CHAPTER FOUR: The Mark

Lena POV

The voices come before the dark lifts.

A wolf-less Luna.

I'm in the great hall and every seat is full, and I'm standing in the middle of the floor in

the green dress with the box in my hands. Nobody has looked at me. They are all looking

at the doors.

A Luna who can't give us a pup.

Elder Pryce is laughing. Joel from the gate. Rourke, with his feet on the table. Marta has

her back to me, folding a towel. I say her name and she keeps folding. I try to open the

box, and there's nothing in it. The tissue paper is empty. I look up and the hall is silent,

and then all sixty faces turn toward me at once.

Hen, someone says. Hen. Hen.

Water hits me in the face.

I come up off the carpet with a sound I don't recognize. It's in my nose, my mouth,

running down my collar. It's cold enough to hurt. I roll onto my side and cough, and my

hand finds the carpet and it's soaked, and I hear a hollow plastic clunk as something is

set down beside me. "Wow," says a voice above me. "You really were out."

I wipe my eyes. I try to stand and my legs won't take me. My lips are split. My head

pounds behind my eyes, and my stomach cramps.

The bedside lamp is on. That's the first thing I understand. Someone has turned it on,

and the room is yellow and small. My hair is plastered to my cheek. The clock says 11:52.

Sloane is sitting on the edge of my bed with her legs crossed. She's holding the white

plastic basin from my bathroom, the one I keep under the sink, and she turns it upside

down to show me it's empty.

She is wearing my dress.

Not the green. The other one, the one that hangs in the back of the closet in its own

garment bag. Charcoal silk with a silver collar. I wore it twice, at the Harvest Gathering

and at the swearing-in, because it isn't a dress you wear to dinner. It's the Luna's gown.

The elders had it made the week I was named. She has found the silver moon pendant

too. It hangs against her collarbone, and it's crooked, because she doesn't know how the

clasp sits.

I push myself up on one hand. My arms shake.

"You look terrible," Sloane says. She says it kindly. That's the worst of it. "Honestly. Have

you seen yourself? Five years in the big house, and this is where you land. Wet on the

floor."

"Get out of my room." "It isn't really your room anymore. Not in the way you think." She sets the basin down by

her foot. "I came to see how you were. Somebody should."

My mouth is so dry my tongue sticks. "You're a surrogate. That's all you are." The words

come out in a croak. "Once it's born, you're done. He'll send you away. He told me

himself."

She smiles.

It's slow. She's got her head tilted and she's looking at me with an expression I have seen

on nurses, on the face of someone about to explain to a child what a word means.

"Lena," she says. "Sweetheart. You're so naive."

"Don't call me—"

"I'm the Beta's daughter. I've fought next to him since I was eighteen. I've bled for him. I

was there the night he took the pack. You know who was holding his shoulder when they

stitched the cut on his ribs? It wasn't you." She leans forward with her elbows on her

knees. "And now I'm carrying his heir. A real one. Everyone says it will be an Alpha. How

do you think this ends? That I hand him over like a coat and walk out?"

Something cold goes down my back and stays there.

"It's the heir's mother, Lena. You don't send the heir's mother away."

I open my mouth. Nothing comes.

"The pack already knows," she says. "Go downstairs. Go down and look. There are people

who stopped using your title this afternoon. They call you 'the Omega.' Not to your face, not yet. The elders were never going to keep you. They kept you because he asked. And

he's not going to ask forever."

"That isn't true."

"You think they care that you remember their birthdays?" She says it softly, as if she's

sorry. "It's a good thing about you. It's just not a thing a Luna needs. You bake. You smile.

You send flowers when somebody's grandmother dies. And meanwhile he comes home

from the field with blood on his hands and the first thing he does is worry about you. Do

you know how tired that makes him?"

My chest hurts.

"You can't give him what he needs. You never could. You're a weight on him. He's too

decent to say so."

I look at the floor. The wet carpet. The felt moons, still in their row, dark where the water

got them.

I was nine. A seatbelt that wouldn't release. A boy with half a sandwich. Every step of my

life in this pack has been a step he took first, so I wouldn't have to take it alone. They

didn't choose me. He did. If he stops choosing me, there is nothing underneath. I've

known that for twenty years. I never said it to anyone, not even to myself. Not once. And

this woman walked into my room and said it in a good dress.

I think of the baby.

No.

I lift my head. "That's what you came for," I say. My voice is raw. "You couldn't wait. You

wanted me to hear it from you. You put on my dress to say it." "I wanted you to hear it from someone."

"You're lying." I swallow. "He told me no one would take my place. He told me today. He

looked at me and—"

I stop.

Sloane has turned her head to pick at the sleeve of the dress. The collar has slipped. It's

lamp-lit, her neck, pale and bare, and on the left side, just below the ear, there is a mark.

Fresh. Two curved rows of punctures, dark red at the center, the skin around them

swollen and pink. Still wet in one place. I know exactly what it is. I've seen the shape of it

every day for five years in my own bathroom mirror, on the right side of my own neck, a

pale half-moon scar gone silver with time.

"Who," I say.

She follows my eyes. She touches the mark, and I watch her decide to let me see her do it.

"Who did that?"

"Who do you think?"

The room tilts.

"No."

"He marked me last night." She's almost gentle. "At the hospital, after I was settled. It's

not what you're picturing. It's protective. The Alpha's mark is the only thing strong

enough to keep a pregnancy stable when the mother's been in the field. Dr. Hale recommended it." She drops her hand. "He didn't want to. He was so worried. He

wouldn't do it for just anybody, Lena. You understand? He did it because he values me."

I can't breathe right. My chest stops halfway and I have to start again.

I'm his mate. There is a mark on my neck that says so. It was supposed to be the only

one. There was one mark, one wedding, one Luna, that was what he said every time

somebody asked. And now there is a fresh one on someone else, and it hasn't even

closed.

"You should leave," Sloane says. She stands and smooths the skirt of my dress with both

hands. "I mean it. For your own sake. Don't make him choose. He'll choose, and you

won't like it. Go now, while you can still walk out with some dignity." At the door she

looks back at me, at the basin, at the floor. "Nobody's going to stop you."

She leaves it open.

I hear her heels on the stairs, evenly spaced, unhurried. The lamp ticks.

I stay where I am. I don't know for how long.

I put two fingers on my own neck, on the old scar. It's cold. It feels like nothing at all.

I think about Rourke's laugh on the intercom. About the empty hall. About the eleven

pairs of feet that passed my door and none that stopped. About sixty people on a

driveway, and not one who stepped up beside me. Not even Marta.

It isn't Sloane who is telling me the truth. It's every person in this house who doesn't say

anything at all.

My hand goes to my stomach. Under the wet green dress it's warm. Flat. There is nothing to feel. I press anyway. I hold

it there, and in the quiet of that room, it's the only thing I'm sure of.

If I stay, the baby will be born into this. Into those halls. Into a house where people take

the wrong turn to avoid my door. Where the pup is raised by a woman who'd throw my

things in a bag, and a father who says it's only a room. Where my child will be called

what I was called, every day, until it believes it.

No.

I get up. My knees nearly give. I hold the nightstand until the room stops moving, and

then I go to the closet and pull the duffel from the top shelf.

I don't take much. Two pairs of jeans, three sweaters, underwear, socks, the sneakers I

wear to the gym. Toothbrush from the bathroom. The charger, though my phone's gone.

From the back of the sock drawer, the envelope of cash Gavin gave me for emergencies,

the one I never touched. Six hundred dollars. I count it twice. I zip the bag. The sound is

very loud. I stop and listen.

I stand in front of the dresser and slide the ring off my finger.

It takes a while. My hands are swollen. When it comes off, there is a white band where it

sat, and a groove. I put it on the dresser, next to the cup from the hospital cafeteria. It

rolls in a small circle and settles.

I look around the room once.

The bed where he used to read to me when I couldn't sleep. The chair by the window

where he sat the night of my first Gathering, holding my hand and telling me, quietly,

that they would learn to love me. The photograph on the wall of the two of us at the lake house, squinting into the sun. The box on the nightstand with its green ribbon, behind

the lamp where I put it, and I can't pick it up. If I touch it I'll stay.

I turn off the light.

The hall is empty. I walk down it with the bag on my shoulder. At the study door I stop. A

line of light shows under it. I put my palm flat on the wood and stay there for the length

of three breaths. If he opens it, I'll turn around. He doesn't open it. Then I go past the

stairs, past the portrait of our wedding day. At the front desk, Rourke's chair is pushed

back and his coffee is cold, and nobody is on the monitor. All the guards who were on

this floor this afternoon are gone. Somebody arranged it.

I take the back stairs. I go through the kitchen. The steak is still in the fridge, wrapped in

foil. I leave it.

The side door opens without a sound.

Outside the air is cold and smells like cut grass. The gravel under my sneakers is loud.

Behind me, a window lights up on the second floor. I don't look back at the house. I walk

to the gate with my hand on my stomach, and I keep walking.