The Edge of everything-b

Four months with Kane. The bond had formed early, the pull between them undeniable from the first week, and packs didn't wait for human courtship timelines once a bond took hold—not when the pull was mutual and strong, not when an Alpha and his intended mate both felt it in their bones the way she and Kane had. They'd been together, in every sense that mattered, for most of those four months.

The rejection had happened three weeks ago.

Before that, though. In the weeks right before. She tried to remember the last time, tried to count backward, and something cold moved through her chest when she realized she couldn't quite place it, couldn't remember for certain if it had been four weeks before the rejection or five, and either number left room for something she didn't want to think about.

She sat up in bed.

You're being ridiculous, she told herself, echoing her own words back at Priya from that morning. *A coworker made a joke. That's all it was. A joke, because you look tired, because you haven't been sleeping, because your whole life fell apart in a Pack Hall three weeks ago and of course you look like hell.*

She lay back down. Stared at the ceiling. Tried to sleep.

Her body had other plans. An hour later she was up again, this time because her stomach turned over with a nausea that had nothing to do with anxiety, sharp and sudden, and she made it to the bathroom just in time to be sick into the toilet, kneeling on the cold tile in an old T-shirt, her whole body shaking afterward in a way that felt disproportionate to the amount she'd actually thrown up.

She sat back against the bathtub, breathing hard, and pressed the heel of her hand against her sternum—the same gesture from three weeks ago, in the Pack Hall, when the bond had torn loose. Some old instinct, apparently, for holding herself together by force when everything underneath wanted to come apart.

Sress, she told herself. You've been under enormous stress. People get sick from stress. People lose sleep and lose their appetite and throw up from stress. This isn't anything else.

But some quieter part of her, the part that had done the aching, unwanted math ten minutes earlier lying in bed, wasn't buying it. That part of her had already started counting days differently. Already started noticing that her bras didn't sit quite right anymore, something she'd chalked up to stress-related weight fluctuation without really examining it. Already noticing that she'd gone off coffee three days ago without deciding to, the smell of it at the diner suddenly turning her stomach in a way it never had before, even though she practically lived off caffeine most of her adult life.

She'd been ignoring all of it. Every small, individually explainable thing. And Priya, without knowing anything real, had walked into the diner that morning and named the pattern out loud in about four seconds flat. Elena sat on the bathroom floor for a long time.

The apartment was quiet around her, the particular quiet of a building where most people were already asleep, water pipes ticking somewhere in the walls, the hum of the refrigerator down the hall the only steady sound. She thought about her aunt, three streets over, who would be awake if Elena called—her aunt barely slept these days, hadn't since Elena moved out, worried about her in the specific way of someone who'd raised a niece from nine years old and never quite stopped bracing for the next thing to go wrong.

She didn't call.

She thought about walking to the twenty-four-hour pharmacy two blocks from her building instead. Buying a test. Getting an actual answer instead of sitting on a bathroom floor doing math with numbers that refused to add up the way she wanted them to.

She didn't do that either. Not that night.

Instead she pulled herself up off the floor, rinsed her mouth, and climbed back into bed, and lay there with her hand resting flat against her stomach—not checking for anything specific, not really, just resting it there, the way you might rest your hand against a door before deciding whether to open it.

It's nothing,  she told the dark.  It's stress. It's grief. It's three weeks of barely sleeping and barely eating catching up with my body all at once. That's all this is.

The dark didn't answer. It never did. But something in her chest—some low, stubborn, frightened thing she didn't have a name for yet—refused to fully believe her own reassurance, no matter how many times she repeated it.

She didn't sleep again that night, not really. She drifted in and out, caught between exhaustion and the particular restlessness of a mind that wouldn't stop circling the same four or five thoughts. At some point near dawn she must have actually slept, because she woke to her alarm at five-thirty with the sick, thick-headed feeling of someone who'd gotten less rest than they started with.

She showered. Dressed for her shift. Stood in front of the bathroom mirror for a long moment, studying her own face in the gray early light, looking for whatever it was Priya claimed to see. She didn't see a glow. She saw tired eyes and a face that looked older than twenty-four, and underneath all of it, something that might have been fear if she let herself call it that.

She didn't let herself call it that. Not yet.

At the diner, Priya took one look at her and winced.

"Okay, I'm sorry about yesterday," she said, before Elena had even gotten her apron tied. "I was just teasing. I didn't mean to actually upset you."

"You didn't upset me." Elena tied the apron strings a little too tight, had to loosen them. "I told you, I just haven't been sleeping."