THE LUNA THEY ABANDONED

Chapter 2: Walking Away With Nothing

Sunrise came faster than I wanted it to and slower than the pack did.

By the time the sky started going grey at the edges, two of Marcus's betas were already standing at the end of my driveway, arms crossed, doing a very bad job of pretending they weren't watching my front door. I packed what fit in one duffel bag. A photo of my mother. Two changes of clothes. The boots she'd bought me the winter before she died, because she said a girl who ran with wolves for a living needed boots that could survive it.

Everything else — the furniture, the house itself, six years of birthdays and pack dinners and a life I'd thought was mine — belonged to the pack now. That was the law. Rejected wolves left with what they could carry and nothing else. Nobody had ever explained to me how thoroughly "nothing else" was meant, until I was standing in the doorway of a house that wasn't mine anymore, holding a bag that weighed almost nothing.

"You've got until the tree line," one of the betas said. Jonah. I used to babysit him.

"I'm going," I said.

He had the decency to look uncomfortable about it, at least. Small mercies.

I didn't cry walking down that driveway. I want that on record somewhere, even if it's only here, even if nobody's ever going to read it. I didn't cry until I was well past the boundary marker, past the old oak with the claw scars in the bark that every pack kid used to dare each other to touch at night, past the point where the packed dirt road turned into asphalt and the trees thinned out into something that could have been anywhere, any town, any life that wasn't the one I'd just lost.

Then I cried. Hard, ugly, walking-and-crying-at-the-same-time crying, the kind where you can't get a full breath in because your chest is doing two things at once.

The mark under my collarbone hadn't faded. If anything it had gotten worse overnight — I'd checked it twice in the bathroom mirror before I left, watching those thin silver lines creep another half inch toward my ribs each time, like a plant growing in fast motion. It didn't look like the rejection scars I'd seen on other wolves over the years. Those went an angry red for a week, then settled into something dull and grey, a story written permanently into someone's skin. Mine was still bright. Mine was still moving.

I didn't know what that meant. I was too tired and too heartbroken to spend much time wondering.

Somewhere around mile four, my body forgot how tired it was and my mind decided that was a good time to remember being six years old.

I was sitting on the kitchen floor of the house I'd just walked out of, except it was smaller then, the version of the house from before we'd added the back room. My mother was braiding my hair too tight, the way she did when she was distracted, and I was asking her the question every six-year-old eventually asks — the one about being born, about babies, about where I came from.

"You weren't born into the pack, sweetheart," she'd said. Her hands had gone still for a second, just a second, in my hair. "You were found."

"Found where?"

"Somewhere you were safer, once we found you, than where you'd been before." She'd gone back to braiding like she hadn't said anything strange at all. "Doesn't matter where. You're mine now. That's the only part that matters."

I remembered asking again, later, older, more insistent the way kids get when an answer doesn't sit right in their stomach. I remembered her getting quiet in a specific way, a way I'd learned by nine or ten meant the conversation was over whether I agreed to end it or not. I remembered never getting a real answer, and I remembered, too, the one time I'd pushed harder than usual and she'd looked at me with something close to fear in her eyes, just for a second, before she covered it with a smile and changed the subject to something safe. I remembered deciding, eventually, the way kids decide things to make peace with them, that it wasn't important. That I was pack. That the how of it didn't matter next to the fact of it.

Standing on the shoulder of a highway with my whole life in a duffel bag and a strange silver mark eating its way toward my heart, six years old, twenty-two years old, all at once — it mattered. It mattered so much I could barely breathe around it.

Found. Not born. Found where. Found from what.

Nobody had ever told me. My mother was three years dead and couldn't tell me now. The pack that had raised me had just told me, in the clearest possible language, that I wasn't theirs to keep asking.

I don't remember much of miles five through nine. I remember my feet hurting and then not hurting, which I know now is a bad sign and didn't know then to be afraid of. I remember headlights passing without slowing, the particular loneliness of being visible to hundreds of strangers in cars and invisible to every single one of them. I remember the mark pulsing under my collarbone in time with my heartbeat, faster than it should have been going, hot enough that I kept pressing my palm flat against it like that would do something, anything, to slow it down. Every few minutes I told myself I'd stop at the next mile marker, just to catch my breath, and every mile marker I kept walking past it instead, because some stubborn part of me still believed that stopping meant admitting how bad this actually was.

I remember thinking, somewhere around mile ten, that I should probably sit down before I fell down.

I didn't get the chance to choose which one happened first.

The world tilted sideways in a way that had nothing to do with the road. I remember the guardrail coming up fast on my left, my hand reaching for it and missing, gravel under my knees and then under my cheek, the duffel bag skidding a few feet away from me like it had somewhere better to be. Headlights swept across the pavement in front of me, too bright, too close, and I remember thinking, with a strange, distant calm that felt like it belonged to someone else — someone who'd already accepted how this was going to end — that I was probably about to get hit by a car on the side of a highway less than a day after being rejected by the only family I'd ever known, and that would honestly track, given how the last twenty-four hours had gone.

Tires shrieked against asphalt. I heard the sound before I understood I was the reason for it.

The last thing I registered, before the dark folded in over everything, was a car door opening somewhere close, and a man's voice — sharp, urgent, nothing like Killian's careful Alpha calm — saying a single word.

"Hey—"

Then nothing.

I didn't know his name yet. I didn't know that the car that almost killed me was about to become the only safe place I had left. I didn't know that the mark on my chest, the one nobody in my pack had ever seen before, was about to catch the attention of someone who'd spent his whole life looking for exactly that kind of thing.

All I knew, in the half second before I lost consciousness completely, was that I'd walked away from everything I had.

And I still had no idea, yet, how much further there was left to fall.