The Forsaken Omega's Second Chance

Chapter eight

Elara's POV

Moonridge had not changed much in four years, and there was something almost unbearably tender about that fact as I walked down its narrow main street in the last grey light of evening, past the same cobbler's shop with its crooked sign, the same well at the village center where I used to fill water jugs as a girl, the same low stone wall along the inn that

Adrian and I had raced each other across a hundred times as children, daring each other not to fall.

The bakery sat at the far end of the street, warm yellow light spilling from its windows into the deepening dusk, and even from a distance I could smell it — the particular mingled scent of yeast and cinnamon and woodsmoke that had meant, my entire childhood, that Aunt Mara was somewhere nearby and everything, whatever else might be wrong in the world, was at least momentarily safe.

I stood outside the door for a long moment before I could make myself go in, suddenly and overwhelmingly aware of how I must look — three days of hard travel, blistered and thin and hollow-eyed, arriving unannounced with two bags and no explanation for why the Luna of Blackthorn Pack was standing on her aunt's doorstep looking like she'd walked the whole distance rather than been escorted by a proper guard.

I had, of course. That was rather the point.

The bell above the door announced me before I'd fully decided to go in, and Mara looked up from behind the counter — flour on her hands, grey threading more heavily through her dark hair than I remembered, the same warm, sharp-eyed face that had never once, in my whole life, looked at me and found me wanting.

"Elara." She said my name the way a person says a word they've been waiting a long time to say, setting down the dough she'd been working without any particular hurry, though something in her eyes had already gone sharp with concern.

"Sweetheart. What's happened?"

I opened my mouth to answer, to give some composed, sensible account of the last three days, and found instead that I simply began to cry — not the controlled tears of that first night in the Alpha residence, but something rawer, something that had apparently been waiting the entire three-day walk for a safe enough place to finally break loose.

Mara came around the counter without another word and pulled me into her arms, flour and all, and held on while I cried into her shoulder like a child, and did not once ask me to explain myself before I was ready.

It took the better part of an hour, once she'd fed me and sat me down by the fire in the small rooms above the bakery, for me to tell her the whole of it — Cassian's return, Seraphina, the announcement in the hall, the choice I'd been given and the one I'd made. Mara listened without interrupting, her hands wrapped around a cup of tea she never seemed to actually drink from, her jaw tightening at certain points in the story in a way that told me, more clearly than words could have, exactly how she felt about the man I'd married.

"I always thought there was something cold in him," she said finally, when I'd finished. "Even at the bonding ceremony. I never said it to you, because you were so happy, and what good would it have done to plant doubt in a girl already committed to the bond. But I thought it, Elara. I'm sorry I didn't say it."

"It wouldn't have changed anything," I said, and I believed that. "The bond doesn't ask permission. It simply happens."

"The bond happening is one thing." Mara's voice was gentle but unyielding, the voice of a woman who had never once, in my memory, been afraid to say a hard true thing out loud. "What you do with it afterward is another. He had four years to choose you properly, bond or no bond, and he chose instead to let his pack humiliate you and say nothing, and then to humiliate you himself the moment it became convenient. That's not fate, sweetheart. That's character. His character, not yours."

I did not have an answer for that. I only sat with it, letting it settle somewhere in my chest alongside all the other things I'd been forced to understand differently in the last three days.

"What will you do now?" Mara asked, after a while.

"I don't know." It was the first time I'd said the words plainly, and they cost me something to say — four years of always having an answer, a duty, a role, and now nothing but an open, frightening blank where a plan should have been. "I have almost no coin. I don't know how to do anything that isn't running a household I no longer have. I can't fight, I can barely shift, and I've spent four years being told that both of those things make me essentially useless." I looked down at my hands, blistered and raw from the road. "I don't know what I'm for, if I'm not Cassian's Luna."

Mara was quiet for a moment, and when she spoke again, her voice had lost none of its warmth but had gained something harder underneath it, something I recognized, distantly, as the same steadiness that had gotten her through running a bakery alone since my uncle's death a decade ago, through raising no children of her own but somehow always having room for mine and Adrian's when we needed her.

"You're for whatever you decide you're for," she said. "That's the whole of it, Elara. Nobody handed me this bakery. I built it, badly at first, out of nothing but stubbornness and the fact that I refused to starve. You don't need a title to be worth something. You never did. You just spent four years around people who convinced you otherwise, because it was easier for them to keep you small than to reckon with what you might become if you weren't."

I did not fully believe her. Not yet. Four years of careful, patient self-doubt did not dissolve in a single evening simply because someone I loved told me it should.

But something in me — small, stubborn, the same coal I'd carried the whole way down that southern road — caught a little brighter at her words regardless.

"You'll stay here," Mara said, in the tone of someone settling a matter rather than asking a question. "There's a room above the bakery going unused since your uncle passed. It's small, but it's warm, and it's yours as long as you need it."

She paused, studying me with the particular sharp affection I remembered from childhood. "And you'll work, starting tomorrow, because I refuse to let you sit up here feeling sorry for yourself when I've got bread that needs kneading and a niece with two working hands, whatever the wolves of Blackthorn decided those hands were worth."

I laughed — a small, startled, entirely unexpected sound, the first laugh I'd managed in three days — and something in my chest, which had felt permanently hollowed out since the moment I'd watched Cassian walk past me at the gates, eased just slightly, just enough to let a little warmth back in.

"I don't know how to bake," I admitted.

"No," Mara agreed, standing and beginning to clear away the tea things with brisk, practical efficiency. "But you'll learn. That's rather the whole point, sweetheart. You'll learn."