2. The Only Survivor

Chapter 2: The Only Survivor

ANYA’S POV

“You can’t do this to me. Please.” My voice broke, small and raw. 

Silence answered me. His face didn’t. Rowan stood there like a cliff—unmoving, finished. The tray of shattered porcelain at my feet still glittered in the lamplight. The taste of metal and spilled coffee clung to my tongue.

Pain thrummed under my ribs, slow at first, then jagged, as if someone had dug a hand into my chest and squeezed. I pressed a palm there because bending over was the only way to keep my lungs from failing. My fingers trembled.

He said nothing new. His rejection had already landed; I’d heard the words. But his stillness made it worse, as if he refused to witness the damage he’d done.

I let the breath shudder out of me and did the only thing left that didn’t feel like dying: I made a choice.

“I accept it.” My voice snapped like a thin wire. “I, Anya Voss, accept your rejection, Alpha Rowan.”

The reaction was immediate and savage.

White-hot pain exploded through me, not like heartbreak but like being ripped open. It clawed down my throat, stole air from my lungs, and everything went bright. 

“Ahhh!!!” I screamed; the sound tore out raw and animal. My knees buckled beneath me.

Rowan stuttered back as if struck. He swore—low and ugly—and one hand flew to his chest. The expression I’d expected—triumph, relief—wasn’t there. Instead his face crumpled into something else: stunned, hollow, as if the cut had bled back on him.

He made a noise I’d never heard from him before, a raw groan, and the room tilted. Our pain mirrored each other for a staggered breath; whatever the mate bond was, it was not only mine to bear. Fate’s chains snapped and they did not break clean. They tore.

Rowan stared at me, eyes wide as if some truth I’d done had landed on him like a thrown stone. His voice came out strangled. “What have you done?”

What had I done? I thought of the moment when he’d first turned away from me, the cold of his rejection like frost. I thought of every hour I’d spent wanting him, of every humiliation for his sake. My answer stayed in my head, blunt and simple, and tasted like iron.

He had done it.

I didn’t say that. I didn’t need to. I had nothing left for arguing. I had one tight scrap of pride and the remaining use of my legs.

“You don’t have to worry,” I said, steadier than I felt. The words surprised me by how clean they sounded. “I won’t bother you again.”

His jaw worked; something indecipherable flickered and died across his face. He didn’t move to stop me. He didn’t call my name. He listened like a man who’d just watched a match cut loose.

I walked out.

Every step through the corridor felt loud, like my life announcing itself in cracks. Heads turned as I passed—faces half-formed out of curiosity and a little cruel delight. Whispers braided the air behind me. I didn’t stop. I held my chin up because lowering it felt like begging. Begging would make it stick.

I swallowed hard when a child on the stairs dared to look at me too long. An elderly housekeeper turned away fast as if the sight of me might rust her heart. No one reached. No one caught me. The absence of hands felt like proof: I was alone in every definition that mattered.

My door was warm under my palm even with the cold coming off the wood. I closed it with a deliberate click and leaned my back to it. The world sounded muffled: distant laughter, a wolf howling somewhere beyond the gate, the hush of servants doing the things of the living.

Only when that click sealed me in did the breath leave me.

I slid down the door until I hit the floor and curled in the small space where the room’s shadow met the light. The cot’s thin mattress scraped my knees. My palms still left wet prints of blood on the floor. I pressed my face to my knees and let myself cry for the first time in hours that weren’t stolen beneath a table or swallowed behind a wall.

When the sobs quieted enough that memory could slither in, it came—not long, not whole, but a clean sting of the night that had done this to me.

It was my eighteenth birthday. We had been a car of five: my father at the wheel—Beta Hale—hands steady even when he laughed; my mother beside him, hair dark and eyes soft; Alpha Darius driving with us like proud kin; Luna Helena beside him, warm and singing; and me, tucked in the back with them, safe in the swell of their voices. 

They’d just picked me up from school to go celebrate my birthday, I’d insisted on coming home on that day and they’d all come to pick their beloved Anya. They all were immersed in the talk about my future as the future Luna and future wife to Rowan. It had been a small and bright and utterly ordinary day.

Then headlights tore the night, too close, too fast. A horn shrieked. My father cursed; my mother’s hand flew to my arm. The world flipped. Glass rained like glitter. Metal screamed. I remember the way my breath left me—short and thin—then the hot slap of somebody else’s blood on my hand and the dry silence that takes everyone away.

When I found the strength to move again, they were gone. Their bodies were there but not them. The other car blurred through the rain, I saw those red eyes for a second and then gone. One month later I woke into accusations, into whispers that looped me like a noose. 

I woke up with people saying I had taken from them what they could not live without. I woke to my sister accusing me of killing our parents because I was adopted. I woke up to Rowan, my boyfriend, accusing me of killing his parents because I was greedy and selfish.

They all said I orchestrated the accident to kill my parents for not including me in their will because I was adopted and that the Alpha and Luna were just at the wrong place and the wrong time. 

The memory wasn’t long. It didn’t need to be. A flare of light, the smell of gasoline, my mother’s last laugh before the world bent.

I reached for the only soft thing left in my life—the picture on my nightstand. The picture showed them on a summer day: my father’s hand over my mother’s shoulder, their smiles wide and bright and real. I hugged it to my chest like a talisman and then squeezed until the glass cracked against my skin.

The cut felt nothing compared to the tearing inside. Blood mapped thin lines across my palm. The frame’s shards fell and tinkled like tiny bells, but the sound was nothing to the ache that roared in my ribcage.

I let the pieces fall. I let the tears come. The sobs wracked me until the only sound left to the room was the soft wet patter of grief.

I lay back on the floor and stared up at the ceiling that had always looked the same—cracked paint, a faint water stain—and for the first time since waking that night two years ago, I didn’t try to hold myself together for anyone. I’d already promised him I wouldn’t bother. I’d already given up the thing that might have saved me. Now there was nothing left but the quiet and the weight of what I had lost.

I closed my eyes and let myself break.