6. Not Fit.

The door wasn’t locked. It never had been, because nobody in this pack ever bothered to visit me.

But now Remus was standing on the other side of the door and my body knew it before my mind even caught up. The wolf in me stirred weakly, that pathetic, traitorous part that still recognized him as mine even after he’d made it painfully clear I was nothing to him.

Another knock. It's harder this time.

“Aria. Open the door.”

It's not a request. I know that, because I’d learned to recognize that tone, the one he used when he’d already decided how something would end and just needed everyone else to catch up.

I looked at the suitcase that's half-packed on my bed. At my mother’s photograph still lying beside it. And then at my hand, which had somehow found its way to my stomach again since I found out about my pregnancy.

I can’t protect him yet, I told the life growing inside me. But you can survive this. You can survive anything.

I opened the door.

Remus stepped inside without waiting for an invitation, because of course he didn't require one. The room had always been small, but with him in it, the walls seemed to shrink inward. He was taller than I remembered or maybe I’d just made myself smaller over the years without realizing it.

His gaze swept the space, caught on the suitcase, and something flickered across his face. Is it relief? Or satisfaction maybe.

“Good,” he said. “You’re already packing.”

I said nothing. There was nothing anyone could say again that wouldbreak me now.

“I assume you’ve heard the announcement.” He didn’t look at me when he said it. His eyes were fixed on the bare wall behind my bed, as if looking directly at the mess he’d made of me would somehow stain him. “Selene and I are now engaged. Officially.”

“I heard.”

My voice came out steadier than I expected. Steadier than I even felt.

He nodded once, curtly like we were discussing trade routes instead of the moment he finally put the last nail in the coffin of my old life.

“Then you understand why this can’t continue. You being here, I mean.” He paused, his jaw tightening. “It will cause a complication.”

“A complication,” I repeated.

“Don’t.” His voice hardened. “Don’t do that thing where you twist my words. You know exactly what I mean.”

Did I? I wasn’t sure anymore. I wasn’t sure I’d ever known anything about him except that I’d loved him and he’d thrown that love back in my face like it was nothing. Like I was nothing.

“Your presence makes Selene uncomfortable. It makes the pack uncomfortable.” He finally turned to face me, and his expression was carved from ice. “And frankly, it makes me uncomfortable. Because every time I see you, I’m reminded of a mistake I can’t undo.”

The word hit me like a slap.

A mistake.

The night of the full moon. The bond that snapped into place between us. The way he’d looked at me for exactly three seconds like I was everything he’d ever wanted, before his face shuttered and he chose her instead.

That night was a mistake to him.

The child I was carrying was a mistake.

I dug my fingernails into my palm until the sting grounded me.

“What do you want me to do?”

“Leave.” He said it so simply and so coldly, that I almost laughed. “Leave the territory. Leave the pack. Just disappear somewhere no one will ever have to think about you again.”

No one. Not even him. Especially not him.

“I’m already leaving,” I said quietly, gesturing toward the suitcase. “I wasn’t planning to stay.”

“I know you weren’t. But I also know you.” He stepped closer, and the air between us grew heavy. “You’re weak, Aria. You always have been. You couldn’t survive a winter outside this pack without help, and we both know it.”

I wanted to argue. I wanted to tell him that I’d survived eighteen years in a house that hated me, a family that wished I’d never been born, a pack that whispered behind my back every single day. That wasn’t weakness. That was endurance carved deeply into my bones.

But I stayed silent. Let him believe what he wanted. Let him underestimate me.

It would make everything easier.

“I’m not a monster,” he continued, reaching into his jacket. “Despite what you probably think of me.”

He pulled out an envelope. That looks thick and heavy with more money than I’d ever held in my life. And beneath it, was a folded document.

“There’s enough here to keep you comfortable for a long time. And a deed to a house. A small one, in a human town about two days from here. It belonged to my father’s pack, no one uses it anymore.” He held it out to me.

“You’ll be safe there. Far from pack politics and far from everythingelse.”

I stared at the envelope.

This was what my life had come to. A payout. A bribe to disappear quietly. A consolation prize for the girl who’d dared to believe the Moon Goddess had given her something good.

Take it, I told myself. Take it, and let him think you’ll use it. Let him think you’re still the pathetic girl who can’t survive on her own. Then do what you need to do.

I reached out. Took the envelope.

My fingers were steady, it didn’t tremble. That surprised me.

“Thank you,” I said.

Something flickered in his expression. Confusion, maybe. He’d expected tears. Begging. A fight. That was what the old Aria would have done, the girl who’d spent her whole life desperate for someone to choose her.

But that girl had died the moment he chose another woman over our bond.

“That’s it?” he asked. “You’re not going to argue?”

“If I do, would it change anything?”

He didn’t answer. He didn’t have to.

We both knew the truth.

“Leave tonight,” he said finally. “Before anyone notices. It’ll be easier for everyone that way.”

“For you, you mean.”

His eyes darkened. “Yes. For me.”

He turned toward the door, then paused. For one breathless moment, Ihoped. Pathetic, I know.

But I still thought he might say something else. Something human. Something that would acknowledged the invisible thread that had once connected us.

Instead, he said: “Don’t come back.”

And then he was gone.

I stood there for a long time after the door closed. Long enough for the silence to settle around me like a dark shroud. Long enough for the numbness to crack just a little, and letting a sharp splinter of grief slide through.

I looked down at the envelope.

Then I walked to the small dresser, pulled open the bottom drawer, and slid the envelope beneath a stack of old clothes. I wouldn’t burn it. I wouldn’t throw it away. But I wouldn’t spend a single coin of it either. That money was his guilt, not my salvation.

I would build my future with my own hands or not at all.

You’ll never find me, I promised silently. Not there. Not anywhere. I’m going to disappear so completely that even the memory of me will fade.

I finished packing in the dark.

I placed my mother’s photograph on top of my clothes, the one where she was smiling, her eyes bright with a hope I’d never seen in person but had spent my whole life chasing.

Then I wrote a note. Just two words, for no one in particular.

Goodbye, Mother.

Not the mother who’d raised me. The one who’d died bringing me into this world. The one whose death had sealed my fate before I’d even taken my first breath. Had my first cry.

I wondered if she’d fought for me. If she’d known, in those final moments, that her daughter would spend the next eighteen years being punished for existing.

I’d never know. But I could make sure my own child never felt that same weight.

Before dawn, I slipped out of the servants’ quarters and walked toward the forest’s edge. The moon hung low and pale above the trees, a silver sliver watching me go. No one stopped me. No one called my name.

I was just a ghost leaving a world that had never wanted me.

I’m sorry, I whispered to the life inside me. I’m sorry you’ll never know this place. Never know your father. But I swear to you, wherever we end up, you will know love. You will know belonging. Even if I have to build it from nothing.

I stepped past the boundary line. My wolf whined once, it was a mournful sound, and then fell silent.

I didn’t look back.

The sky was beginning to lighten when I finally let myself cry.