Rejected by my Mate, Chosen by his Enemy
I held my open hand out over the sand.
"I am going to ask. Come to me because you want to. Or do not, and I will love you anyway. But it has to be yours. Come home, little one, if you choose it. Choose."
For a moment that lasted a year, my daughter knelt on the sand between the woman who owned her and the mother who would not.
And then Selene turned away from the glowing vial, and she crawled to my open hand.
She did it slow, and wobbling, and entirely on her own, out from under the pull of the blood and across the last stretch of sand, and she put her small hand in mine and pressed her wet face into my wrist, and she chose me.