Chapter Four - The Mark

In the dream, I was standing in the courtyard again, and every wolf in the pack was facing me.

I tried to speak. This time, I did not stop speaking. But no sound came out, and the silence was so complete that I could feel it pressing against my ears.

Then freezing cold water hit my face.

I woke up choking, gasping, my whole body seizing from the shock. Water ran down my neck, soaked into my dress, pooled on the floor around me. The room swam into focus: the ceiling, the lamp, and a woman standing over me with an empty basin in her hands.

Talia. She set the basin aside, pulled a chair up beside the bed, and sat down like she was visiting a sick friend.

"You look pathetic," she said, as simply as if she were commenting on the weather. "Five years of being Luna, and this is what's left of you. Soaked, shaking, sleeping in your own tears on the floor of a room you used to think you owned."

I pushed wet hair out of my face with a trembling hand. Whether from cold or fear, I couldn't tell anymore—but I would not give her that, so I dragged myself upright against the side of the bed and made myself meet her eyes.

"You're a womb," I said, and my voice came out hoarse but steady. "He told me himself. He was drunk, he woke up, and you were just there. That's all you are to him—an accident he's decided to make use of."

Her smile didn't move. She laughed, but it was pity in her tone that hit harder. "Sweet, exhausted thing. You really believe that, don't you? I'm the Beta's daughter. I carry the heir this pack has been waiting for. Tell me, how exactly does anyone set aside the mother of the future Alpha?"

My heart dropped, because I didn't have an answer.

"The whole pack already sees it," she went on, gently, almost kindly. "They see who's strong and who's decorative. Who bleeds for them, and who hides in a nursery. You were a placeholder, Elira. A lovely one. But a placeholder."

I wanted to fight back. Part of me—that stubborn part—still wanted to scream that five years of trying had to count for something. But underneath the anger there was a small, orphaned girl who'd been handed a title she'd never quite grown into, who had spent five years waiting to be caught pretending. And some sick, tired part of me had been waiting just as long for someone to finally say it out loud.

Now someone had. And what I felt, to my own surprise, wasn't the collapse I'd braced for. It was relief—the relief of the worst thing finally being said aloud, and me still breathing.

"Is that all?" I said.

Talia blinked.

"You've called me weak, barren, wolf-less, and unwanted. I've heard it from better liars than you, from people who smiled while they said it. You came here to watch me break, Talia. I'm sorry to ruin your morning."

For the first time, her smile slipped.

She leaned forward to pick up the basin, and the collar of her dress shifted. Then I looked up, and I saw it.

A mark.

Pale and unmistakable on the curve of her neck, where my own skin was bare and had been bare for five years.

My breath left me all at once.

"Who did that." It wasn't a question. It came out flat, from somewhere far below my anger.

She touched the mark with two fingers, almost lovingly. "Kade, of course. After the bleeding. He wanted to make sure the pup would be protected, and it's the strongest bond an Alpha can offer." She tilted her head. "He didn't tell you? How strange. I assumed you'd already agreed."

Five years. I had spent five years being told there could only ever be one mark, one mate, one Luna, and I had spent every one of those years believing that if I only waited, if I only stayed sensible, he would one day look at me and see someone worth the risk of being claimed fully.

He hadn't. And now he had given it away in a single night, without a word, to a woman who'd arrived with a swollen belly and a smile.

"You should leave," Talia said, standing, smoothing her dress. "Quietly, before this gets any more embarrassing for you. No one in this pack is going to value you again, and I'd rather you saved us both the trouble."

"I'll leave when I choose to," I said. "Not when you've finished enjoying yourself. And when I go, Talia, it won't be because you told me to."

She paused in the doorway as if she might say something, then thought better of it and walked out without closing the door.

I sat there a long time in my soaked clothes, and something that had been holding up the whole ruined structure of my life gave way completely.

He had marked her. She'd said it herself: it was for the pup. But it didn't matter why. A mark was a mark, and he'd put his on her skin in the same week he'd locked me in a room and called me sensible.

I had only ever been safe here because I'd believed he loved me. Belief, I was learning, made a poor foundation.

My hand found my stomach, the way it kept doing on its own. Whatever else was true in this house, the pup was real. Four weeks, a heartbeat the size of a seed, and not a single person in this pack who knew she existed or cared to ask.

I would not raise her here.

Not in a house where a locked door was a marriage vow. Not in a pack where marks were handed out to whoever it found useful, where love had never once been strong enough to overrule fear.

I didn't cry again. I'd run out of crying, somewhere between the courtyard and the floor.

I went to the closet instead.

I didn't take much. A few dresses. A cloak. The small amount of coin I'd saved from the household allowance, which no one had ever thought to count. Things that could be carried quickly and wouldn't slow me down.

The small crushed gift box was still in my dresser, ribbon clinging to it. I held it for a long moment. Then I set it behind the lamp on the nightstand, where the light would catch it. Let him find it, or not. Let him turn this room over someday and learn what he'd been too busy to ask.

I left no note. I didn't need proof, because I was carrying it.

At the doorway, I looked back once. We had been happy here. Once. I let myself believe that for exactly as long as it took to breathe in and out one final time.

Then I walked out.

The hallway was empty. No guards. Of course there were no guards—Talia had already made sure of that. She'd cleared the path for me like she was doing me a kindness, when really she was just making sure nothing stood between me and the door.

Let her take the credit. I knew whose decision it was.

I walked past the room that used to be my nursery. I didn't look inside. I walked past the dining hall, where a dinner two nights cold still sat untouched on the table, set for a homecoming nobody had come home to. I walked past the servants, who dropped their eyes. Not one of them tried to stop me.

I walked straight out through the front door, past the training grounds, past the courtyard where it had all started, and into a night with no moon at all.

Ahead of me was nothing but dark. And somehow, for the first time in five years, that felt like the safer direction.