The Forsaken Omega's Second Chance

Chapter five

Elara's POV

The gathering hall filled faster than I had ever seen it fill, word of the war host's return and the strange, charged tension surrounding it spreading through the pack grounds like fire through dry brush. By the time I made my way inside — Damien's hand steady at my elbow, though I could not have said afterward whether he was guiding me or holding me up — the long hall was packed shoulder to shoulder, elders and warriors and kitchen staff and children all crowded together beneath the old carved beams, all of them waiting for something none of them had yet been told.

I understood, walking in, that I was one of the very few people in that hall who already knew what was coming. I understood it the way you understand the shape of a wound before the pain of it fully arrives — a cold, clear certainty settling over everything else.

Cassian stood at the head of the hall where he always stood to address the pack, tall and composed in a way that made my chest ache with the unfairness of it, that he could stand there looking like nothing at all had changed while I stood at the back of the crowd feeling as though the entire foundation of my life had been quietly removed from beneath me. Seraphina — I had learned her name by then, passed in a whisper from someone near me who seemed to already know a great deal more about the situation than I did — stood a pace behind him and to his right, her hand still resting, deliberately I now understood, across her stomach.

The hall fell quiet as Cassian raised a hand.

"I know you're all waiting to hear about the campaign," he began, and his voice was the same voice he had used to address the pack for four years, steady and sure, the voice of a man born to be listened to. "And you will. But there's something I need to say first, and I'd rather say it plainly than let rumor say it for me."

I felt, more than saw, the crowd's attention sharpen.

"During the campaign, I formed a bond with Seraphina Rose, daughter of Alpha Julian Rose of the Rose territories." A murmur went through the hall, quick and startled. Cassian did not pause for it. "She is carrying my child. An heir for Blackthorn."

The murmur became something louder, something I felt in my own body like a physical blow, a wave of sound and shifting bodies and half-formed questions rippling out from the front of the hall toward the back where I stood, frozen, my hand finding the edge of a wooden support beam and gripping it hard enough that the rough grain bit into my palm.

"I understand what this means for the pack," Cassian went on, and something in the careful, prepared cadence of his words told me, even through the roaring in my ears, that he had rehearsed this. That he had ridden home across half the continent with this speech already composed, already polished, already decided. "Blackthorn needs an heir. Blackthorn has needed one for four years, and it hasn't come, and I won't pretend any longer that it will."

I felt every eye in the hall that wasn't already on him turn instead to me.

"Elara has served this pack faithfully," he said, and I remember thinking, with a strange, distant clarity, that it was the kindest thing he had said about me in over a year, and that he was saying it only as a preamble to something far less kind. "No one disputes that. But a Luna who cannot give her Alpha an heir is a Luna who cannot fulfill the position she holds. I won't ask this pack, or myself, to keep pretending otherwise."

The hall had gone very quiet again, the particular quiet of several hundred people collectively holding their breath.

"Seraphina will take the position of Luna," Cassian said. "The bond between us is real, and I intend to honor it, as I intend to honor the child she carries as my heir."

I do not remember deciding to speak. I only remember that my voice came out of me anyway, smaller than I wanted it to be but steady enough to carry in the silence.

"Cassian."

He looked at me then — the first time he had looked at me directly since he'd ridden through the gates — and whatever I had hoped to find in his face, I did not find it. I found instead a kind of tired resolve, the expression of a man who had already made his decision and was simply waiting for the unpleasant business of announcing it to be finished.

"Elara," he said, and his voice gentled slightly, which somehow made it worse, "you can remain in Blackthorn if you wish. There's no shame in it. But you'll do so under Seraphina's authority as Luna, not beside it. I won't ask this pack to answer to two women claiming the same position." He paused. "Or you can leave. Return to your family, start again somewhere the bond between us won't complicate things for either of us. I'll see that you're provided for, whatever you decide."

Provided for. As though four years of my life could be settled with an allowance, the way a debt is settled, the way a business arrangement concludes when both parties have gotten what they came for.

I looked around the hall — at Damien's carefully blank face, fighting something I couldn't read; at Dr. Elias near the front, his expression openly, furiously unhappy in a way I had rarely seen from him; at dozens of pack members I had served for four years, some looking away in embarrassment on my behalf, others watching me with the same open, avid curiosity they might have given a particularly dramatic piece of theater.

I looked, last, at Seraphina, who met my eyes without flinching, without apology, her hand still resting over the child that had already replaced me in every way that mattered to the man standing beside her.

I understood, in that moment, standing in the hall I had swept and organized and defended for four years, that there was no version of staying that would not require me to shrink myself smaller than I had ever been asked to shrink before. To watch another woman wear the title I had earned through four years of quiet, unthanked service. To remain in a pack that had, in the space of a single afternoon, made it very clear exactly how little my four years of loyalty had actually been worth.

"I'll leave," I said.

My voice did not shake. I have wondered, many times since, where I found the strength for that — to stand in front of the entire pack that had just watched my husband dismiss me like an unsatisfactory arrangement and answer him without a single c***k in my composure. I think now that it was not strength at all. I think it was simply shock, doing the kind, temporary work of holding a person together until the real pain has time to arrive.

Cassian nodded once, as though I had confirmed something he'd already expected, and something in that easy, unsurprised nod hurt more than anything else that had happened in that hall.

"I'll have your things gathered," he said. "You can leave in the morning."

I turned and walked out of the hall before he could say anything else, before the crowd's whispers could fully close in around me, before the careful composure I was holding onto could c***k in front of the entire pack I had spent four years trying, and failing, to earn a place among.

I made it all the way back to what had been, until an hour ago, my own chambers before I finally allowed myself to fall apart.