Four

Elara pov

I left in the dead of night with nothing but my bag and the little money I’d managed to hide away, slipping past the pack borders while the moon was thin and the guards weren’t watching closely enough. By morning I’d reached a small human town an hour’s walk from the territory line, anonymous among people who had never once heard my name spoken with contempt. It should have felt like freedom. Mostly it just felt like falling, with no idea yet where I’d land.

I was sitting outside a bakery, doing the math on how far my coins might stretch, when a voice I half-recognized said my name.

“Elara?”

I looked up into the face of an older woman, gray-haired now, and something in my memory stirred—she’d kept house in my father’s residence, years ago, before she vanished from it without explanation when I was still a child.

Nessa sat down across from me without waiting to be asked, and her eyes moved over my split lip and the bruises shadowing my jaw with an expression that needed no words. My throat tightened just from being looked at like that—like someone actually saw what had happened to me, instead of deciding I deserved it.

“I heard what happened,” she said quietly. “Word travels, even out here. I’m sorry, child. I should have told you the truth a long time ago.”

My pulse picked up, dread and curiosity tangling together. “Told me what?”

Her hands twisted together in her lap, and for a moment I thought she might not say it after all. “About your mother.”

I had been raised on a single fact about the woman who gave birth to me—that she’d been a servant in my father’s house, that she’d died bringing me into the world, that the subject was not to be raised in front of Yvonne. I’d stopped asking questions about her years ago, because asking only ever earned me silence colder than anything else in that house.

“Your mother’s name was Ren,” Nessa said. “She worked in the kitchens. Your father—forced himself on her. I don’t know a kinder way to say it, because there isn’t one.” My stomach turned over, sick and cold, even as some buried part of me had always suspected something like this. “Lady Yvonne found out she was carrying his child before your mother even understood what had happened to her, and she was furious. Wanted her thrown out that same week. She didn’t yet know the pregnancy had already taken hold.”

My hands had gone numb around my cup. “She died in childbirth. That’s all anyone ever told me.”

“She was healthy the whole time. Strong, even. It was after the birth the bleeding started, and it never stopped.” Nessa’s voice dropped lower, like even now the words frightened her. “I found something in her room after she died—herbs, a tincture, the kind of thing a midwife uses to bring on labor too early, or to keep a womb from healing the way it should. I didn’t understand what I was looking at then. I only knew it scared me badly enough that I never told a soul, and a week later Lady Yvonne dismissed me from the house with no explanation given. I’ve wondered every day since whether my silence let someone get away with murder.”

The word landed in my chest like a stone dropped into still water, and the ripples didn’t stop—they tore through everything I thought I understood about my own life, about who I was and why I had never been allowed to belong anywhere. My mother hadn’t simply died. 

Someone—Yvonne, I thought immediately, with a viciousness that startled me—might have made certain of it. Made certain there would be no inconvenient reminder of my father’s betrayal left breathing in that house.

Grief and rage rose up in me together, so tangled I couldn’t tell where one ended and the other began. I thought of every cold look, every slap, every year spent begging silently for scraps of love from people who had decided long before I could even talk that I didn’t deserve any. I had spent my whole life apologizing for the sin of being born, and now I understood that the people punishing me for it might have killed my mother just to bury her secret a little deeper.

Something that had been shattered in me since that morning in Damian’s bed began, slowly, painfully, to pull itself back together into something harder. Something that didn’t ask permission to exist anymore.

I was done being the unwanted daughter. Done being the omega cast aside, the girl who went hungry for love from people who had already decided what kind of woman she was. I had a child to protect now, and a mother’s death to answer for, and a pack full of people who were going to learn—eventually, painfully—exactly what they had made me into.

“Thank you,” I told Nessa, and meant it with everything I had left. “I’m going to find out the truth. All of it.”