From Fat to untouchable queen

ghost zero

Chapter Two: Ghost Zero

I didn't sleep. I sat on the edge of the bathtub most of the night with the tap running so nobody in the hall would hear me, and somewhere around five in the morning I stopped crying and just sat there, empty, listening to water go down a drain.

When the sun comes up I get to my feet because staying on that floor another minute feels like agreeing to something. I walk to the mirror and I make myself stand in front of it a long time before I can make myself look at it directly.

Frizzy hair pulled back so tight it's given me a headache since seven this morning. Glasses too big for my face, the kind Derek picked out for me himself years ago, said they made me look "respectable." My reflection stares back at me like a stranger wearing my clothes.

I lift my shirt.

The scar sits low on my left side, pale and thick, the skin around it puckered where they stitched me back together. I press two fingers against it the way I used to when I needed proof I was still real. I gave a piece of my own body to a man who called me the size of two cows before the sun even came up. I gave up my own health for a family that spent five years teaching me exactly how little that was worth to them.

Something in my chest stops aching and starts burning instead.

I pick up my phone before I can talk myself out of it. Scroll past the contacts Derek knows about — the hairdresser, the pack physician, the school Jay attends — down to one saved under three letters and nothing else. A recruiter I met once at a conference I wasn't supposed to be at, back when I still let myself have a life outside these walls. He offered me a position that would have made me more money in a month than Derek's entire territory generates in a year. I said no. I told him I had a family. I told him that like it meant something.

My thumb hovers over the contact for one second, and then I press dial.

It picks up on the first ring, like he's been waiting.

"Is the offer still available." My voice comes out sharp, laced with something broken clean off. No hello. No apology for the years of silence.

"Of course it is." A pause on the other end, careful. "I'll admit, I'm confused. You turned this down the last time. What changed?"

"A lot."

Another pause, shorter this time. "Well. We're always open to having you." A small, satisfied exhale, like he already knew this call was coming eventually. "Welcome back, Ghost Zero."

I hang up before he can say anything else. Before I can hear myself change my mind.

I start packing without deciding to. My hands just move — dresser drawers, closet, the bottom shelf where I keep the laptop nobody in this house has ever asked about because nobody in this house has ever asked me anything.

Word travels fast in a pack house. By the time I'm on my second bag there are staff lined up in the hallway outside my door, not even pretending to have somewhere else to be. Some of them I've known for five years. I brought one of them soup when her mate died. I covered another one's shift for a month when her daughter was sick. Not one of them offers to help me carry a bag. Not one of them asks if I'm okay.

They just watch, arms folded, faces unreadable, the way you'd watch weather finally break after a drought you'd stopped believing would ever end.

I carry my bags down the stairs myself.

They're in the kitchen. Of course they are. Rachel's spooning cereal into Jay's mouth like she's done it every morning of his life instead of five weeks. Derek's got his coffee in both hands, reading something on his phone, completely unbothered, like yesterday never happened, like I didn't watch him finish inside another woman twelve hours ago.

Jay sees me first. "Mum, are you leaving?"

They all turn at once.

Derek's face goes hard immediately, like my having luggage in my hands is the inconvenience here. Rachel doesn't even try to hide it — there's a smile pulling at the corner of her mouth that she's not bothering to smother.

"Where the hell do you think you're going, Rose?" Derek sets his mug down too hard. "Why do you always have to make a scene out of everything?"

"A scene." I almost laugh. "I'm giving you exactly what you want."

Jay slides off his chair and runs toward me. "Mummy, are you going away?"

I look down at him. The child I carried for nine months, the one who almost took my life coming into this world, the one whose voice lifted my whole chest an hour ago even after everything. I look at him and I make myself say it steady.

"Yes. I'm leaving." I crouch down so we're eye level, keep my voice soft even though nothing in me is soft right now. "You can be with Aunty Rachel now. From now on, Mummy won't embarrass you anymore."

A smile breaks across his face. Fast. Easy. Like I just told him summer break got extended.

"Really? Aunt Rachel's my new mummy now?" He's already turning. "Aunt Rachel's way prettier than you." And he runs. Back to her, back to the chair, back to the family he's decided he'd rather have.

I stand up and walk for the door.

Derek gets there first, grabs my wrist.

"Let go of me, Derek."

"You're really going to leave? Just like that?" His grip tightens. "Stop being stubborn. Both of us know you have no money, no job. How exactly do you plan on surviving?"

I yank my hand out of his, harder than I mean to. "How I survive isn't your concern anymore. But trust me when I say I would rather beg for scraps on the street than spend one more night under this roof with you."

I turn to go again. He steps in front of me.

"So that's it." His jaw tightens. "Five years, and you're just going to walk out over one mistake."

"One mistake." I stare at him. "Derek, I watched you finish inside another woman while looking me in the eye. You told me I disgust you. You told me you never loved me. Which part of that am I supposed to file under 'mistake'?"

He doesn't answer that. He never does, when the question actually costs him something.

"What about Jay?"

I freeze for exactly one second. Then I smile, and it costs me more than anything I've said all morning.

"I'm sure he'll be perfectly fine without me."

"Fine, then." Derek's voice drops, flat and final, the same tone he used last night. "You've made your choice, Rose. But get this straight — the second you walk out that door, don't bother coming back. You're dead to us."

I lift my chin. "My lawyer will send you the paperwork."

I walk out.

The rain hits the second I step off the porch, hard and cold and immediate, soaking through my shirt before I've made it ten feet down the drive. I keep walking. I don't look back at the house, at the windows, at any of it.

"Luna Rose."

I stop. Turn around despite myself.

Rachel's standing under the porch overhang, dry, unbothered, watching me get drenched like it's entertainment.

"Oops. Sorry." She doesn't sound sorry. "You're not Luna anymore. Just Rose."

She smirks and tosses something at me — a jacket, my old one, landing wet in my arms before I can catch it right. "I should be a little kind to you. Since you literally raised me, after all."

She steps off the porch with an umbrella of her own, unbothered by the mud, and walks close enough that I can smell her perfume under the rain.

"And don't worry about a thing." Her voice is honey-smooth, the same voice she used last night with her hand on my husband's shoulder. "I'll take very good care of this pack. As Luna." A pause, deliberate. "And of your husband. And your son."

Something in me goes very still.

I could tell her right now what I actually am. I could tell her that the pack she's about to inherit is sitting on debt Derek has been hiding from the council for two years, debt I know about because I've quietly been the one keeping the books balanced enough that nobody noticed. I could tell her that "Luna" comes with more weight than a title and a wardrobe. I could tell her a hundred things that would wipe that smirk clean off her face.

I don't say any of it. Not yet. Some things are worth more said later, from somewhere she can't reach me.

"Well." My voice comes out sharper than the rain, sharper than I expect it to. "Have fun being Luna."

I turn and walk to the cab idling at the end of the drive, rain running down the back of my neck, my old jacket soaked through in my arms, five years of my life shrinking down to whatever fits in the trunk of a car I called myself.

I don't look back at the house once.

The driver doesn't ask where to. I already gave him the address before I ever picked up that phone call this morning — some part of me deciding before the rest of me caught up. I climb in, shut the door, and for the first time since I smelled that room last night, I stop shaking.

The city outside the window blurs into gray and streetlight as we pull away, and somewhere underneath the rain and the ache in my ribs where that scar sits, a name settles into place where "Rose" used to be.

Forty minutes later the cab drops me outside a storage facility on the edge of the city, the kind with no sign and a keypad instead of a receptionist. I haven't been here in five years. My code still works on the door.

Inside, under a tarp I put there myself back when I still thought I might need it, is a bag I packed the week before my wedding and never once unpacked. A passport under a name that isn't Rose. A hard drive I built by hand. Enough cash, wrapped and vacuum-sealed, to disappear completely if I ever needed to.

I stand there dripping rainwater onto concrete, staring at the version of myself I locked away five years ago because I thought love was worth more than power.

I was wrong about that too.

I pick up the bag.

Somewhere behind me is a pack house with my son's laughter in it, a husband drinking coffee like nothing happened, a woman I raised wearing my title before the ink on my exit is even dry. Somewhere ahead of me is a version of myself I buried on purpose because I thought I didn't need her anymore.

I was wrong about a lot of things. I don't intend to be wrong about this one.

Ghost Zero is going back to work.