Aftermath
I do not sleep. I lie there for hours with one hand pressed to my chest and my mind circling the same three things. The first is the pain. It sits deeper than muscle, beneath bone, caught somewhere between my ribs and Astraea. A constant, punishing soreness that sharpens whenever I breathe too deeply, as though my body has decided every inhale should remind me what I said. I rejected my mate. Words so rarely spoken in our world. Words with consequence. Words spoken in a rush of panic and anger and instinctive self-preservation. The second is the rawness sitting alongside it. A different kind of pain. Quieter. More hollow. It is my eighteenth birthday. My first full day as an adult Lycan, and I have no family to celebrate it with. Lying there in the dark, listening to Jen sleep pe
- Writer
