From Neglected Luna to Pack Heir

CHAPTER TWO: THE DISCARDED GIFT

The stars were starting to blur at their edges, the clouds rolling in low and grey, when Elara pushed herself up off the grass and brushed the dew from her palms. The hill was quiet except for the wind threading through the trees below. She stood there for a moment, the cold settling into her joints, and then she turned and walked back down toward the packhouse.

She went back because the dagger was still there, and the dagger was hers. She had made it. She was not leaving it behind for Selena Drake to keep as a trophy.

The bedroom door was unlocked. The room smelled of jasmine wax and something else, something musky and intimate that turned her stomach. The bed had been straightened, which was almost more insulting than finding it in disarray. Someone had tried to tidy the evidence. The candles were still burning.

She unwrapped it carefully and lifted the lid, and the dagger lay in its casing, gleaming under the lamp, the silver filigree catching the light in a way that made it look almost alive. She ran her thumb along the flat of the blade. The engravings were precise. Microscopic in their detail. The AI targeting circuit was built into the hilt, disguised as decorative scrollwork, the kind of layered craftsmanship that had taken her forty separate attempts to get right.

She had made this for him. Months of work. She had wanted to tell him everything tonight. That she was Elias. That she had always been Elias. That the company he admired and used for pack defense and called revolutionary was built in her basement by a wolfless Omega with nothing but stubbornness and one mysterious investment that changed everything.

She had wanted to see his face.

The side door opened quietly, and Marcus Thorn stepped in, his broad frame filling the doorway, his weathered face carrying the particular weight of a man who has been ashamed of someone he loves for a long time. He was Damien's father, and he was aging in the way that hard men aged, all deep lines and careful eyes.

"Elara," he said quietly.

"You don't have to come in."

"I know." He came in anyway, crossing to where she stood and settling a heavy hand on her shoulder with the careful gentleness of someone touching something that might break. "I am sorry. I want you to know I mean that."

"Did you know?"

He was quiet for a moment too long. "I suspected. In the last few weeks. I should have said something."

She looked at him. "You should have."

"I know." He did not defend himself, which she appreciated. "He is my son, and I have failed him by not raising him better. And I have failed you by staying quiet." His jaw moved. "He is a fool. An absolute fool. And I will tell him so every day for the rest of my life."

"You'll tire yourself out."

The corner of Marcus's mouth moved, something almost like a sad smile. "Your chest. Is it bad tonight?"

She glanced down. She had pressed her hand over her sternum without realizing it. She dropped it to her side. "Mira says it's stress."

"Mira says a lot of things." The way he said it was careful. Measured. Like he was choosing not to say the rest of what he thought.

"What are you not telling me?"

Before he could answer, the door swung open hard.

Damien filled the frame with the energy of a man who had been drinking just enough to stop filtering himself. His eyes went to Elara, then to his father, and the look that crossed his face was the particular ugliness of someone who feels cornered and decides offense is the safer play.

"Of course," he said. "You're already running to console her."

"I am talking to her, yes," Marcus said evenly. "Someone should."

"She doesn't need consoling, Father. She needs a reality check." Damien stepped into the room, his gaze moving to the dagger in Elara's hands, and something shifted in his expression. He moved toward her and took it from the case with the casual authority of a man who assumed everything in the room belonged to him.

He turned it over in his hands.

"Where did you get this?" he said.

"I made it."

He looked up. "What?"

"I said I made it."

A beat of silence. Then Damien let out a short, sharp laugh that had nothing amused in it. "Right. You made an Elias blade." He held it up, tilting it toward the light. "The inscription. The circuit work. The silver alloy." His voice was tipping toward contempt. "Do you know how insulting this is? Someone sold you a counterfeit and told you it was Elias, and you were foolish enough to believe it."

"I know what it is," she said. "I built it."

"Elara." He said her name like a parent addressing a stubborn child. "Elias is a company. A serious company. They do not sell to individuals. They do not sell, period. They contract. This is a fake, and a bad one, and if anyone in this pack is found holding forged Elias merchandise, it will put us in a terrible position."

"You are holding a genuine Elias prototype," she said. "The serial code is in the hilt. Check it."

"I am not checking a fake serial code."

"Damien." Marcus stepped forward. "Listen to her."

"I am not doing this." Damien set the dagger down hard on the dresser and turned to face Elara with the full weight of his displeasure. "You come back from one of your ghost hunts, you find something that upsets you, and your response is to pull a stunt like this. What are you doing, exactly? Trying to sabotage us? Making us look like fools in front of Elias's name?"

"I was trying to give you an anniversary gift," she said. "That is all. At least until I found you f*****g another women in my bed."

"Don't." His voice dropped. "Don't act like tonight was going to be some perfect reunion. You are never here, Elara."

He dropped it. The blade hit the floor with a sharp clang and skidded two feet across the wood.

Something in her chest split cleanly in two.

"Whatever game you are running," Damien said, "it should stops now."

He walked out. Marcus followed rushed behind him.

Elara sighed and picked the knife again. Like she always suspected. No one would ever believe her. They will always choose accusations instead.

Selena suddenly appeared in the doorway less than a minute later, as though she had been waiting in the corridor, which she had been. Her silk robe was dark green and barely tied. She looked at the dagger on the floor and then at me and her expression was a particular kind of satisfied that required an audience to mean anything.

"You still do not understand, do you," she said. "He chose. He chose me. And the pack chose. There is nothing to fight for here, Elara, because you already lost." She moved into the room and snatched up the dagger from the her hands, turning it in her fingers. "This is actually beautiful work. It is a shame the person who gave it to you wasted it on a marriage that was finished before it started."

"Put it down, Selena."

"Your weak blood was always the problem." She turned the blade slowly, watching the light move on it. "Everyone in this pack knew it except you. Damien wanted power and you handed it to him and expected that to be enough. Love does not work that way. Especially not for an Alpha." Her voice dropped. "Especially not for a woman who cannot even shift."

Elara moved forward by instinct. "Put that down."

Selena looked at her with a smile that reached nowhere near her eyes.

And then she drove the blade into her own side.

The sound Selena made was immediate and theatrical and enormous, a scream that bounced off every wall in the room and poured into the hallway. She staggered back, one hand clutching the wound, blood spreading dark and fast through the silk of her robe, her expression cycling from the brief, clinical flatness of someone in control to the wide-eyed devastation of someone performing agony.

"She stabbed me!" Selena screamed. "She stabbed me, she knows about the baby and she stabbed me!"

Elara's hands were on her before she could think, pressing the nearest bedsheet against the wound, her training taking over, her fingers pushing firm against the seeping cut while her mind ran three steps behind the situation and then caught up all at once.

Damien's roar filled the room. Marcus was shouting. Feet thundered in the hallway. And Elara stood over her cousin with blood on her hands and the truth locked behind her teeth, knowing that no one in this room was going to listen to a word of it.

"Get her away from me!" Selena sobbed, reaching for Damien's hand. "She tried to kill our baby."

Elara looked up at Damien.

And for the second time in one night, she watched him look at her and choose not to believe her.