Three

Elara’s pov

That was the sentence that finally finished me.

Not the slap. Not my father’s silence. Not even the rejection itself, which had already carved out something essential and left a hollow where it used to be. It was that — the quiet, casual intimacy of his concern for Selene’s comfort, and the fact that my pain was only relevant to him as an inconvenience to be managed around it. I was not a person to mourn. I was a complication to be cleared before the celebration could begin.

I picked up my luggage. I straightened my spine until it ached. I walked out of the pack house with my chin parallel to the floor and my heart in more pieces than I had hands to count them, and I did not look back. I refused. I refused — even when every part of me that still felt anything was screaming to turn around, to look at him one last time, to find out if he watched me go.

I didn’t give him the satisfaction.

I didn’t give myself the devastation.

I just walked, and I kept walking, until the house was behind me and the road was ahead of me, and the only thing left to do was figure out how to build something from the rubble of a life I’d never fully been allowed to own.

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.