The Forsaken Omega's Second Chance

Chapter two

Elara's POV

I made my way down to the kitchens before I did anything else, because even on a morning like this one, the pack still needed to eat, and old habits did not care that my hands were shaking with something that felt dangerously close to joy.

"You look like you haven't slept," said Old Mabel, who had run the Alpha kitchens since before Cassian was born and had never once bothered softening her observations for anyone, Luna included. She was elbow-deep in bread dough, flour dusted up to her forearms, and she gave me one long look before going back to her kneading. "Good nerves or bad ones?"

"I don't know yet," I admitted. "I suppose I'll find out today."

"Mm." She didn't look up again. "Four years is a long time to hold your breath, girl."

I didn't answer that, because there was nothing to say to it that wouldn't have sounded either defensive or pathetic, and I had grown very tired, over the years, of sounding like either. I busied myself instead with the morning tasks that had become mine by default rather than by any formal assignment — checking the stores ledger against what had actually been used, confirming with the healers' house that they had what they needed for the day, making sure the meeting hall was swept and the long table set in case the pack elders wanted to gather once word came that the host was within sight of the border.

It was work no one had ever asked me to do. It was work that, in the earliest days of my marriage, I had believed would prove something — that I belonged here, that I was more than the omega girl who couldn't hold a proper shift, that a Luna's worth could be measured in things other than the strength of her bite.

I remembered, with the particular clarity that certain memories never lose no matter how many years pass over them, the night Cassian and I bonded.

I had been nineteen, visiting Blackthorn territory with my brother Adrian for a trade gathering between our smaller village and the pack, standing near the edge of a crowded hall in a borrowed dress that didn't quite fit, feeling entirely out of place among wolves who moved like they owned the ground beneath them. And then a young Alpha — not yet fully invested with his father's title, but already carrying himself like a man who expected the world to make room for him — had gone very still across the room, and the noise had seemed to fall away, and I had felt something in my chest recognize something in his before either of us said a word.

He had crossed the hall like the crowd wasn't there. Elara, he'd said, before I'd told him my name, and the way he said it — like a discovery, like a gift he hadn't known he was about to receive — had undone something in me that I had never quite managed to put back together in any shape that didn't revolve around him.

I had been so sure, that night, that I had been chosen for something extraordinary.

I did not let myself think, most days, about how quickly that certainty had eroded once I actually moved into Blackthorn territory as his mate. How the pack's whispers had started within the first month — an omega, of all things, and a weak one at that — and how Cassian had gone quiet in a way I mistook, at first, for patience, and only later understood to be the early shape of shame.

"You're wool-gathering," Mabel said, not unkindly, breaking into the memory. "Go on, then. Go make yourself pretty for him. The bread doesn't need you standing over it."

I went.

The training yard was already busy by midmorning, warriors sparring in loose pairs to burn off the restless energy of the day, and I skirted its edge on my way to the medical house the way I always did — close enough to see, far enough not to be pulled in. I had learned that lesson early and painfully. Three years ago, one of the younger warriors, a boy barely past his first full shift, had good-naturedly invited me to spar with him in front of a dozen others, and I had gone down in the dirt in under a minute, my wolf refusing to fully answer my call the way it always seemed to refuse when I most needed it, and the laughter that followed had not been cruel, exactly. It had been worse than cruel. It had been fond, the kind of laughter people give a thing they've stopped taking seriously.

Cassian had been standing at the edge of the yard that day. I remembered turning to him, dirt-streaked and humiliated, hoping for something — anything — and finding only a tightness around his mouth that I had not been able to read as anything but embarrassment.

He had not laughed. He had also not defended me. I had since decided that the second failure hurt considerably more than the first.

I did not spar anymore. I had told myself, for a long time, that this was simply practicality — why invite an audience for my own inadequacy — but some more honest corner of my mind knew it was closer to self-preservation. There were only so many times a person could watch the man they loved fail to come to their defense before they stopped giving him the opportunity.

Dr. Elias was expecting me at the medical house, as he usually was these days, and he looked up from the ledger he was updating with the particular sharp attention he seemed to reserve only for me among the whole pack.

"You've heard, then," he said. Not a question.

"Everyone's heard." I began sorting the bandages that had come in from Moonridge's supplier the day before, glad to have something to do with my hands. "The host is close. Maybe by evening."

"And you're glad."

"Of course I'm glad. He's my husband." I heard the edge in my own voice and tried to smooth it before he noticed, though Elias noticed most things. "He's been at war for eight months, Elias. Of course I'm glad he's coming home alive."

"That's not quite what I asked." He set down his pen and looked at me properly, the way he had a habit of doing when he thought I was being less than honest with myself, which — if I was fair — was often. "I asked if you're glad. Not if you're glad he's alive. There's a difference, Elara, and I think you know it."

I didn't answer right away, because the honest answer sat somewhere I didn't like looking at directly. The honest answer was that I had spent four years telling myself a story about my marriage that required a great deal of maintenance to keep standing — a story where Cassian's coldness was circumstance and not character, where his silence in the face of the pack's cruelty was distraction rather than agreement, where somewhere beneath the Alpha who had grown so careful never to touch me in front of witnesses, the boy who had crossed a crowded hall for me still existed, waiting for the right moment to come back.

"I think," I said finally, carefully, "that today is the day I find out whether the story I've been telling myself is true."

Elias looked at me for a long moment, and something in his face — pity, maybe, or a kind of tired affection — made my chest ache in a way I didn't have a name for.

"Well," he said at last, going back to his ledger. "I hope it is, Elara. I do. But hope's a poor substitute for evidence, and you've had precious little of the second in four years."

I didn't argue with him, because there was nothing to argue with. I only finished sorting the bandages, and went to find out, one way or another, what today would bring.