The unloved Luna's one-night mistake

Chapter 6: The Escape

I pack in the dark, because I don't trust myself to do this in the light without stopping to reconsider every single decision my hands are making.

Lyra sleeps fitfully in her bed down the hall, worn thin from crying, from the confusion of watching her mother collapse in the middle of a crowded hall and not understanding why. I check on her every few minutes as I move through my rooms, filling a single travel bag with what little I can carry — a few changes of clothes for each of us, her favorite stuffed fox, the small collection of things I've quietly set aside over the past three days since I first opened that locked cabinet and understood exactly what kind of house I was living in.

It isn't much. I own almost nothing outright in this house. Everything here — the jewelry, the wardrobe, even the modest savings I thought I'd managed to build over three careful years — belongs, in the ways that matter under pack law, to my husband. My former husband. The word still feels strange in my mouth, too large and too small at once, like a shoe that doesn't yet fit the shape of my foot.

The bond's absence is the strangest part of all of it. I keep reaching for it without meaning to — some old habit of the body checking for a presence that isn't there anymore, the way your tongue keeps finding the gap where a tooth used to be. Every time I find only silence, I feel a fresh wave of something that isn't quite grief and isn't quite relief, some third thing I don't yet have a name for.

I wake Lyra a little after midnight, gently, my hand smoothing back her dark hair. "Baby. We need to go on a little adventure."

She blinks up at me, still half in a dream. "Now? It's dark."

"I know, sweetheart. But we need to be quiet and quick, all right? Like a game."

She nods, trusting me the way she has trusted me every single day of her small life, and something in my chest aches at how easily she hands that trust over, how little she suspects that the ground beneath both our feet has just fundamentally shifted.

I carry her, half-asleep against my shoulder, down the servants' stairs at the back of the manor — the same stairs I've walked a thousand times overseeing deliveries and staff schedules, and never once imagined I'd use to flee my own home. The house is quiet at this hour, most of the staff asleep, the few night guards positioned at the main entrances rather than the smaller doors reserved for deliveries and service.

I make it as far as the garage before someone finds me.

It's not Killian. It's Marcus — no, wait, I catch myself, that's wrong, Marcus belongs to another pack entirely, another story not yet begun — it's Dorian, Killian's Beta, standing in the doorway with an expression I can't quite read in the dim light, arms crossed, blocking my path to the car I'd hoped to take.

"Luna." He still uses the title, out of old habit or perhaps simple courtesy, though we both know it no longer applies. "The Alpha asked me to speak with you before you left."

My arms tighten instinctively around Lyra. "I have nothing left to discuss with him."

"He isn't stopping you." Dorian's voice is quieter than I expect, almost gentle, and I remember, distantly, that he was never unkind to me in three years, simply loyal to a man who never deserved that loyalty. "He wants you to know that. You're free to go, both of you." A pause, and something shifts in his expression, something almost like reluctance. "But your accounts have been frozen. Your identification documents are being held pending review by the council. He believes—" Dorian hesitates, choosing his next words with visible care. "He believes you'll return within the week, once you understand what it means to have nothing."

The words land like a physical blow, and for a moment I can't speak at all.

Frozen accounts. Held documents. Not a chase, not a fight to keep me — something far colder and, I realize with a sick lurch in my stomach, far more effective. He isn't trying to stop me from leaving. He's simply making certain I have nothing to leave with, confident that hunger and desperation will accomplish what love never could: bring me crawling back to Ironclaw within days, humbled and grateful for whatever scraps of a marriage he's willing to offer me afterward.

"Tell him," I say, and I'm surprised by how steady my voice comes out, "that he has profoundly misjudged me."

Dorian studies me for a long moment, and something in his face — some flicker of respect I never expected from him — settles into place. "For what it's worth, Luna—" he catches himself, "—Sera. I hope you prove him wrong."

He steps aside from the doorway.

I have perhaps three hundred dollars in cash, tucked into the lining of my travel bag from months of setting aside small amounts against some unnamed future emergency I never let myself fully imagine. I have no identification. I have a sleeping three-year-old and a car that technically belongs to a household I no longer belong to, though I take it anyway, because I refuse to walk out of these gates on foot with my daughter in my arms.

The drive out of Ironclaw territory takes nearly two hours, mountain roads twisting dark and empty beneath a moon that offers no particular comfort tonight. Lyra sleeps in the back seat, one small hand curled around the stuffed fox I packed for her, entirely unaware that the borders we're crossing are ones she will likely never cross back over the same way again.

I don't cry until I see the territory marker for Ironclaw lands recede in my rearview mirror, the old stone boundary post that has marked the edge of my world for three years shrinking smaller and smaller until it disappears entirely into darkness behind me.

Then I cry the way I haven't allowed myself to cry in longer than I can remember — not quietly, not composed, not performing grief for an audience that expects me to bear it gracefully, but raw and shaking, both hands gripping the steering wheel as the road blurs in front of me, pulling over onto the shoulder because I genuinely cannot see well enough to keep driving.

I cry for the girl I was at twenty-one, so desperately grateful to be chosen that she never once asked whether she was actually wanted. I cry for three years of mornings waking alone in a cold bed, of dinners eaten in solitary silence, of a love I gave completely to a man who only ever gave me a fraction of himself in return, and even that fraction, I now understand, was never truly mine at all.

I cry, too, for what's ahead — a road with no clear destination, a bank account with three hundred dollars in it, a daughter depending entirely on me now with no safety net beneath either of us should I fail her.

But underneath all of it, quiet and stubborn and entirely new, something else is beginning to take root. Something that feels, terrifyingly and wonderfully, like the very first breath of my own life.

I wipe my face, check on Lyra sleeping soundly in the back seat, and pull back onto the empty road, driving toward a horizon I have absolutely no plan for.

I have no way of knowing yet that within a week, that horizon will lead me into a seedy border-town bar, into the arms of a stranger with storm-gray eyes who will change everything I think I know about what I'm capable of surviving.

Or that the man waiting for me back at Ironclaw has no intention whatsoever of letting either of us disappear quietly into someone else's story.