The Forsaken Omega's Second Chance

Chapter seven

Elara's POV

I had forgotten, in four years of pack life, what it felt like to be entirely alone.

Not the loneliness of an unhappy marriage — I had grown intimately familiar with that particular flavor of solitude, the kind that exists in a crowded hall, in a shared bed, in the small daily indignities of being overlooked by the one person who was supposed to see you clearly. This was different. This was the road stretching empty in front of me and behind me, no pack patrol trailing at a discreet distance the way it always had when I traveled as Luna, no expectation waiting for me at either end of the day. Just my own two feet against the packed dirt of the southern road, and the weight of two bags against my shoulders, and the enormous, echoing silence of a life with no one currently responsible for it but me.

It should have terrified me. For the first hour, it did.

I had left before the pack fully woke, which meant I avoided the particular cruelty of an audience for my departure, but it also meant I had not thought to ask Old Mabel for provisions, had not thought, in the numb clarity of that final night, to plan the practical mechanics of a three-day walk with any real care. By midday I was hungry in a way I had not been hungry since I was a child, and my feet, unused to more than the short distances of pack grounds, had already begun to blister inside shoes meant for standing gracefully in meeting halls rather than walking any real distance at all.

I sat down on a fallen log at the side of the road sometime in the early afternoon, pulled off my left shoe, and stared at the raw, angry blister forming across my heel with something between despair and grim amusement.

You spent four years learning to run a household, I told myself, and never once learned to pack for a journey.

It was, I thought, rather a perfect illustration of everything wrong with the life I'd just left. I had been extraordinarily competent at being useful to other people. I had never once been taught, or taught myself, how to be useful to myself.

I bound the blister as best I could with a strip torn from the hem of my least favorite dress, put my shoe back on, and kept walking, because there was nothing else to do. The alternative was to sit on that log until someone found me, and I did not know who, in that moment, I imagined might come looking.

I met no one on the road that afternoon, which I was grateful for, and precious little that evening beyond a farmer's cart heading in the opposite direction, its driver giving me a curious look as he passed — a woman alone on the southern road, dressed too finely for the walking she was clearly doing, carrying her own bags rather than being carried by someone else's effort. I did not stop to explain myself. I was not entirely sure, if I was honest, that I could have explained myself even if I'd wanted to.

I found a place to sleep that night in the hollow beneath an old oak a little way off the road, and I want to say that I lay awake grieving, that the enormity of what I'd lost kept me from rest the way it had the night before. But exhaustion, it turned out, was a mercy I had not expected. My body, unused to real physical effort, simply gave out somewhere after the sun set, and I slept harder and more dreamlessly than I had in months, curled small against the cold with my two bags for a pillow.

I woke before dawn, stiff and cold and hungrier than before, and found, digging through my things with some desperation, a small paper packet of dried fruit that Old Mabel must have slipped into my bag without my noticing — a final, quiet kindness from a woman who had never once softened her opinions for me but had apparently decided, in the end, that I deserved to eat on the road regardless. I sat beneath that oak eating dried apricots as the sky slowly lightened, and found myself crying, not from grief exactly, but from something more specific and harder to name — the simple, overwhelming fact of someone having thought of me, in the chaos of that terrible evening, when I had felt so thoroughly unthought-of by the man who was supposed to matter most.

I am not entirely without people, I told myself, wiping my face with the back of my hand. I only lost the one person I built my whole life around. That isn't the same as losing everyone.

It was a small distinction. On that cold morning, beneath that oak, it felt like the only foothold I had.

The second day was harder than the first, if only because the novelty of the ordeal had worn off and left only the ordeal itself — the blister on my heel joined now by a second on the other foot, my shoulders aching from the unfamiliar weight of the bags, my legs trembling by midafternoon in a way that frightened me a little, though I did not let myself stop for long. I passed through a small crossroads village around midday and spent a portion of the meager coin I'd brought with me on bread and a wedge of hard cheese, and the woman who sold it to me looked at me with the same curious, faintly pitying expression the farmer had the day before, and I understood, with a fresh, small ache, that I must have looked exactly as lost and out of place as I felt.

I thought, walking the long empty stretch of road that afternoon, about the years I had spent believing that my worth was measured entirely by my usefulness to Blackthorn — that if I could only organize the stores well enough, tend the sick faithfully enough, smooth over enough disputes, I might eventually earn the kind of belonging that should have come to me freely, as a mate, without ever needing to be earned at all. I thought about how thoroughly that belief had failed me, in the end. How all the usefulness in the world had not been enough to keep Cassian from standing in front of the entire pack and declaring, in so many careful words, that I was not enough.

I did not yet know, on that second long day of walking, what I might become instead. I only knew, with a clarity that felt almost like the first solid ground I'd stood on in days, that whatever I built next would not be built on the same foundation. I would not spend the rest of my life proving my worth through service to people who had already decided, long before I ever lifted a finger to help them, that I did not deserve a place among them.

I did not know yet what that meant, practically. I only knew it as a feeling — small, stubborn, and entirely my own — and I carried it the rest of the way to Moonridge like a coal held carefully against the wind, determined, however foolishly, to keep it lit.

By the evening of the third day, footsore, hollowed out, and thinner than I'd been even before I left Blackthorn, I crested the last low hill on the southern road and saw, spread out in the valley below me, the familiar scattered lights of Moonridge Village, and felt something in my chest loosen for the first time in three days.

I was almost home. Whatever home meant now, I was almost there.