Chapter 8: Goodbye, Elena — No, Goodbye, Nobody

I was still on the floor when she walked in.

I heard her heels first. Red bottoms. I knew because I had cleaned the scuffs off them before when I served her coffee at the morning meetings. Elena Stone never looked at me when I served her.

That night, she finally did.

"Oh," she said, stopping in the doorway of Alexander's office. Her hand was on his arm. Possessive. "It's still here."

Alexander didn't push her hand away.

He was standing over me. Shirt open, breathing hard, eyes still black from almost claiming me. The $500 was scattered around me like confetti. My phone screen was cracked, showing the pregnancy test photo I never got to show him.

Elena looked down at me, at my cheap dress, at the blood on my lip where I bit it to stop crying.

"Alex, baby, who is this?" she asked, even though she knew. Everyone in Thorne Tower knew who the human waitress who brought him black coffee was.

Alexander's voice was ice. "Nobody. A human mistake. I handled it."

Nobody.

Not Seraphina. Not even a stray anymore. Nobody.

Elena smiled then. That perfect, pureblood Lycan heiress smile my mother told me I could never compete with.

"Nobody, you need to say goodbye to Alexander now," she said sweetly, crouching down so her diamond necklace — the one Alexander bought her last week, I saw the receipt — dangled in my face. "He and I are announcing our engagement tomorrow. The merger. Stone Pack and Thorne Pack. You know about mergers, right? Oh wait, you don't. You serve coffee."

I couldn't speak. The mate bond was still burning, still trying to pull me toward him even as he called me nobody.

Elena leaned closer, her voice dropping to a whisper only I could hear.

"Let me give you some advice, nobody. Lycan Kings don't mate waitresses. They fuck them. Then they marry someone who can give them an heir who can actually shift. Someone like me. Not some weak human who will die in labor."

My hand went to my stomach on instinct.

Three weeks. A poppy seed. A secret.

Elena saw it. Her eyes narrowed.

"Are you —" she started.

"No," I said fast. Too fast. My voice cracked. "I'm not. I'm — I'm leaving."

I scrambled up. My knees gave out. I had to grab his desk to stand.

Alexander didn't help me. He watched. His jaw clenched, but he did nothing.

"Goodbye, Elena," I whispered to her. Because I thought I had to. Because she was his future Luna and I was nobody.

Elena laughed. Loud.

"No, honey," she said, standing up and linking her arm through Alexander's again. "Not goodbye, Elena. Goodbye, nobody. Say goodbye to nobody. Because that's what you are to this pack. To him. To Manhattan. Nobody will remember you tomorrow."

She was right.

I walked out of Thorne Tower that night and no security stopped me. No one asked if I was okay. The receptionist who I brought soup to when she was sick looked away.

I was nobody.

Outside, it was raining. The $500 was still on his office floor. I didn't take it. I didn't take anything.

I sat on the sidewalk with my cracked phone and my poppy seed and my bleeding lip and I whispered to the empty street:

"Goodbye, nobody."

But I wasn't talking to them.

I was talking to Seraphina Cole. The girl who believed in fated mates and Moon Goddesses and that a billionaire could love a waitress.

She died that night on the sidewalk outside Thorne Tower.

The woman who stood up, who put her hand on her stomach and said "we're leaving Manhattan" — that woman was someone else.

That woman was already a mother.

And a mother is never nobody.