The Forsaken Omega's Second Chance

Chapter four

Elara's POV

The crowd at the gates was thicker than I had seen it in years, pack members packed shoulder to shoulder along the road that led up from the northern hills, children hoisted onto shoulders for a better view, dogs weaving underfoot and being scolded away. I made my way toward the front of it the way I always did on occasions like this — not pushing, not asserting the place that should, by rights, have belonged to me as Luna, but easing myself gently through gaps that people made for me half out of habit and half, I suspected, out of pity.

I found a place near Beta Damien, who nodded to me with the same steady courtesy he always showed me, the courtesy of a man who had never once, in four years, made me feel small for what I could or couldn't do.

"They'll crest the ridge any moment," he said. "Rider says the Alpha's in good health. No serious injuries among the officers."

"That's good," I said, and meant it, though my eyes were already fixed on the ridge, my whole body strung tight as a bowstring.

The sun was low enough now to turn the hillside gold, and when the first riders finally came over the crest, a sound went up from the crowd that I felt as much as heard — a swell of relief and pride, warriors home from war, safe, victorious, alive. I scanned the column as it began winding down toward the gates, searching for the particular set of shoulders, the particular dark head, that I would have known anywhere in any crowd in the world.

I found him near the front, exactly where an Alpha belonged, riding tall and sure, and something in my chest simply broke open at the sight of him — eight months of careful distance collapsing in an instant into something closer to relief than I had words for. He looked leaner than when he'd left. Harder, somehow, in the line of his jaw. But alive. Whole. Home.

I lifted my hand, not quite a wave, more an instinct I couldn't have stopped if I'd tried.

And then I saw her.

She rode just behind him, close enough that the placement could not have been an accident, a young woman with hair the pale gold of ripe wheat catching the last of the sunlight, seated on a fine grey mare with the easy confidence of someone who had never once doubted her welcome anywhere she went. She was beautiful in the particular, effortless way that made other women's beauty look like effort by comparison, and she rode with a hand resting, almost absently, low across her stomach.

I did not understand, at first, what I was looking at. I told myself it was a healer, perhaps, brought along to tend the wounded on the long ride home. I told myself it was the daughter of an ally, escorted for her own safety through territory still unsettled from the war. I told myself a great many things in the several seconds it took the column to close the remaining distance to the gates, because the alternative explanation had not yet fully formed itself in my mind, and some old, well-worn part of me was still working very hard to protect me from it.

Cassian's eyes found mine across the crowd.

I want to remember that moment as something softer than it was. I want to remember warmth in his face, or even simple exhaustion, the blankness of a man too tired from war to properly feel anything yet. What I actually remember — what I have never managed to un-remember, no matter how many years pass over it — is the flicker of something that looked almost like discomfort crossing his features before he mastered it, before his expression smoothed back into the composed, unreadable mask he had worn for most of our marriage.

He did not smile at me. He did not dismount and cross the distance between us the way he had crossed a crowded hall four years ago, my name already forming on his lips before I'd told it to him.

He reined in at the gates, and the crowd's noise swelled up around him — cheers, someone shouting his name, the particular chaotic joy of a pack welcoming its Alpha home — and I stood very still at the edge of it all, watching him dismount, watching him turn back toward his horse to help the golden-haired woman down from hers with a careful, practiced hand at her waist.

Beside me, I felt Damien go very still.

"Elara," he said quietly, and something in his voice made my stomach drop even before I understood why.

I did not answer him. I could not, because I had finally understood what I was looking at — the careful hand at her waist, the low, protective placement of her own hand across her stomach, the way Cassian's whole body angled toward her the way it had once, a lifetime ago, angled toward me.

The crowd's cheering seemed to recede into a dull roar in my ears. I stood at the edge of the welcome I had spent eight months waiting for, in the blue dress I had worn on my bonding day, and watched my husband walk his mistress through the gates of the pack he had promised, once, to build a life with me inside.

I do not know how long I stood there. Long enough, I think, for the crowd's attention to begin turning toward me — a ripple of awareness moving through the gathered wolves as they, too, began to understand what they were looking at, as whispers started at the edges of the crowd and worked their way inward the way whispers always did in Blackthorn, quick and merciless and impossible to stop once they'd started.

Cassian did not come to me. He walked past the crowd, past the cheering, past his own Luna standing frozen at the edge of the gathering in her bonding-day dress, and led the golden-haired woman toward the Alpha residence with a hand still resting at the small of her back, and he did not once look back to find me in the crowd, the way he had not once looked back the day he rode away to war.

Somewhere near me, I heard Damien say my name again, gently this time, the way a person speaks to someone standing too close to the edge of something.

I do not remember answering him. I only remember standing very still in the golden evening light, surrounded by the pack I had spent four years serving, and feeling something inside my chest go quiet in a way that felt less like breaking and more, terribly, like finally understanding something I had spent four years refusing to see.