Three

Elara’s pov

The room they gave me in the omega block was barely big enough to breathe in.

A narrow cot with a mattress that had been slept on by too many people before me, springs that groaned when I turned over in the night. A single shelf bolted crookedly to the wall. A window so small and so high that the light it let in was more of a suggestion than anything useful. The walls were thin….. thin enough that I could hear the women in the next room as clearly as if we were sharing a bed, and they had no shortage of things to say.

She slept with the Alpha to steal her sister’s place.

She should be grateful she wasn’t thrown out entirely.

As if a bastard like that could ever be worthy of him. Only the pure-blooded sister deserves a Luna’s crown.

I lay awake in the dark with my knees pulled up to my chest and my arms wrapped around them, listening to strangers construct a version of me I barely recognized, and I was too exhausted and too hollowed out to argue with any of it. That’s the thing no one tells you about being publicly shamed — it doesn’t just hurt your feelings. It takes something from you. 

I kept telling myself it would pass. I kept telling myself to be patient, to stay quiet, to let it die down. I was good at waiting. I’d been practicing my whole life.

On my third night, someone went through my bag while I slept.

I don’t know what woke me but by the time my eyes opened the damage was already done. My mother’s wooden box was gone. That was the only thing I registered at first. Everything else — the other small indignities of the ransacked bag, the scattered clothes on the floor  blurred to nothing around the single absence of that box. It was the only thing I had ever owned that connected me to her.

 A woman I had never met, never heard laugh, never been held by. A woman who was apparently the source of everything wrong with me, according to everyone in this house. And someone had taken the last physical proof that she had existed at all.

I followed the noise and found the box in the hands of a woman I recognized by face but not by name, surrounded by a small crowd that treated the whole thing like entertainment. I asked for it back. 

Calmly, the first time, because I was still trying to be the kind of person who handled things calmly. Then less calmly. Then I was clawing through bodies with my heart hammering and my vision narrowing down to that one small wooden box, and the crowd only laughed harder, and two of them caught my arms and held them, and someone else’s fist came from somewhere I didn’t see and split my lip open so suddenly that for a moment I didn’t understand what had happened.

The pain arrived a second later — white-hot, blooming across my whole face, filling my mouth with the copper taste of blood. I stopped fighting. 

No one stepped in.

I looked at the faces around me,  some were laughing, some were watching with blank curiosity, some already drifting away because I wasn’t entertaining enough anymore and I understood something very clearly and very coldly: I was alone here in a way I had never quite been alone before. 

I retrieved the box from the floor where it had been dropped. One of the hinges was bent. I carried it back to my room and sat on the edge of my cot and held it in both hands in the dark, and breathed, and tried not to come apart.

I went to report it the next morning.

My face was swollen on one side, my lip crusted over, and I had rehearsed what I was going to say on the walk over — keeping it factual, keeping it calm, not giving anyone a reason to dismiss me. 

The omega housekeeper looked up from her desk when I entered and then looked back down again almost immediately, in the way that people do when they’ve already decided the conversation isn’t worth their full attention.

“They stole my property,” I said. “And when I tried to recover it, I was struck. I’d like to formally report it.”

She set down her pen and looked at me — slowly, from the top of my head to the floor and back up, and her expression had so much contempt packed into it that it almost felt like a physical thing.

“You think you’re owed protection?” She leaned back in her chair like the whole conversation amused her in a tired way. “Everyone in this pack knows what you did to end up down here. You should be on your knees thanking whatever gods you pray to that they didn’t put you out of the pack entirely. And you want to come in here making reports.”

She picked her pen back up. I had been dismissed.

It only got worse.

Once, walking back from the kitchens alone after the evening meal, three women stepped out of a side passage and blocked the way ahead of me. 

I’m not going to describe everything that happened next. What matters is that I ended up on the ground in the narrow alley between two buildings, and while I was there I heard familiar voices at the alley’s entrance  and looked up and saw my parents and Selene passing by.

Close enough to hear me.

“Help,” I called out. And then again, louder — “please—”

My father’s step did not slow. He turned his head once, just slightly, as if he had heard something he couldn’t quite place, and then he kept walking. And I heard his voice drift back over his shoulder with the terrible, unhurried calm of a man who had rehearsed and meant what he was saying:

“I don’t have a daughter like that. I’d rather she were dead than let her keep disgracing this family.”

Serena turned and glared at me triumphantlyletting me know she won this round again.

I lay in the dirt for a long time after.

It was the pack doctor who changed everything, he was treating my split lip and the bruising along my ribs that same evening, gentle and efficient and admirably careful not to ask questions I wasn’t ready to answer, when he paused. His hand hovered over my stomach, not quite touching, and his expression shifted into something quieter and more careful than it had been a moment before.

“Are you pregnant?” he asked.

The question landed somewhere strange. I opened my mouth and then closed it again, because I genuinely did not know how to answer it — not because I was trying to be cagey, but because the possibility hadn’t fully assembled itself in my mind yet, and saying I don’t know felt almost more alarming than either of the alternatives.

“I am not — “ I stopped. Started again. “I don’t think so. I’m not certain.”

He looked at me steadily, not unkindly. “Should we check to be sure?”

I nodded. The word scared doesn’t quite cover what I was feeling. It was more like standing at the edge of a height, already knowing you were going to step off, just not knowing yet whether there was water below or rock.

He took a blood sample and left the room, and I sat on the examination table in the thin gown they give you and looked at the wall and tried not to think too specifically about anything. 

When he came back, he set the results down in front of me and said, “You’re pregnant,” in the same gentle, careful tone he’d been using all evening.

I looked at the paper. I looked at the numbers on it. I looked back at the wall.

I should be happy, some distant part of me thought. This is supposed to be the thing that would have fixed everything. This is supposed to matter.

But I knew, with the same cold certainty I’d been collecting all day like stones in my pockets that it wouldn’t fix anything. Damian would not be thrilled. He had already told me, in the corridor with his flat voice and his closed expression, exactly what I was to him: a complication.

I just thanked the doctor in a voice I barely recognized as mine, and I walked out.

I sat alone in my cramped little room that night with the results folded in my hand and my palm pressed flat against my own abdomen, and waited to feel something I could name.

For a long time I didn’t feel anything at all.

And then, slowly, from somewhere underneath all the wreckage of the day — underneath the grief and the humiliation and the ache of my bruised ribs and my split lip and my father’s voice saying I’d rather she were dead — something else began to surface. Not joy. I wasn’t ready for joy and I didn’t trust it yet. But something fierce and wordless and entirely new. Something that felt almost like the opposite of everything I’d spent the day feeling.

A need to protect.

I pressed my hand a little harder against my stomach and felt it — that sudden, ferocious clarity that cuts through everything else and tells you exactly what matters. Whatever I had lost. Whatever had been taken from me or had never been mine to begin with. This small, unformed, entirely unknown life was mine, and I would not let it grow up the way I had. I would not let my child be unloved and unclaimed and beaten down by people who were supposed to keep it safe. I would not watch my son or daughter spend eighteen years making themselves smaller and quieter and more useful in hopes that someone might finally decide to keep them.

Two days later, word came down through the block like weather — Damian and Selene’s engagement was to be formalized within the month. A celebration was being planned. The pack was invited to rejoice.

I could not stay here. I could not raise a child in this place, in this block, surrounded by these walls and these people and this story they’d already written about me that had no good ending. 

I could not watch my child inherit my reputation before they were old enough to speak, could not let them grow up in the shadow of everything I’d been called and everything I’d been blamed for.