~ 4: Goodbye

~ 4

~ Mia ~

I didn't cry.

I laid out Darian's riding leathers piece by piece in the dressing room. Polished the ceremonial saddle until my arms shook. Packed provisions for two Alphas — dried venison, water skins, flask of aged whiskey. 

Eight years of serving a man who couldn't stand the sight of me had made me expert.

I have six months to live. And this is what my hands are doing with them.

When the last strap was buckled, I stood in the quiet dressing room and realized there was only one thing in this house I still needed to see tonight.

My son.

If I really was dying — if the doctor was right — then who would take care of him? Who would notice when he stayed up too late, when he skipped breakfast, when he was sad and pretending not to be? I just wanted to look at his sleeping face. To hold onto something that was still mine.

His bedroom light was on, a warm line under the door.

I raised my hand to knock… and heard Fanny's voice.

"...and then? What happened then?"

"Then Dad let me steer the whole way down the lake road!" Nick, bright and breathless. "Don't tell Mom. She'd freak out. She freaks out about everything."

A soft, indulgent laugh. "She worries because she loves you."

"She doesn't love me, she just makes rules. Bed at nine. No games on school nights. She checks my homework like a border guard." A rustle of blankets. "Aunt Fanny… when your pup is born, will you love it a lot?"

"So much," Fanny said softly. "More than anything under the moon."

Silence. Then, small and wistful:

"Your pup is lucky. It gets to have you as its mom." A pause. "I wish you were my mother."

My hand froze against the door.

"Nick." Fanny's voice was gentle, honeyed, pitched with perfect care. "Don't say things like that. Your mother is… she's very good. She'd be so sad if she heard you."

"I don't care. I don't want her to be my mother." The petulance in his voice was a knife going in slowly. "She can't even shift. Tommy's mom runs with the pack every full moon and carries him on her back. My mom just stays home and cooks and makes rules. Everyone at school knows the Luna has no wolf. Kai calls her the empty Luna."

"Nick…"

"I just wish that one day I'd wake up and she'd have vanished." A beat. "Or die or something. Then you could be my mom for real."

The hallway tilted. I pressed my palm flat against the wall.

Nine months I carried him. Eighteen hours of labor without a wolf's healing to ease any of it. Every fever, every nightmare, every scraped knee… and he wished I was dead. 

Through the door, Fanny's voice flowed on, warm as bathwater. "Ssh. No more of that. Come on… lie down. Should I tell you the story of the moon rabbit again?"

"Yes! The long version."

Blankets rustled. Her voice dropped into a storyteller's lilt, and my son sighed the contented sigh he used to make against my shoulder when he was small.

"…Goodnight, Aunt Fanny. I love you."

"I love you too, sweet boy."

I don't know how long I stood in the dark hallway. Long enough for my legs to go numb. Then I turned and walked mechanically toward the master bedroom, one hand trailing the wall like an old woman.

Darian was already in bed, dress shirt unbuttoned at the throat, one arm draped over his eyes.

"Darian." My voice came out raw.

"What now, Mia?"

Three words. The casual dismissal in them nearly finished me.

"I need to talk to you." I shut the door and leaned against it. "Please."

He sighed. "It's late. I ride at dawn. Can this wait?"

"No." The word came out stronger than I expected. "No, it can't."

He finally moved his arm, irritation creasing his forehead. "Fine. What."

"I'm sick." I wrapped my arms around myself, suddenly cold. "I went to the pack hospital today. They ran scans. Darian… there's a tumor in my brain. And an old blood clot beneath it. The doctor said…"

"Mia." He sat up, dragging a hand through his hair. "Can you hear yourself? A brain tumor. Do you know what someone with a brain tumor looks like? They're sick. Actually sick."

"I collapsed today!" My voice cracked. "I've been telling you for weeks… the headaches, the nausea, the dizziness and all of you just kept telling me to take something and stop complaining!"

"You're always complaining about something." He swung his legs off the bed and stood. "Last month it was your back. Before that you'd diagnosed yourself with anemia. You spent three years in a classroom, Mia, and you think it made you a healer. Now it's a brain tumor. What's next?"

"The tumor is why I have no wolf," I said quietly.

That stopped him. For one heartbeat, something flickered across his face.

"The doctor said it's been pressing on the place where the wolf-bond forms. Since I was a child. She's not missing, Darian. She's buried. All these years, everything you were ashamed of me for…"

"Enough." The flicker was gone, sealed over. "This is a new low, even for you. Using that… inventing some magical cure for the one thing…" He shook his head slowly. "Goodness! You'll say anything."

"I'm not…" I stopped myself because I realised he was bent on not listening to me.

"Where were you today?" I asked instead, because there was nothing left to lose. "This afternoon. When I called. Where were you really?"

His jaw tightened. "I told you. Business."

"You were at the café in the market district. With Fanny. And Nick." My voice rose despite everything. "The café you told me the Alpha family was too dignified to visit. And this morning you were at the hospital… outside the maternal wing. I heard her, Darian. I heard her tell you she's pregnant." I made myself hold his eyes. "So I'm asking you directly, as your Luna. Is that pup yours?"

The silence was deafening.

He stared at me with an unreadable expression. Then he looked away — out the dark window, like I was noise. He didn't deny it. He didn't confirm it. He didn't do one single thing except stand there, silent and damning.

His phone buzzed on the nightstand.

We both looked. Fanny glowed on the screen.

Of course it was.

He hesitated for exactly one second, then answered. "Fanny?" His voice transformed instantly — the irritation, the coldness, all of it gone. "What's wrong? …No, don't move, stay lying down. Did Dr. Halden leave anything for the pain?" He was already reaching for his jacket. "I'll drive you back to your apartment myself. No… it's fine. I'm leaving now."

He ended the call and finally looked at me.

"Darian, please…"

"Listen to me." He stopped at the door, one hand on the frame, and his voice went flat and final. "Fanny's parents died protecting you. Her father took the killing blow that was meant for you… the Beta, the finest wolf this pack ever had, bled out in the dirt of the eastern border so that you could stand here tonight, accusing her." His eyes were ice. "Every breath you take, you owe to her family. Try to remember that."

I knew that story. He'd thrown it at me a hundred times over the years, and it never stopped landing. 

"And maybe if you hadn't spent years playing the perfect little foundling for my father… making a dying old man believe you were some gift from the Goddess, until he chained me to you with his last command, we wouldn't be standing here at all." He pulled the door open. "You got everything, Mia. The Alpha's house. The Luna's title. A life a wolfless orphan omega could never have touched. Be grateful. And be content."

Each word was a nail driven into my chest.

"We'll talk when I get back."

The door clicked shut. His footsteps faded down the stairs. The front door. The engine. Then silence swallowed the house whole.

My son wished I was dead. My husband was driving through the night for the woman carrying his pup. And I have six months to live.

I sank onto the edge of the bed — and my eyes landed on the wall opposite. The tall bookshelf in the corner. My old medical texts were crammed onto the bottom shelves where no one else ever looked.

I crossed the room and pulled one out. Advanced Lycan Neurology. The Red Moon Medical Academy's crest was stamped inside the cover, and beneath it, folded flat after all these years, a single sheet of heavy cream paper.

The Red Moon Medical Academy is honored to offer admission…

The finest medical institution in the world of wolves. The strongest pack, the most advanced technology — decades ahead of anything East Lake had, the doctor had said so today without knowing he was quoting my own buried life back to me. I'd earned my place there at eighteen. I'd held this letter and dreamed of walking those halls.

"Too far," the old Alpha Wilson had ruled, kindly, immovably. "Your place is here." And then the marriage, and Nick, and the slow disappearance of everything I'd been.

The doctor's voice came back to me. ‘Only the Red Moon Pack may have the ability to save you.’

I stood very still in the empty bedroom, the letter in my hands.

They wouldn't look for me. My husband couldn't hear my dying words over Fanny's phone calls. My son wanted Fanny. My mother-in-law would celebrate. There was nothing left in this house but a title I'd never really held and people who'd be relieved.

If I had six months, I would not spend them here.

I would go to Red Moon. Maybe their doctors could save me; probably they couldn't. But even if I died — I would die in the place I'd once dreamed of.

I packed one small suitcase. At Nick's door I paused, easing it open. He'd fallen asleep mid-blanket-tangle, one arm around the stuffed wolf I'd sewn him when he was three, back when he still hugged me goodnight.

"Goodbye, Nick," I whispered.

He didn't stir.

I closed his door softly, picked up my suitcase, and walked down the stairs of the Alpha house for the last time.