5

Elara pov

The guards at the border stopped the car before I'd gone half a mile, telling me, with the apologetic firmness of men following orders they didn't personally love, that I needed the Alpha's permission to leave pack lands. I sat there with both hands on the wheel, feeling the last of my strength drain out through my fingers, wondering if I even had the energy left to argue.

That's when a man's arm reached past my window and planted itself between me and the guards, a badge held up to catch the gatehouse light.

"She's leaving with me."

I watched the guards' faces change in a single breath. It was the Alpha King's family crest, old and unmistakable even to men who'd probably never seen one up close.

They lowered their heads and stepped back without a word, though one of them, dutiful to the end, reported it through the mind link before letting the car through — just doing his job, he said. I genuinely didn't care whether the report ever reached anyone. He was probably still at the hospital, cooing over someone else's twins.

No order ever came to stop us.

Cassian — my brother, the Alpha King, the family I'd only learned existed a few weeks earlier — took my suitcases from the trunk himself and pulled me into a hug solid enough that I let myself just be held for a second instead of holding everything together on my own.

"I'm glad you finally decided to come home," he said into my hair, and there was something so plain and unguarded in it that it undid something I'd been keeping wound shut all day.

I still hadn't fully let myself believe in this family that had appeared out of nowhere — a lifetime of thinking I had no one, and then, all at once, a brother, a title, a whole history nobody had told me about. But I had nowhere else left to go, and he was the only one who'd opened a door instead of quietly closing one.

I thanked him quietly. Behind us, through the rear window, the pack lands I'd called home for five years shrank until the road curved and took them out of sight.

As the distance grew, I reached for the mate bond — the thread I'd believed my whole life was unbreakable — and severed it. It didn't come apart cleanly. It felt like tearing something with roots already grown into me, and for one blinding second the pain of it was almost as sharp as the stairs. Then I reached for the pack bond underneath it, older, deeper, and cut that too, until nothing was tying me to any of it anymore.

Cassian asked, carefully, if Ronan had hurt me. I kept my voice steady and told him everything — the ceremony, the ring, the stairs, the phone call — flat, because I'm better at being strong out loud than at being comforted. He wasn't calm by the time I finished. His jaw had gone tight enough I could see the muscle working. He said, low, that he'd make Ronan pay for every part of it.

"Don't," I said. "Please. I don't want a war. I just want to rest. And I don't want him knowing where I've gone. Not yet. Maybe not ever."

Cassian didn't argue, though it clearly cost him something.

He settled me into a room finer than anything I'd slept in during five years as somebody's almost-Luna — deep rugs, a fire already going, a window looking out over land I'd never once set foot on. Then duty pulled him away, an Alpha King's evening apparently never fully his own, and I sat alone on the edge of an unfamiliar bed and finally let myself stop holding everything together.

I don't know how long I sat like that. Long enough that the fire had burned to embers by the time there was a knock — not Cassian's knock, brisker, more entitled — and a woman let herself in without waiting for an answer.

She looked me over once, head to foot, the way some women size up someone they've already decided to dislike.

"So you're the omega he's been hiding in here," she said, arms crossed. "I should've known he'd have some little pet stashed away. Did he really think no one would notice?"

I was too tired to bother correcting her.

Cassian did it for me, appearing in the doorway just in time to catch the tail end of it, his voice going cold in a way I hadn't heard yet.

"Vivienne. That's my sister. You'll speak to her with respect, or you won't speak to her at all."

I watched the color drop out of her face and her posture shrink from contempt to something much smaller, and understood, distantly, that whatever came next, at least I wouldn't be facing it completely alone.

After she left, Cassian sat on the edge of the bed a moment, close enough that I could feel the warmth coming off him — a different kind of warmth than I was used to, nothing charged in it, nothing asking anything of me. Just a brother's presence, solid and uncomplicated.

"You don't have to figure out how you feel about any of this tonight," he said. "Just rest. I'll be down the hall."

It wasn't love the way I'd known it for five years — no ache under it, nothing breathless. But sitting there in the firelight, some exhausted part of me recognized it as something I hadn't felt in a long time. Safety. And for the first time all day, the tightness in my chest let go, just slightly. Just enough to breathe.