The Forsaken Omega's Second Chance

Chapter three

Elara's POV

The horns sounded a little after midday, three long notes rolling down from the watchtowers at the northern border, and the entire pack seemed to exhale at once.

I was in the meeting hall when I heard them, going over the elders' seating with one of the younger pack members, and my hands went still on the linen I'd been folding. Around me, the hall itself seemed to come alive — someone near the doorway let out a whoop that was quickly hushed by an elder, and I heard running footsteps in the corridor outside, and somewhere further off a dog began barking at the general commotion, and underneath all of it I could feel my own pulse climbing to match the noise.

Three notes. The host is in sight.

I set down the linen very carefully, because my hands had begun to shake, and I did not want anyone to see that and mistake it for anything other than what it was — four years of waiting, arriving all at once at its answer.

"Luna." One of the younger warriors, a boy named Tobin who had always been kinder to me than most, appeared in the doorway with color high in his cheeks. "They'll reach the gates by evening. Beta Damien sent a rider ahead to confirm it."

"Thank you, Tobin." I made myself smile, made myself sound composed, though composure was very far from what I felt. "Has anyone told the kitchens? They'll want to prepare something for the welcome."

"Already done. Old Mabel's had the ovens going since the horns sounded, I'd wager." He hesitated, glancing at me with the particular careful expression I had grown used to receiving from the handful of pack members who actually seemed to like me — sympathy wrapped in something that didn't quite know how to express itself. "It's good, isn't it? Him coming home?"

"It's very good," I said, and meant it, even as some small cold current beneath the words asked me why I needed to work so hard to convince myself of something that should have required no convincing at all.

I spent the rest of the afternoon in a state that I could only describe, looking back, as suspended — every task I attempted half-finished, my attention pulled constantly toward the window, toward the gates, toward the road that wound down from the northern hills where eight months ago I had watched Cassian ride away at the head of three hundred warriors without once looking back to find me in the crowd.

I told myself that meant nothing. Alphas did not have the luxury of sentiment on the day they rode to war. I had told myself that for eight months, the way I had told myself a great many things.

By late afternoon, I gave up on pretending to work and went instead to prepare myself properly, because whatever this evening became, I did not want to face it looking like the woman I had let myself become over eight months of solitary waiting — thin, tired, faded at the edges. I bathed carefully. I chose the blue gown, the one from our bonding day, and stood in front of the mirror afterward trying to see myself the way Cassian might see me after eight months apart.

He'll be different, I told my reflection. War changes people. He'll have had time to think, out there, about what actually matters. He'll come home and remember that I was here the whole time, waiting, even when the pack made it easy for him not to.

I believed it. I had built four years of marriage on believing things that required belief to survive, and I saw no reason, standing in front of that mirror with my hair combed smooth and my oldest gown fitted loosely to a body that had grown thin with worry, why today should be any different.

My aunt Mara would have told me, if she'd been there, that hope built on nothing but hope eventually collapses under its own weight. She had told me something like it more than once over the years, on the rare occasions I visited Moonridge and let my guard down enough to admit how hard the marriage had become. You can't love someone into loving you back properly, sweetheart, she'd said once, flour on her hands and something gentle and sad in her eyes. Either it's there or you're building a house on sand.

I had not wanted to hear it then. I did not particularly want to remember it now, standing in front of the mirror with my heart climbing toward my throat.

Adrian would have said something less gentle. My brother had never trusted Cassian, not from the very first introduction, and eight months of Cassian being away at war had done nothing to soften Adrian's opinion of him — if anything, the distance seemed to have hardened it. He rode off and left you here to be laughed at, he'd said, the last time he visited, his jaw tight with the particular fury he reserved only for things that hurt me. A real mate doesn't do that, Elara. Bond or no bond.

I had defended Cassian to my own brother that day, the way I had defended him to myself for four years, the way I was preparing to defend him again tonight if the pack gave me any reason to. I told myself it was loyalty. I told myself it was love, the kind that endured, the kind the old stories always praised in the wives of great men.

I did not let myself consider, standing there in the fading afternoon light with my hair perfect and my hands finally steady, that loyalty and love were not always the same thing, and that a person could spend four years mistaking one for the other without ever noticing the difference until it was far, far too late to matter.

The evening horn sounded as the sun began its long slide toward the western ridge, and this time the note was different — not the three sharp calls that meant sighted, but the long, single, rolling note that meant arrived.

Around me, the whole of Blackthorn Pack began moving toward the gates like a single creature waking up.

I smoothed my skirts one final time, took a breath that did nothing at all to steady the roaring in my chest, and went to meet my husband home from war.