Chapter 12: Exile

Serena

The wind was cold.

Colder than I expected for this time of year, and colder still because we had nothing but a thin blanket of hope wrapped around our shoulders. The clothes on our backs were wrinkled from hurried packing, our bags heavy with everything we owned—which wasn’t much. Just a few dresses, some savings my mother had hidden away over the years, and a soul-crushing silence we hadn’t been able to shake since we were cast out.

We had left the Moonclaw estate just before dawn. No fanfare. No goodbye. Just shadows and guards who didn’t bother looking us in the eyes as we walked through the gates one last time.

I didn’t cry when we left.

I was numb.

But now, as we stepped into the streets of a small, unfamiliar town—miles away from the forested wealth and elegance of the estate—I felt the tears burning at the edge of my eyes again.

This place wasn’t much. The buildings were old but not falling apart. Simple brick and cement, most of them two stories, with painted shop signs that looked faded by years of rain and dust. A bakery sat on the corner with steam fogging up its windows. A secondhand bookstore stood beside it, closed for the morning. A tiny clinic sat at the end of the street. No pack banners, no patrol cars. Just people.

Humans.

Normal ones.

It was quiet. Too quiet.

I shifted the strap of the bag on my shoulder and looked down at my stomach. Still flat, but different. I could feel it. Not in the way it looked, but in the way I moved. The exhaustion. The sickness. The weight that wasn’t physical—but heavy all the same.

My baby.

My son or daughter.

The last piece of him I’d ever carry.

And the only piece I’d never regret.

I placed a hand over my belly as we paused at a corner.

“I’ll protect you,” I whispered. “No matter what.”

Beside me, my mother adjusted her own bag. She looked exhausted—older somehow, her face more hollow than I remembered. She hadn’t said much during the journey, just kept holding my arm like if she let go, I’d fall apart completely.

Maybe she wasn’t wrong.

We stood there for a moment longer, taking in the unfamiliar street. It wasn’t home. It wasn’t anything close to it. But it was all we had.

“What do we do now?” I asked softly.

She looked around, then pointed to a bench across the street beneath a flickering streetlamp.

“We sit,” she said. “And then we plan.”

I nodded and followed her across.

The bench groaned beneath our weight. My feet were aching, and my back pulsed with pain, but I said nothing. We sat there in silence, watching the town slowly wake up.

Children walked past in school uniforms. A woman opened her shop and waved at a passing vendor. Everything looked so… ordinary. Peaceful. It felt wrong—like the world had moved on while mine had shattered into dust.

My mother sighed and turned to me. “We’ll find something.”

“What if we don’t?”

She looked me in the eye. “Then we’ll make something.”

I wanted to believe her. I wanted to believe that things would somehow, someway, fall into place. But belief had been torn out of me, piece by piece, by the man who was supposed to protect me. And all I had left was fear.

“I don’t know how to start over,” I whispered.

She placed a hand on my back. “You don’t need to know how. You just have to try.”

I nodded, brushing tears from my cheeks.

We stayed on that bench for a while, watching people live lives we would never have. A girl my age rode past on a bike, her ponytail bouncing behind her. A man kissed his wife before heading into a law office across the street. Laughter echoed from somewhere nearby. Life. It kept going.

A deep ache grew in my chest.

Because I knew mine had stopped the day Kael looked me in the eye and rejected not just me—but the life growing inside me.

I hadn’t just lost my job or my home.

I had lost the illusion of safety.

The illusion of love.

“I’m scared,” I said quietly.

“I am too,” my mother replied. “But being scared doesn’t mean we stop. It just means we go slower. Together.”

I looked at her then, really looked. She had raised me through worse. She had carried her own pain in silence for years just to give me a chance. She hadn’t abandoned me when I made the same mistakes she did.

And now, once again, she was walking beside me into the unknown.

I reached for her hand and squeezed.

She looked at me in surprise, then smiled faintly and laced our fingers.

“We’ll find work,” she said. “Maybe not what we had. Maybe not right away. But something.”

I nodded. “We’ll need to find a place to stay, too.”

“There’s always someone willing to rent a room to a quiet maid and her daughter.”

I smiled, barely.

We sat like that for another ten minutes, just breathing. Just trying to exist in this new reality.

Then we stood.

The weight of the bags pulled at my shoulders, but I didn’t let it stop me.

Because for the first time in days, I felt something other than shame.

I felt purpose.

I wasn’t just a cast-out maid or a broken girl anymore. I was a mother now. And mothers didn’t have the luxury of breaking forever.

As we walked further down the road, a bakery door opened and the scent of fresh bread filled the air. A woman inside waved gently.

“Are you looking for work?” she called out.

Ma and I froze.

The woman was plump and warm-looking, with flour dusted across her apron. Her cheeks were flushed, and she held a tray of steaming buns.

“Yes,” Ma said quickly. “We just arrived this morning.”

“Can either of you bake?”

Ma stepped forward. “I can. My daughter’s still learning, but she’s fast.”

The woman studied us, then nodded.

“We open at 5 a.m. daily. It’s hard work, and it doesn’t pay much. But it’s warm. And there’s breakfast.”

Warm.

Breakfast.

A chance.

“That would be perfect,” Ma said.

And just like that, we had the first piece.

It wasn’t a mansion.

But it was something.

A few streets down, we found a small sign that read Rooms for Rent in chipped paint. The building was worn but clean, and the woman who owned it said she had a spare room with two beds and a broken heater.

We took it anyway.

By nightfall, we were lying on mismatched sheets in that tiny room, staring up at a ceiling that didn’t have a chandelier—but also didn’t remind me of Kael.

I turned to my mother and whispered, “Thank you.”

She smiled, her hand on her pillow, eyes tired. “We’re not home yet. But we’re safe.”

And that night, for the first time since the nightmare began, I slept without dreaming of him.