Forsaken Luna

CHAPTER FOUR: Millhaven

Three hundred miles is a long way to run on foot, on a bus, on the last of your own two feet, with nothing but a canvas bag and a secret only you and one traitorous Beta know exists.

It took me eleven days.

I want to say I remember the whole journey with some kind of clarity, but the truth is those eleven days blur together into a smear of bus station benches and the particular ache of sleeping sitting up, of eating whatever was cheapest, of jumping at every set of headlights that slowed down near wherever I was standing, certain each time that Ironwood had finally caught up to me.

None of them ever did.

Somewhere around day six, I stopped bracing for it. That was almost scarier than the fear itself, realizing how easy it was to disappear, how little the world outside Ironwood cared about one small omega with an old canvas bag and a secret growing quietly under her ribs. I remember sitting in a diner in some town I never learned the name of, watching a family argue over a shared plate of fries, and thinking that whatever came next, at least no one here already knew what I was worth before I'd said a single word to them.

By the time I stepped off the last bus into Millhaven, a city bigger and louder than anything I'd ever seen, all concrete and neon and human noise, not a single werewolf scent anywhere on the wind, I had four dollars left in my pocket and a growing certainty that I had absolutely no idea what I was doing.

I found the bakery by accident. I was sitting on a bus stop bench three blocks from the station, trying to work out whether four dollars would buy dinner or one more night somewhere with a roof, when the smell hit me, warm bread, cinnamon, butter, and my stomach, traitor that it was, growled loud enough that the woman sweeping the bakery's front step actually laughed out loud.

"That bad, huh?" She was tall, freckled, red hair scraped back under a flour dusted bandana, maybe five years older than me, with the kind of open, unbothered face that made you trust her before you'd said a single word. "Come on. I've got day olds going in the trash anyway, might as well feed a person instead."

That was how I met Nora Whitfield.

I didn't tell her everything that first day, not the pack, not the rejection, not what I was carrying under my jacket that I hadn't told a single soul in this city about. I told her I was running from a bad situation back home and needed work, any work, and she looked at me for a long moment with something sharp and assessing behind her easy smile, and then she said, "I need someone at the register starting tomorrow. Pay's not much but the apartment upstairs is empty and I'm tired of hearing rats in the walls at night."

I cried in the bakery bathroom for ten minutes after she said that, quiet, careful crying, the kind you learn to do when you've never had the luxury of falling apart loudly, and then I washed my face and went back out and told her yes.

The apartment above Whitfield's Bakery was one room with a hot plate and a mattress on the floor and a window that looked out over the fire escape, and it was, without question, the safest place I had ever lived in my entire life.

I got a library card. I read everything I could find about pregnancy, about human hospitals, about how to hide a wolf birth in a place with no pack healer, no moon ceremony, nothing but human doctors who would ask questions I couldn't answer if my daughter came out with claws instead of fingernails.

She didn't, in the end. She came out with ten perfect human looking fingers and a full head of dark hair and a cry so furious the delivery nurse actually laughed and said, "Well, she's got opinions already."

I named her Hazel, for the color her eyes settled into after the first few weeks, not quite hazel at all, actually, but a clear, unmistakable storm grey that made my breath catch every single time she looked up at me, because it was the exact color of eyes I had spent nineteen years never letting myself dream about again.

I held her in that little apartment above the bakery, three hundred miles from the only pack I'd ever known, completely alone except for a human woman with flour on her hands who'd shown up outside on the register schedule the very next morning with a secondhand crib she'd found at a church sale, and I made her a promise.

"I don't know what you are yet," I whispered into her dark hair, while outside the window Millhaven's traffic hummed on, indifferent, endless, safe in its indifference. "Wolf, human, something in between. I don't know if you'll ever shift, or if you'll grow up wanting to know where you came from. But I promise you this, Hazel Calloway, you will never, not one single day of your life, find out what it feels like to be told you're not enough. Not by me. Not by anyone, if I can help it."

She grabbed my finger in her tiny fist and held on with a strength that startled me, and somewhere deep in my chest, in the space where a mate bond had once opened and slammed shut in the space of an hour, something small and fierce and entirely new began, quietly, to grow.

I didn't know yet that three hundred miles away, in a pack house gone cold and struggling under an Alpha who couldn't sleep, couldn't eat, couldn't explain to a single soul why some essential part of him had felt hollowed out since a Moon Ceremony five years wasn't even close to happening yet.

I didn't know that Elias Roy still hadn't told anyone what he'd seen at the border that night.

And I didn't know that in five years, a black car with Ironwood plates was going to pull up outside a bakery in Millhaven, and every single thing I had built with my own two hands was about to be tested by the one person I'd sworn I would never let hurt my daughter the way he'd hurt me.