Chapter 2 : Found

Elara POV

I step back. Then another step.

My skin is burning where nothing is touching it. My pulse is loud in my ears. I don't know if it's the bond or him, and I don't want to find out. He hasn't moved. His eyes follow me anyway.

"Stay away from me," I say. It comes out shakier than I want.

"I haven't come near you."

That's true. It makes me angrier.

I walk to the door and take the stairs down, all eleven floors, faster than I came up. I cross the lobby in the black uniform with dried blood on my lip. The night clerk looks at me, then at his desk. I push through the glass doors and keep walking.

I don't know where I'm going. I can't go back to the pack house. I have nowhere else.

The voices come with me. Even her own mate doesn't want the defective one. Zero out of ten. Eighteen and still a blank slate. They play in order, then out of order, then all at once. I walk with my head down and my arms wrapped around my ribs. I don't look at the street.

I step off the curb.

Headlights fill the road. An engine, close and loud. A horn. I scream. My knees give out and I land on the asphalt on both hands, and tires lock beside me. The car stops so near I feel the heat of the bumper on my shin.

Doors open. A driver in a dark suit reaches me first. "Miss. Don't move. Are you hurt?" He takes my wrist to check my hand. My sleeve has slid to my elbow. He stops.

He's looking at the inside of my wrist, at the curved mark there, the size of a thumbnail. I've had it since birth. The pack called it ugly.

"Sir," the driver says. His voice is wrong. "Sir, you need to see this."

An old man gets out of the back seat. Gray hair, long coat, a cane he isn't leaning on. He walks into the headlights, sees my face, and stops.

His mouth opens. Nothing comes out. The cane falls on the road.

"I'm fine," I say. "I'm sorry. I walked into the street. It's my fault."

His eyes drop to my collar. The locket has come out of my uniform when I fell. It's small and silver and scratched. I've worn it every day of my life. It's the only thing I own that was never handed down.

"Where did you get that?" His voice cracks.

"I've always had it."

He kneels on the road in his good coat. His hands are shaking. "Elara," he says. Then, quieter: "Elara Vale."

Nobody has ever given me a last name. I just stare at him. He takes out his phone and turns it toward me. A photo of a young woman with my face, holding a toddler. The toddler wears the same locket.

I can't breathe right. The bond is still throbbing in my chest where Callum cut it, and this stranger is telling me I belong to someone. Hope and fear arrive together and I can't tell which is louder.

"I'm your father," he says.

* * *

He makes one call. "Hotel entrance. Now. All of you."

Within minutes five men run out of the lobby. They don't slow down when they see me. They kneel on the road, and all of them are touching me at once.

The tallest scans the street first, hand inside his jacket, looking for anything that could hurt me. That's Lucas. The twins stop on either side of him. Rafe has my shoulder in a hard grip. Rhys stands back an extra second, jaw tight, and then moves in beside him.

"Okay," says the one in the open collar, voice breaking halfway. "So we have the same nose. That's so unfair. I wanted to be the good-looking one." He laughs once and wipes his face with his whole sleeve. Theo.

The youngest drops to his knees and takes my hand in both of his. He doesn't let go. "I knew you'd come back," he says. "I knew it. I knew you'd come back." He keeps saying it. His name is Ezra. He's maybe sixteen.

Nobody has ever hugged me like this. Too tight. Rafe turns my face to the light and looks at my lip. Rhys takes my hands and finds the scrapes from the road and says a word I've only heard from the pack's drivers.

Theo has his phone out. His face goes flat. "This is you," he says. "Isn't it? Someone posted this an hour ago."

The video. The hall. The tray breaking.

The street goes quiet. Lucas doesn't move. Rafe's eyes flash gold. "Which pack," he says.

"Not now," my father says. He's still on his knees. His voice is low and steady and everyone obeys it.

More people come out of the hotel, men and women in dark coats. Friends of my father, I understand later. A woman I've never met puts her coat over my shoulders and holds it closed at the front with both hands. She's crying. She doesn't say why.

I'm shaking. Not from the cold. I've been shoved, laughed at and stepped on my whole life, and I've never once been wanted like this. I don't know where to put it.

A last set of heels clicks down the hotel steps. Slow. Unhurried.

"Oh my god."

The crowd opens. A girl my age walks through it in a cream silk dress, hair perfect, eyes already full. She drops to her knees on the asphalt and throws her arms around me.

"My sister," she says. "You're home. I never stopped looking, I never stopped hoping."

Her voice is soft and warm and every word is perfect. This is Sera, my father says. Seraphine. The daughter they raised while they searched for me.

Her cheek is against my ear. Over her shoulder I watch her eyes. She isn't looking at me. She's looking at Ezra's hands on mine. At Lucas's palm on my back. At Theo, who has not stopped touching my hair.

Her smile never reaches her eyes.

When no one is looking, her fingers dig into my arms. Hard. Too hard. Then she leans back, smiling, and wipes her cheek.

"Welcome home," Sera says.

* * *

Elara POV

I don't remember the drive. I remember a gate that opens by itself and a house that has more windows than the pack house had doors.

The brothers walk me upstairs, close on every side. Ezra still has my hand. Lucas opens the last door on the east hallway and stands aside.

The room is bigger than the whole kitchen wing I sleep in. A bed with a white cover. A desk with a lamp. A window the height of the wall, and past it the lit grounds going on and on. A door stands open to a closet. Clothes hang inside, in rows, with tags still on. I know before I check that they're in my size.

"We kept it ready," Ezra says. He says it quietly. "Every single year. Just in case."

I look at the bed. At the lamp. At the clothes with tags.

I have never owned one thing that wasn't borrowed. I stand in the doorway with the coat still on my shoulders and I can't make my feet cross the floor.

"Go on," Rhys says gently.

I step inside. The carpet is soft. My chest hurts, in two places now.

* * *

Sera POV

I wait in the hallway until the door closes behind the last of them. Then I stop smiling.

My face hurts. I've held it for three hours.

I walk to the end of the corridor where the camera angle misses me and take out my phone. I don't wait for hello.

"She's back," I say. "The real one. Move the plan up. Tonight. I don't care what it costs."

A voice says something. I cut it off.

"I said tonight."

I end the call. I stand there looking at my reflection in the black screen.

Sixteen years. I learned how to sit at their table. I learned which brother wants to be told he's right and which one wants to be left alone. I learned Gideon's coffee and Lucas's moods. I learned to cry when they cried. I became the daughter they needed in a house that was waiting for someone else.

I will not lose Damian. I will not lose the brothers. I will not lose the life I earned.

She walked out of a car in a kitchen uniform with a scratch on her lip, and in ten minutes they were on their knees.

I fix my mouth. The smile comes back easily. It always does.

Elara is a problem. Problems can be removed. Quietly, cleanly, and soon.

* * *

Elara POV

The dining room table seats twenty. This morning it seats seven. The clothes I'm wearing came out of the closet.

Sera sits across from me in pale blue. She passes me the bread. "I hope you slept," she says.

"A little."

"Good." She smiles. Lucas looks at her and smiles back. I watch him do it.

My father stands. The room stops. Lucas stands with him.

"Last night," my father says, "my family became whole." He looks at me. "The lost heiress of the Vale bloodline has been found. Tonight, at the gala, you will claim your rightful place in front of every pack on this continent."

Every eye is on me. Theo grins. Ezra is crying openly. Rafe nods once, hard, at me.

Across the table, Sera claps softly. "I'm so proud of you," she says.

Her left hand is under the table. I can see her shoulder. I think her nails are in her palm.

A man in a gray suit walks in carrying a black folder. He gives it to my father and leaves without speaking.

My father opens it.

I watch his face change. The color goes out of it. He reads one page, then turns it, then reads the second. Lucas moves to his side. My father puts a hand flat on the table.

He looks at me. His voice is low and final.

"You will also claim your groom tonight."

The room goes still.

"Contract," Lucas says, reading over his shoulder. "Signed the day she was born."

"Her groom," my father says. "Damian Morati."

I don't know the name. I look at the faces around me. The twins have stopped moving.

Sera is on her feet before the sound of the chair finishes. It scrapes across the floor, long and loud.

"No." Her voice is still sweet. It doesn't stay that way. "No. You told me I would marry him. You promised me. I have been preparing my whole life—"

"Sera," Lucas says.

"You promised—"

"The real heiress is back," Rafe says. He doesn't raise his voice. He doesn't have to. "She was betrothed to him at birth. By blood. By right."

"You were never the one," Rhys says, quieter. He doesn't look away from her while he says it.

Sera's fists are white at the knuckles. She breathes in once and the smile goes back on, crooked and tight. Her eyes find mine. There is nothing sweet left in them.

I look down at the folder. A photograph is clipped to the first page.

A tall man in a black suit. Dark eyes. A hard jaw. Not smiling.

It's him. The man from the terrace. The one who told me to take my crying somewhere else. The one who watched me and walked away without a word.

My pulse is loud. My hands are flat on the table because I don't trust them anywhere else. Last night I was a wolfless servant. This morning I'm an heiress who's hated by the sister sitting across from me, and I am contractually bound to a man I hate with everything in me.

Damian Morati.

I read the name again. I hate it too.