his arms, his back to me, his shoulders set like granite. And he did not look back.

I pressed my bloody forehead to the floor one final time. Then I stood, bowed three times to their backs, and walked out the door.

The night air hit me like a slap. The front porch, the garden, the long driveway that led to the road, everything looked exactly the same as it had when I walked in this morning, but the whole world had shifted on its axis and nothing would ever be the same again.

I did not know where to go. I did not know where to even start. I had no money. My phone was still on the nightstand in my parents' room. I had nothing but the clothes on my back and the baby in my stomach and the blood drying on my forehead.

I walked. Block after block, street after street. Past houses with warm lights glowing in the windows. Past families sitting down to dinner. Past couples walking their dogs and children riding their bikes in the last light of evening. Every window was a reminder of everything I had just lost.

I ended up at a park somewhere on the east side of town. The benches were cold and the streetlights buzzed overhead. I sat down and pulled my knees up as far as my stomach would allow and wrapped my arms around myself.

Then I cried. Not the quiet, dignified tears I had managed in front of my parents. These were ugly, heaving sobs that ripped through my chest and shook my whole body and echoed off the empty playground equipment like the howling of a lost animal.

I was still crying when I walked blindly into a familiar chest.

"Hey. Hey, easy."

I looked up through blurred, swollen eyes and saw Weston's face. He was not smiling. There was no teasing in his expression, no laughter hiding behind his lips. He just looked at me with those steady brown eyes and gently pressed his thumb to my cheek, trying to catch a tear before it fell.

I turned my face away from his hand. I did not deserve comfort. I did not deserve kindness.

"Lillian sent me." His voice was soft. "She is grounded. Your father has guards on her door. She called me from a phone she hid under her mattress and told me to find you before you did something stupid."

"I already did something stupid." A broken laugh escaped me. "Several weeks ago, apparently."

He did not laugh. He just stood there, close enough that I could feel the warmth coming off his body, and waited.

"Do you know?" I whispered. "About everything?"

He hesitated. It was only a second. Maybe less. But I felt that hesitation like a knife sliding between my ribs.

Then he nodded.

And in that tiny pause, that fraction of a heartbeat where Weston Calloway, the boy who had never once treated me differently, had to gather himself before he could face the truth of what I had become, I felt something between us break.

Not loudly. Not dramatically. Just a quiet little crack, like ice forming on a puddle, thin and fragile and impossible to undo.

Our carefree past was gone. The three of us, Weston and Lillian and me, laughing and fighting and running through the summers of our childhood, that world had closed its doors.

And we could never go back.