Two

Elara’s pov

My parents left first.

Selene lingered. Of course she did — Selene always lingered when there was something left to take from me. She stood in the doorway with her arms wrapped tight around herself, mascara smudged in dark half-moons beneath her eyes, looking for all the world like the one who’d been wronged here. Like she was the one whose whole life had just been folded up and handed back to her in pieces.

“Selene.” I hated how much desperation bled into my voice when I said her name. I reached for her anyway, because I was stupid and I was terrified and she was the last person in that house who might still look at me like I was worth something. I knew what she was capable of, I knew exactly how much she enjoyed watching me scramble. But I reached for her anyway, because when you’re drowning you’ll grab at anything — even the hand that pushed you in. “Please, talk to Father. Tell him I would never do this to you on purpose, I don’t want to leave home, Selene, please……”

For one fragile, treacherous second, something shifted behind her eyes. Something that almost looked like guilt. Something soft and human that made the desperate, stupid part of me think yes, there she is, there’s my sister.

“If I ask him,” she said quietly, “will you promise never to go near Damian again? Never look at him, never speak to him, never be in the same room as him if you can help it?”

“I promise.” The words came out of me fast, grateful, almost tearful. “I swear it, Selene, I never wanted any of this — I never chased him, I never asked for any of it. He already rejected me. What would I even want with someone who looked at me the way he did? I just want to go back to how things were. I just want to come home.”

The softness in her eyes didn’t fade. It snapped — like it had only ever been a mask she was holding up to see how long it would take me to trust it. Her mouth curved into something that wasn’t quite a smile and wasn’t quite a sneer but was the most honest expression I’d ever seen on her face, and somehow that was the most devastating thing of all. Because it meant the softness had been deliberate. She’d put it there on purpose just to watch me reach for it.

“You’re so naive it’s almost funny,” she said. Not cruelly — almost gently, which was somehow worse. The tears that had been smudging her makeup didn’t stop. She cried and said it anyway, like the two things had nothing to do with each other. “You’re a bastard, Elara. You should have been thrown out of this house the day Father found out what your mother was. Pack your things. He wants you gone within the hour.”

She left without looking back.

I stood in the middle of that room and listened to her footsteps fade down the hall, and I thought about all the years I’d spent in this house trying to deserve the space I took up in it. All the mornings I’d woken up early and stayed up late and made myself small and quiet and useful. All the times I’d told myself that Selene was just difficult, that Father was just hard to reach, that love in this family looked different than it did in other families but it was still love, it was still something.

I had been wrong about that my whole life and I was only finding out now.

I packed what little was mine in silence, working through it room by room like I was already a ghost in my own life. My hands were steadier than I expected. I think I’d simply run out of feeling like a wound that goes so deep it stops hurting and just goes numb. A small bag. The plain clothes that had always marked me as a tier below Selene in every room we shared. My mother’s old wooden box — the one thing I’d been allowed to keep from a woman I had never met, never touched, never heard laugh, but whose blood apparently made me unforgivable. I pressed my thumb against the carved lid of it while I packed it and tried to feel something connected to her. Some thread of her reaching back to me across all that absence.

Nothing came. I put the box in the bag and kept moving.

I was halfway down the servants’ corridor when the door to a side room opened and Damian stepped out.

My whole body reacted before my brain could stop it. My chest tightened. My steps faltered. Even now, even after everything, some pathetic and treacherous part of me looked at him and hoped that he’d come to say it was a misunderstanding, that there had been some terrible mistake, that he would fix it, that he would look at me and mean it this time.

“Why are you here?” I asked him. I let every drop of my disappointment into my voice — not to wound him, but because I was so exhausted from pretending and I didn’t have anything left to pretend with.

“Just listen to me, Elara.” His voice was low and careful, almost pleading. Almost like he meant it.

“I am listening.” I set my luggage down with a dull thud and folded my arms across my chest, because I needed something to hold onto and there was nothing else. “Go ahead.”

He didn’t meet my eyes right away. When he finally did, his expression was impossible to read — some locked and complicated thing I didn’t have the key to and probably never had.

“I have property in the human world,” he said. No greeting. No, I'm sorry. “I can arrange a transition for you. Papers, somewhere to live, a way to start over. I only ask one thing in return — that you never come back to this pack.”

I felt something inside me go very quiet.

I want you to understand what that offer was. He had taken everything from me in the span of a single morning — my home, my father’s last remaining shred of regard for me, my dignity dismantled piece by piece in front of the only family I had. He had let that happen. And now here he was, holding out money and an exit like he was settling an inconvenient account. Like I was a debt to be cleared and forgotten so he could go about the rest of his life without the awkward reminder of what had been done to me.

He wasn’t offering me help. He was offering himself a clean conscience.

“No,” I said.

He blinked. Actually blinked, actually paused — genuinely surprised, like it hadn’t crossed his mind that I might refuse. Like I wasn’t supposed to have enough self left in me to refuse anything.

“No?”

“I don’t want your charity.” My voice came out even. Steady. I have no idea how. Inside I was trembling so hard I thought my ribs might come apart. “And I don’t want your conditions. I’ll make my own way. I have nothing left to lose by trying, and I’m done pretending otherwise.”

Something moved behind his eyes. It was there and then it wasn’t, gone so fast I couldn’t name it — couldn’t even decide if I’d imagined it before it was already buried under whatever blankness he wore like armor.

“Then you should leave quickly,” he said. Flat again, distant again, already somewhere I couldn’t follow. “Selene and I are announcing our engagement soon. I’d rather she didn’t have to see you — “ he paused, and I watched him choose the word with a kind of clinical precision that made my stomach turn — “unhappy.”