The Forsaken Omega's Second Chance

Chapter six

Elara's POV

I did not cry as long as I expected to.

I had braced myself, walking the corridor back to my chambers with my spine held unnaturally straight and my hands clenched hard enough to leave crescent marks in my palms, for something enormous — a grief so large it would swallow the room whole, the kind of collapse that required other people to witness it, to hold you upright through it. Instead, when I finally closed the door behind me and let the composure drop, what came was quieter than that. A long, shaking cry that emptied itself out over perhaps twenty minutes, and then, strangely, a kind of stillness.

I sat on the edge of the bed I had shared with Cassian for four years — the same bed I had woken in that morning, hopeful, foolish, certain that today would be the day everything finally changed — and I found that I was, in fact, correct. Today had changed everything. Simply not in any direction I had let myself imagine.

There was a knock at the door perhaps an hour later, soft enough that I almost didn't hear it over the ringing in my own ears.

"Elara. It's Damien."

I did not particularly want to see anyone, but Damien had never once, in four years, given me a reason to distrust him, so I opened the door and found him standing in the corridor with a look on his face that suggested he'd been standing there gathering himself for some time before he knocked.

"May I come in?"

I stepped aside, and he entered, and stood for a moment near the cold hearth looking distinctly uncomfortable, a big, steady man who clearly had no idea how to navigate the particular disaster he'd walked into.

"I'm sorry," he said finally. "For what it's worth, which I know isn't much right now. I didn't know. About Seraphina. Not until we were a week from home and he finally told me himself."

"Did the others know? Before tonight?"

"Some of the officers. Not the pack at large." He shook his head slowly. "I argued with him, Elara. On the ride home. I told him he owed you a private conversation before he owed the pack a public announcement. He didn't listen. I don't think he's been listening to much of anyone since the campaign in the eastern valleys." He paused. "That's not an excuse. I want you to know I'm not offering it as one."

"I appreciate that." And I did, in some distant, functional way, even through the numbness that had settled over most of me. "Did he say anything else? After I left?"

Damien's jaw tightened. "He said you'd made the right decision. That it would be easier for everyone this way."

Easier for everyone. I turned the phrase over in my mind and found, somewhat to my own surprise, that it didn't hurt the way I expected it to. It simply confirmed something I had already begun, in the space of that single terrible hour, to understand — that whatever version of Cassian I had spent four years waiting for, whatever softened, grateful, war-changed man I had imagined riding home to me, had never existed anywhere except in my own determined hope. The man who had made that announcement in the hall tonight had not been changed by eight months at war. He had simply stopped bothering to hide who he'd already become.

"Thank you for telling me," I said. "And for not pretending it was something it wasn't."

Damien looked at me for a long moment, and something in his expression — guilt, maybe, or a kind of helpless respect — made me look away first.

"If you need anything," he said, moving toward the door, "before you go. Or after. I mean that, Elara. Whatever you decide."

He left, and I sat alone again in the quiet of a room that no longer belonged to me, and began, mechanically, to pack.

There was less than I expected. Four years of marriage, and when I laid it all out — a handful of dresses, a small collection of jewelry that had mostly been gifts from pack elders rather than from Cassian himself, a few books, a wooden box containing letters from Adrian and Mara that I'd kept over the years — it amounted to two traveling bags, easily carried, easily forgotten by anyone who might have wondered, afterward, what had become of Blackthorn's former Luna.

I found myself, near midnight, standing at the window of the chambers I had shared with Cassian, looking out over the pack grounds I had called home for four years, and trying to decide what I actually felt.

Not the numbness of shock anymore — that had begun, slowly, to give way to something sharper. Not quite grief, though grief was certainly somewhere in the mixture. Something closer, I think, to the particular vertigo of realizing that a story you have told yourself for years, a story your entire understanding of your own life has been built around, was never true to begin with. I had told myself I was a woman loved imperfectly by a man too proud and too distracted to show it well. I had told myself that endurance was a kind of virtue, that staying was a kind of strength, that the mate bond meant something sacred and unbreakable even when the man on the other end of it treated me like an inconvenience he'd grown tired of managing.

I did not know, standing at that window, what I actually was, once you removed the story. I only knew that I was not, could not any longer pretend to be, the wife of Cassian Blackthorn.

I thought of Mara's bakery in Moonridge, warm and smelling of bread, and of my aunt's steady, unromantic kindness. I thought of Adrian, who would be furious on my behalf in the particular loud, protective way that had always both comforted and exhausted me. I thought of the small house I had grown up in, three days' travel south, and wondered whether I still had a place there at all after four years away, or whether I had become, in some fundamental way, a stranger even to the life I'd had before Cassian.

I did not sleep that night. I sat instead with my two packed bags at the foot of a bed that no longer belonged to me, and watched the sky outside the window slowly lighten from black to grey to the pale gold of early morning, and when the sun finally rose over Blackthorn territory for what I understood, with a strange, hollow clarity, would be the last time in a very long while, I stood, and smoothed my traveling dress, and walked out of the Alpha residence without looking back — a small mercy I gave myself, since Cassian had never once given it to me.

The road to Moonridge was three days on foot, longer than I had walked in years, and I had no coin to speak of and no protection beyond whatever meager skill I'd never bothered developing, and I did not, in that moment, care about any of it.

I only knew that I was leaving, and that some small, stubborn, unbroken part of me — the same part that had risen up to meet the horns at the gate the day before, hopeful even when hope had long since stopped being warranted — was already, quietly, beginning to wonder what I might become, once I was finally, entirely, my own.