Chapter 2: I Won't Beg for What Should Have Been Mine

Sera's Pov

"Sera."

I stopped halfway across the yard. Della. She had followed me out of the hall, her shawl pulled tight around her shoulders, her breath making small clouds in the cold air. She looked at the bag on my shoulder and then at my face and I watched her put it together in real time.

"Where are you going?" she said.

"For a walk."

"With a bag."

"Della."

"Don't Della me." She stepped closer, dropping her voice. "Talk to me. Where are you actually going?"

I looked at her. She was one of the few people in this pack who had ever been genuinely kind to me, without any angle or agenda That almost made it harder.

"I'm leaving," I said.

Her face fell. "Tonight? Sera, you can't just walk out tonight, it's dark. The border is two miles out and you're human. At least wait until morning. Please."

"I can't stay in that building tonight, Della."

"Then stay at mine. Come on, just come inside. We'll talk and figure something out together."

"There's nothing to figure out." I adjusted the bag on my shoulder. "He made his choice, now I'm making mine."

She was quiet for a moment. Then softly "He cared about you. Whatever tonight looks like, he did care about you."

"I know he did," I said. "That's not the problem."

She opened her mouth to say something else. I shook my head once, gently, and she closed it again. Her eyes were wet, mine weren't. I didn't know what that said about either of us.

"Stay safe," she said finally. "Please."

"I always do."

I walked away before she could find another reason to ask me to stay. The gate was unguarded on the inside. I slipped through without stopping and followed the north road into the trees, the dark closed around me immediately and I focused on my breathing and my feet.

I had made it maybe half a mile when footsteps came up fast behind me. I spun around.

A pack wolf, older, one of the border guards. He held both hands up when I turned, showing me he wasn't reaching for anything.

"Easy," he said. "Alpha doesn't know I'm here. I just wanted to make sure you got clear of the territory safely."

I stared at him. "Why?"

He shrugged. "Because you've been good to this pack for three years and nobody in that hall thought about that tonight." He paused. "The north road stays clear until the two mile mark. After that you're in neutral territory."

I looked at him for a long moment. "Thank you."

He nodded once. "Take care of yourself, Sera." Then he turned and walked back toward the gate without another word.

I watched him go, then I turned around and kept walking. The memory came somewhere around the first bend in the road.

His voice. Low and certain, the way it got when he had already decided something and nothing was going to move him.

“You won't be touched here.”

I was sixteen. Two weeks in the breeding ward. He came in, looked at me across the room, spoke to the ward keeper, and twenty minutes later I was following him out into a hallway I didn't know, with no idea where I was going or why he had chosen me out of everyone else in that room.

He said those words in that hallway and I believed him without thinking twice, that was always my problem with Caden. I believed everything he told me. Every single time. I kept walking.

Another memory. Softer and harder at the same time. The first time he kissed me. Late at night in the kitchen, both of us up past everyone else. The way he looked at me right before, like he was asking a question he wasn't sure he had the right to ask. The way I answered without thinking because it was him and I never needed to think around him.

I pushed it down hard, not tonight. The last time he looked at me like I was worth keeping. I tried to pinpoint it and couldn't. A week ago? A month? Had I even noticed when it stopped or had I been too busy making myself useful to see it changing?

The road curved north and the pack lights disappeared behind the trees. Just dark and cold and the sound of my own feet on the packed dirt. My bag was light on my shoulder. My feet were steady on the road. I was two miles out when the howl split the night. I stopped walking.

It rose from somewhere inside pack territory, long and low, hanging in the cold air before it slowly faded. I stood completely still and listened to every second of it. A grief howl. I knew that voice. I had heard it once before, two years ago when the pack lost an elder they all loved. That same sound, pulled from somewhere deep, Not an Alpha sound. Just a man hurting.

I knew that voice better than my own heartbeat. My feet stopped moving on their own.

Go back. The thought came quiet and firm. He's hurting, he needs you. You know him better than anyone in that pack.

I stood on that road in the dark and I breathed, then I thought about his face when he looked at her. That one second. The look I had spent three years telling myself was there for me, had always been there for me, and now understood had never belonged to me at all.

I thought about the two females by the pillar. She actually thought she deserved to be our Luna. I thought about Della's careful voice. He cared about you. Past tense, she had used past tense without even noticing.

The howl faded, silence came back. I shifted my bag higher on my shoulder and kept walking, not because I didn't feel it. I felt every inch of it, that sound pulling at something deep in my chest that I would deal with eventually, in private, when there was space for it. But he had known what I was to him for three years and never once said it out loud. He had kept me close and let me believe in something he never actually offered, and now he was howling like something had been taken from him.

Nothing had been taken.

He made a choice. A deliberate, public irreversible choice in front of his entire pack. So had I.

The border road stretched out ahead of me, pale in the moonlight. No plan beyond the next mile. A small bag, my mother's ring tucked into the inside pocket, and three years of learning how to make myself useful in a world that didn't think much of human girls.

It would have to be enough. I crossed the two mile mark and kept moving, behind me the howl didn't come again. Then ahead of me, from somewhere in the dark tree line, a twig snapped. Sharp and deliberate. Not an animal.

I went completely still.

"You're further from the gate than I expected," a voice said.

I spun around. Riven stepped out of the tree line ten feet ahead, arms loose at his sides, completely unhurried. I recognized him immediately. The man from the gate, the one who had given me nothing but his name and a question I hadn't answered.

"You followed me," I said.

"I walked the same road." He tilted his head slightly. "Different thing."

"That is not a different thing."

"You're two miles from Ironmoor on foot in the dark with a bag that weighs nothing." His eyes moved over me once, calm and steady. "Where exactly are you planning to go?"

"That," I said, "is none of your business."

"Maybe not." He looked at my bag, then back at my face. "But you're about to cross into Northesk land. That makes it mine."

The trees were quiet around us. Behind me, Ironmoor. Ahead of me, him.

I lifted my chin. "Then what are you going to do about it?"

He looked at me for a long moment. Those calm steady eyes giving absolutely nothing away.

"That," he said quietly, "depends entirely on you.”