Just a Little Bit Crazy

I walked through the crowd and the crowd parted. For the first time since I was five, I wasn’t invincible. I heard the whispers start behind me as I moved. Heard my name. Heard his. Heard the word traitor the way I’d been hearing it my whole life, like a sound they made without even thinking anymore. Automatic, reflexive, a habit of cruelty so old it had stopped feeling cruel to them.

I walked to the small room at the back of the east quarters where I’d slept on the same thin mattress for thirteen years. I sat down on the edge of the mattress and  pressed my hands flat against my knees and I breathed.

The bond was broken. I could feel where it had been. A raw ache in the center of my chest, the ghost of something that had existed for approximately six minutes before it was destroyed.

Six minutes.

That was all I got.

I sat with that for a long moment.

Then I reached under the mattress and I pulled out the only thing I owned that actually mattered. A small, cracked photograph. My father, young, laughing, standing in sunlight with his hand on someone’s shoulder. He looked nothing like a traitor in that photograph. He looked like someone who loved being alive.

They killed him anyway.

I put the photograph in my pocket.

Then I stood up.

And I started packing.

I was gone before midnight.

No announcement. No goodbye. No one to say goodbye to.

I crossed the Ironmoor border at eleven forty-seven and I felt the pack bond snap. Quieter than the mate bond, less violent, but final in a way that made my lungs expand like they hadn’t been able to fully open in years.

Free.

I kept walking.

The woods were dark and cold and indifferent, which suited me perfectly. I had nowhere to go. I had no money, no contacts, no plan beyond out. But I had survived thirteen years on nothing, I could survive whatever came next.

I walked until my legs ached.

I walked until the trees thinned and the ground changed and I realized I had reached the edge of the neutral territory. The strip of unclaimed land between Ironmoor and whatever came next.

That was when I collapsed. 

I laughed.

Loud and manic. 

I wanted to claw out my heart from my chest and dump it on the floor for the wolves to find. Maybe i’d have a little burial ceremony for it with a headstone that says “Here lies the heart of Sera Voss loved by no one and loved noone” 

Caden Walsh probably assumed he had destroyed me, and maybe he had.

I felt like I was going crazy. 

I hit the ground on my knees and I put my hands in the cold dirt. I tried to regulate my heart beat and calm down a bit.

But the roaring in my ears wouldn’t stop.

I heard footsteps.

Quiet. Measured. Deliberate.

Someone else was here, and they felt Dangerous.

The footsteps didn’t hurry.

That was the first thing I noticed.

Whatever was moving through these trees wasn’t afraid of what it might find. It wasn’t cautious. It wasn’t checking the shadows before it stepped into them. It moved the way things move when they have never once in their life needed to be careful, because nothing in the world has ever given them a reason to be.

I was still on my knees in the dirt.

I thought about getting up. I thought about it seriously, for approximately two seconds, and then I decided that if something was going to kill me tonight, it was going to have to find me exactly like this. Hands in the cold earth. Chest still cracked open. Eyes probably red in a way I would deny to my grave.

I was done performing dignity for things that hadn’t earned the show.

The footsteps stopped.

I didn’t look up immediately. I counted my breaths instead. One. Two.

Then I looked up.