All Chapters of The Bastard Luna: His Unwanted Mate: Chapter 1 - Chapter 7

Elara’s povMy parents left first.Selene lingered. Of course she did — Selene always lingered when there was something left to take from me. She stood in the doorway with her arms wrapped tight around herself, mascara smudged in dark half-moons beneath her eyes, looking for all the world like the one who’d been wronged here. Like she was the one whose whole life had just been folded up and handed back to her in pieces.“Selene.” I hated how much desperation bled into my voice when I said her name. I reached for her anyway, because I was stupid and I was terrified and she was the last person in that house who might still look at me like I was worth something. I knew what she was capable of, I knew exactly how much she enjoyed watching me scramble. But I reached for her anyway, because when you’re drowning you’ll grab at anything — even the hand that pushed you in. “Please, talk to Father. Tell him I would never do this to you on purpose, I don’t want to leave home, Selene, please……”

Elara povI left in the dead of night with nothing but my bag and the little money I’d managed to hide away, slipping past the pack borders while the moon was thin and the guards weren’t watching closely enough. By morning I’d reached a small human town an hour’s walk from the territory line, anonymous among people who had never once heard my name spoken with contempt. It should have felt like freedom. Mostly it just felt like falling, with no idea yet where I’d land.I was sitting outside a bakery, doing the math on how far my coins might stretch, when a voice I half-recognized said my name.“Elara?”I looked up into the face of an older woman, gray-haired now, and something in my memory stirred—she’d kept house in my father’s residence, years ago, before she vanished from it without explanation when I was still a child.Nessa sat down across from me without waiting to be asked, and her eyes moved over my split lip and the bruises shadowing my jaw with an expression that needed no wo

Elara povThe room cost forty-two dollars a week. I counted every bill and coin I had three times before I knocked on the landlord’s door, certain that if I was even a dollar short he’d turn me away and I’d have nowhere left to go. I wasn’t short. I had forty-seven dollars and some change — enough for the first week and almost nothing left over. I stood in the doorway of the smallest room I had ever seen in my life and told myself it was enough. It had a lock. It had four walls. After the omega quarters, after the alley, after everything, a room with a lock felt like the closest thing to luxury I could imagine.The landlord was a heavyset human man named Gerald who smelled like coffee and pipe tobacco and had absolutely no interest in where I’d come from or why a young woman was renting a room with a bag that held everything she owned. He gave me a key, told me the bathroom was shared, hot water ran out by seven in the morning, and left. I stood alone in the center of my forty-two