My Fated Mate, My Enemy, My Second Chance

Chapter Four

Mira POV

"Mom?" My voice came out cracked, barely a whisper, but she heard me over the noise of the crowd.

She reached me and pulled me hard against her, shielding me from the crowd's stares with her own body, and I felt her shaking, her whole frame trembling like she was the one who had just been rejected in front of hundreds of people. "We need to leave. Now."

"Mom, what did you call me? That wasn't my name. You've never called me that before."

"Not here." Her voice was a blade, sharp and final. "Please, Mira. Not here. I will tell you everything, I promise, but not here."

The rejection pain was still tearing through my chest, sharp enough that I could barely walk straight, my legs unsteady beneath me, but my mother half carried me through the crowd, past whispers and stares, past Bree's triumphant little smile, past the Alpha's stunned face, out into the cold night air where the noise of the great hall finally faded behind us.

I didn't see Ryder again before we got in the car. I didn't know if he watched us go, if he felt even a flicker of what I was feeling as we walked away. Part of me, the traitorous, aching part still tangled up in a bond he had just tried to sever, hoped he did. I hoped it hurt him even a fraction of how much it hurt me. The rest of me just wanted to disappear into the seat and never be looked at again.

We drove in silence for twenty minutes before my mother finally spoke, her hands white knuckled on the wheel the entire time, her eyes flicking constantly to the rearview mirror like she expected someone to be following us.

"Your name," she said quietly, "isn't really Mira Hart."

The pain in my chest went cold and strange, a different kind of ache settling in underneath the first one. "What?"

"Your father was Alpha of the Hallow Ridge pack. Before you were born, before I even knew I was pregnant, his own Beta staged a coup." Her voice cracked, and for the first time in my life I heard my mother sound truly afraid. "He killed your father. Killed most of our ranked warriors in a single night. I got out with you inside me and I never stopped running, not once, not for ten years. I changed our names. I hid us in the smallest, quietest pack territory I could find, somewhere nobody would think to look. I taught you to be invisible because the wolf who murdered your father is still out there, still Alpha of Hallow Ridge, and if he ever found out my daughter, the true born heir, survived, he would finish what he started that night."

"Stop the car."

She did, pulling onto the shoulder with shaking hands, the engine ticking as it idled in the dark. I stared at her in the dim glow of the dashboard lights, my whole world rearranging itself around a truth I never saw coming, every memory of our life together suddenly looking different, sharper, full of things I had never noticed before. The way she used to check every window before bed. The way she flinched whenever a stranger's car idled too long outside our house. The way she never once let anyone take a photo of me, not even at school, always finding some excuse to step out of frame. None of it had made sense before. Now all of it did, all at once, like a dam breaking.

"I'm not who I thought I was," I whispered, the words feeling foreign in my mouth, like they belonged to someone else entirely.

"You're exactly who you always were." My mother reached for my hand, holding it like she was afraid I might disappear. "You're just finally allowed to know it. I'm sorry I took so long. I was trying to keep you alive, Mira. That was always the only thing I was trying to do."

My wolf, still raw from the rejection, still aching from the broken bond, went suddenly, sharply alert, her whining replaced by something harder, something almost fierce. Heir, she said, testing the word like it fit something in us that had always been there, buried under years of hiding. We're not weak, Mira. We were never weak. We were hiding, and there's a difference.

I thought of every bruise I let Bree give me without fighting back. Every fight I threw on purpose. Every time I made myself smaller so nobody would look twice, so nobody would ask questions I couldn't answer. Ten years of hiding a fire that was always mine, banked down so low I had almost forgotten it was there at all.

Something shifted in my chest, hard and final, right alongside the pain of the rejection bond. Grief and fury, twisting together into something new and sharp, something with teeth.

"I want to know everything," I told my mother. "Every name. Every detail. I want to know who did this to us and why."

She hesitated, fear and something like pride warring on her face in the dim light. "Mira, once we start down this road there's no turning back. I need you to understand that."

"I'm done hiding." My voice didn't shake anymore, steadier than it had been in hours. "If Ryder Blackwood didn't want a weak, invisible mate, fine. He rejected a lie anyway. He has no idea who I actually am, and honestly, neither did I until about ten minutes ago."

Headlights flashed suddenly in the rearview mirror, a car pulling up fast behind us on the empty road, too fast, too deliberate, closing the distance in a way that made my stomach drop.

My mother's face drained of all color, and for one terrible second neither of us moved, both frozen by the sight of those headlights growing brighter in the mirror. "Mira, get down."

The car doors slammed outside before I could move.