done

Chapter Three

In the dream, I'm standing in the middle of a ballroom and every voice in the family is aimed at me at once.

Wolf-less wife. Barren wife. Heavy, soft, useless wife. A wife who can't bear children isn't a wife at all.

I try to answer them, but my mouth won't open. I try to run, but my feet are nailed to the floor the same way they were the day Kael came home with Freya on his arm. The voices get louder instead of quieter, closing in from every direction, and I can't find a single face in the crowd that isn't laughing at me. Somewhere behind all of it I hear Kael's voice too, calm, distant, telling someone it's just a room, it's just a name, it's just a wife, nothing that can't be replaced—

Cold water hits me like a slap and I come up gasping, choking, my hands flying out to grab onto anything solid.

Freya sits in the chair beside my bed, an empty basin resting on her knee, wearing a dress the deep blue that marks the lady of this house. My dress. The color reserved for me.

"You looked pathetic lying there." She says it lightly, almost bored, like she's commenting on the weather. "Five years as his wife and you've fallen this far."

Water drips off my chin onto the sheets. My hair is plastered to my face. I push it back with a shaking hand and force my voice steady even though nothing else about me feels steady right now.

"Enjoy the dress while you can. You're a surrogate. Once you give birth, you're gone."

She laughs, and it's not a nervous laugh, it's a real one, the kind that comes from someone who already knows how this ends. "You're still so naive." She leans forward, elbows on her knees, eyes dragging over me the way they always do, cataloguing. "I'm his underboss's daughter. I stood beside Kael when this family fought for the border while you sat here arranging flowers and finishing your plate. My son will have real blood behind him, an heir with a name that means something on the street and in the boardroom. Tell me — how exactly does a family like this send away the mother of its future head?"

Something in my chest drops straight through the floor.

"Everyone already sees it," she continues. "You. Me. Everyone knows which way this is heading. His father's men have been done with you for years — you just haven't been paying attention. It's only a matter of time before they strip your name off the accounts themselves, so you can stop clinging to it like it still means something." Her gaze flicks down my body, unhurried, deliberate. "Especially once they stop pretending your shape has anything to do with childbearing and start calling it what it actually is."

I want to tell her she's wrong. I open my mouth to say it. But the words don't come, because some ugly, honest part of me has been afraid of exactly this since the day Kael put a ring on me over the objections of every man at that table. I was an orphan they pulled off the docks. I have no wolf, no blood, no name behind me, and apparently not even a body anyone here considers fit for the job. I have given this family nothing they can point to and call a victory.

I hate that her words are landing. I hate it more than I've hated anything in five years, because I can feel my own resolve buckling under the weight of something that might actually be true, and she can see it happening on my face, and she's enjoying every second of it.

Then I see it.

A mark on the side of her throat, fresh, dark red, unmistakable. A mate's mark.

My whole body goes cold in a way the water never managed.

For five years I have been the only one who carried that mark from him. It sits under my own collar right now, faded with time but still mine, still proof of something I thought no one could touch. Seeing a fresh one on her skin feels like watching someone else wear my own name.

"Who did that." My voice comes out low, and it's not a question, it's a demand, and I don't recognize how hard it sounds coming out of my own throat.

Freya's hand drifts up to touch it like it's a gift. "Kael, obviously. He wanted to protect the baby, and a mark like this does that better than any bodyguard could." Her smile is slow and satisfied. "He must value us quite a lot to do that."

Us. Not her. Us. Like she and the child are already one unit he's chosen to protect, and I am the thing standing outside that circle looking in.

She stands, smoothing down my color on her body like she's trying it on for good. "You should leave before they make you leave, Wren. Save yourself the humiliation. Nobody in this house is going to value you after this. Not with a body like that standing next to one like mine."

She walks out and leaves the door wide open behind her.

I sit there in a soaked nightgown, water cooling against my skin, and something inside me that has been bending for five years finally, quietly, snaps.

Not sadness. Not this time.

I think of every guard who used to nod when I walked past and doesn't anymore. I think of the one who left me locked in this room to faint from thirst without a second thought, and laughed while he did it. I think of his father's men smiling at Freya's belly like it solved every problem I supposedly caused just by existing. I think of every comment about my plate at family dinners, every pair of eyes that dropped to my waistline before they ever met my face. None of that happened because of anything I did wrong. It happened because the second Kael's attention drifted, this whole family showed me exactly how disposable I've always been to them — my body just gave them an easier place to aim.

My hands stop shaking. That surprises me more than anything else that's happened today. The fear that's lived in my chest for five years is still there, but something harder has climbed on top of it, and for once the harder thing is winning.

I press my hand against my stomach.

They will not do this to my child too.

I won't stand in a hallway and let some old man tell my son or daughter they don't count because their mother came here with no wolf and no name and a body this family decided to treat like a character flaw. I won't let Freya's child grow up calling this house home while mine grows up an afterthought in it, or worse, isn't allowed to grow up in it at all.

I get up. My legs are unsteady but they hold.

I go to the closet and pull out the smallest bag I own, and I don't waste a second deciding what matters. A few changes of clothes. The boots I wore the day I first came to this family, half-starved, with nothing to my name but the clothes on my back. It feels fitting to leave the same way I arrived.

I stop once, at the doorway, and look back at the room.

Five years of my life happened inside these walls. Kael's hands on my face the night he told his father's men he was choosing me no matter what they said, no matter what they said about how I looked doing it. The nights we stayed up talking until the city lights blurred outside the window. The morning I found out I was finally, after everything, pregnant, and I stood in this exact spot and cried from happiness instead of grief.

None of it is enough. It was never going to be enough for people who decided a long time ago that I didn't belong here, in this body, with this name, at this table. I gave this family five years of trying to earn a place that was never actually available to me. I'm done auditioning for it.

I swallow the ache trying to climb up my throat and I turn away from the room.

Some part of me wants to march downstairs, find Kael, and scream every ugly truth in his face before I go. Tell him exactly what his silence cost me. Tell him I heard every word he didn't say when I asked if he'd send her away. But I already know how that ends. He'll reach for my hand, lower his voice, tell me to be reasonable, and some starving part of me will want to believe him all over again. I can't afford to believe him one more time. Not with a child depending on me to be smarter than that now.

The hallway outside is empty.

No guards. Not one. They were posted at every door in this penthouse yesterday, and now, when I actually need to move without being seen, there's nobody here at all — which tells me exactly whose hand cleared them out, and exactly how little time I have before that hand notices I've used the opening.

I grip the strap of my bag, force down the tremor threatening to take over my whole body, and step into the elevator.

Whatever is waiting for me outside these walls, it cannot be worse than staying here and watching them erase me one room, one mark, one smile at a time.

I start walking, and I don't look back again.