Chapter 5

Evelyn pov

I don't know how long I laid in that bed after Damon left, staring at the same water stain on my ceiling, before my body finally forced me into motion. Hunger, maybe, though nothing about my stomach felt like it wanted food. Or maybe it was just the desperate need to feel something other than the hollow, aching stillness that had settled into my bones since the night before.

I peeled myself off the mattress and stood under the shower until the water ran cold, scrubbing at my skin like I could somehow wash away the memory clinging to it—Marissa's laugh, Damon's bare back, the particular scent of betrayal that seemed to have worked its way into my very pores. It didn't work, of course. Some things don't rinse off. But at least when I stepped out, dressed in clean clothes with my hair still damp, I looked marginally more human than I had a few hours before.

My stomach growled, hollow and insistent, reminding me I hadn't eaten anything since the night before the ceremony. I told myself I could do this—walk to the pack kitchens, grab something quick, retreat back to my room before anyone had the chance to look at me with pity or, worse, satisfaction. I braced myself and opened my door.

Marissa was standing right outside it.

For one absurd moment I actually thought I might have summoned her through sheer bad luck, some cruel cosmic joke determined to make this day worse than the one before it. She stood there in the hallway, arms crossed, looking entirely too put-together for someone who'd been caught in another woman's mate's bed less than twenty-four hours earlier. Her hair was perfectly styled. Her clothes were pressed. She looked, infuriatingly, like nothing at all had happened.

"Oh good, you're alive," she said, and there was no warmth in it, no trace of the girl who used to braid flowers into my hair when we were children. "I was starting to wonder if you'd just wither away in there dramatically."

I stared at her, genuinely stunned into silence for a moment. Of everything I'd braced myself for—apologies, excuses, even more of Damon's tired justifications—I hadn't prepared myself for outright cruelty. Not from her. Not after everything.

"Marissa—"

"What?" She tilted her head, something sharp and unkind flashing behind her eyes. "Are you going to cry again? Beg me to explain myself? Honestly, Evelyn, I thought you'd handle this with a little more dignity."

"Dignity." The word came out of me like a laugh with no humor in it at all. "You slept with my mate the night after he marked me, and you're lecturing me about dignity?"

"I didn't force him into anything." She examined her nails like this conversation bored her, like my entire shattered world was simply an inconvenience interrupting her morning. "He came to me plenty willingly, if you must know. Has for weeks, actually. I don't know what you expected, marrying an alpha and thinking you'd be enough to satisfy him all on your own."

Something in my chest went white-hot.

"Weeks," I repeated quietly.

She must have realized her mistake a half-second too late, because something flickered across her face—not quite regret, but close to it. Not close enough.

"That's not the point," she said quickly.

"That's exactly the point." My voice was shaking now, but not with the same grief that had wrecked me the night before. This was different. This was fury, clean and consuming, burning away the fog of heartbreak I'd been drowning in since I'd run from that bedroom. "You've been sleeping with him for *weeks*. While I planned our mating ceremony. While I stood beside my best friend and asked her to help me pick out what I'd wear the night he marked me."

"Don't act so innocent." Marissa's own composure cracked slightly, something defensive creeping into her tone. "You know how alphas are, Evelyn. Everyone in this pack knows it. I don't understand why you're acting so shocked that—"

The sound of my hand connecting with her face cracked through the hallway like a gunshot.

I didn't fully register deciding to do it. One moment she was standing there, smug and dismissive, dissecting my heartbreak like it was some minor overreaction on my part, and the next my palm had already made contact, hard enough that she stumbled sideways and lost her footing entirely, landing hard against the hallway floor.

The silence that followed felt enormous.

Marissa stared up at me from the ground, one hand pressed to her reddening cheek, shock written plainly across her face—as if some part of her had genuinely believed I'd simply absorb this, fold quietly into whatever secondary role she and Damon had decided I deserved without ever pushing back.

"You *hit* me," she said, like the concept was entirely foreign to her.

"You laughed at me," I said back, my voice trembling but my resolve solid beneath it. "You've been sleeping with my mate for weeks, helped him break something in me that I don't think will ever fully heal, and then you had the audacity to stand outside my door and laugh in my face about it. Yes, Marissa. I hit you."

Doors were opening down the hallway now, pack members drawn by the noise, their eyes flicking between Marissa on the floor and me standing over her, breathing hard, my hand still stinging from the impact. I heard whispers start almost immediately, that particular hum of pack gossip that spread faster than wildfire.

And then, over the murmurs, I heard footsteps. Fast ones. Damon's, unmistakably, the cedar-and-rain scent of him cutting through the hallway before he even rounded the corner.

He took in the scene in an instant—Marissa on the ground, cheek reddening, tears now welling dramatically in her eyes—and I watched, with a fresh wave of devastation, as his expression shifted immediately into concern.

For her.

"Marissa." He crossed the hallway in three strides and crouched down beside her, one hand going to her shoulder, entirely too gentle, entirely too familiar. "Are you okay? What happened?"

She didn't even have to say anything. Just pointed one shaking finger at me, and Damon's eyes rose to meet mine, something dark and disapproving hardening across his features.

"Evelyn." My name came out like a warning, like I was the one who'd done something unforgivable in this hallway. "What did you do?"

I felt something inside me shatter all over again, a different kind of break than the night before, but no less devastating. Because in that moment, watching him kneel beside the woman who'd helped destroy our bond, watching him look at me like *I* was the problem here, I understood with total, bone-deep clarity that there was no version of this pack, no version of this life, where I would ever come first to him. Not really. Not when it mattered.

"I slapped her," I said, my voice steadier than I expected, steadier than I felt. "Because she stood outside my door and laughed at me for being upset that my mate has been sleeping with her for weeks."

Something flickered across Damon's face—surprise, maybe, at the new information—but it didn't stop him from helping Marissa to her feet, didn't stop his hand from lingering at her elbow a beat too long, didn't stop the concern in his eyes from staying fixed on her instead of shifting toward me.

"We'll talk about this," he said to me, not to her. Like I was the one who needed correcting. Like the woman rubbing her cheek beside him hadn't done a single thing wrong in any of this.

I looked between them—at his hand still resting near her arm, at the pack members watching from doorways with expressions ranging from pity to poorly concealed judgment, at the mark on my own neck that no longer felt like devotion but like a brand I hadn't consented to—and I felt the last fragile thread holding me to this place finally, quietly, snap.

"No," I said. "We won't."

I turned and walked back toward my room without waiting for his response, without looking back at either of them, my mind already turning over the decision I'd made in the dark hours of the night before, the one I hadn't been ready to say out loud until this exact moment.

I wasn't staying here. Not for him. Not for this pack that would apparently always choose comfort over truth, tradition over me.

I was leaving. And I wasn't looking back.