Chapter2
1288 Words
Three weeks after the rejection, Elara stopped being a person to the pack and became, instead, a problem.
The work doubled.
The rations halved.
She was moved from her room, small as it was, cold as it was, into the storage corridor behind the laundry, where the floor was uneven stone and the draft came in under the door all night.
Two other omegas passed her in the hall on the day she was moved.
One of them looked at the floor.
The other met her eyes for exactly one second before looking away.
She told herself it didn't matter.
She had slept in worse.
She wrote it down anyway.
Writing was the only thing that had ever made sense of things she couldn't change.
She couldn't change the corridor.
She couldn't change the rations.
But she could name them, and naming them made her feel like she was standing slightly outside the situation instead of buried inside it, which was the closest she'd ever come to control.
Page sixty-three: They have decided that proximity to me is an insult to the Alpha. They act as though worthlessness is contagious. Perhaps for them it is, perhaps they fear that if they stand too close to me, someone will mistake them for someone who doesn't matter. I understand the fear. I simply no longer have the energy to feel sorry for people who protect themselves at my expense.
She should have understood sooner what was coming.
On what she believed was a Tuesday, the days had grown slippery without proper meals to mark them, she was summoned to the Alpha's hall.
Two guards came for her, which was unusual.
People of no consequence were not collected by two guards.
The great hall felt different in the daytime.
Smaller.
Less ceremonial and more functional, the kind of space where decisions were made that would be dressed up as justice later.
Ronan sat at the head of the long table.
Selene sat beside him with her hands folded, her expression arranged into something that resembled grief if you didn't know how to read it.
Three pack elders Elara didn't recognize sat to the left.
A woman she'd never seen before stood near the wall, pointing at her before she'd even stopped walking.
"That's her," the woman said.
"She was near the kitchen stores. I saw her."
"Elara Voss," Ronan said, not quite looking at her.
"You are accused of attempting to poison Selene Vale."
There was a cup on the table.
A small glass vial beside it.
The vial contained something dark.
Elara looked at the cup for a long moment.
She had never seen that cup before in her life.
"I didn't do this," she said.
"The evidence" one of the elders began.
"Was placed."
She kept her voice level, her hands still.
"There's no evidence I touched that cup because I never touched that cup. Whatever's in that vial didn't come from me. If you conduct a proper investigation, a real one, you'll find nothing connecting me to it."
"We have conducted an investigation," the elder said.
She looked at him.
He did not meet her eyes.
They already know, she thought.
They've already decided.
"Then your investigation is wrong," she said.
Ronan's jaw tightened.
"You will not speak to"
"I am speaking to the facts," she said.
"I have no motive. I have no access to poison. I have spent every day since the ceremony doing exactly what I was told and going nowhere I wasn't assigned. If someone saw me near the stores, they saw me doing my work, which I was doing because that is all I have ever been permitted to do here."
Silence.
Selene lifted her eyes slowly to Elara's face.
Her expression did not change.
That was the tell, Selene always let something flicker through when she was genuinely surprised.
Nothing flickered.
She had known exactly how this would go.
"The sentence," Ronan said,
"is death."
She looked at him for a long moment.
He was still not quite meeting her eyes.
She thought: he knows. Not just that the charge was false, he knew before they staged it. He had agreed to it, or he had suggested it, or at minimum he had looked at the cup on the table and chosen not to ask the question that would have unraveled everything. She thought about writing that down later. She thought about how many pages she had written about people choosing not to ask the question.
She ran.
Not immediately.
She was not stupid.
She waited through the sentencing, through the march to the holding room, through the long minutes while the single young guard outside her door spoke to someone in the hallway.
His voice was nervous, too young for this, she noted, too uncertain, which meant he had not been chosen for capability but for expendability.
The moment he stepped further down the hall, she was through the window.
The drop was eight feet onto hard ground. She felt two ribs c***k on impact and kept moving anyway, because the alternative to moving was dying, and she had decided, somewhere between the cup on the table and Selene's unmoving face, that she was not going to die in Silvercrest.
She ran through the forest with her hands bleeding and her lungs burning.
She could hear them behind her, voices, then howls, then the particular sound of wolves who have been given permission to stop pretending.
She ran until the territory markers fell away and the trees thinned into rocky ground, and then she ran further, because territory lines meant nothing to people who wanted to make an example of you.
She collapsed on the far side of a dry creek bed, in the dark, in the cold, with three broken ribs she'd been running on for forty minutes.
She lay on her back and watched the sky.
The stars were indifferent, which she'd always found oddly comforting.
Indifference was at least honest.
Page sixty-five, she thought. If she ever reached a page sixty-five, she would write: Being right about people is the loneliest thing in the world. It doesn't protect you. It only means you see it coming and can't stop it anyway.
She closed her eyes.
She did not expect to open them again.
In the strange, drifting space between consciousness and not, she heard her mother's voice, not words exactly, more like the memory of a tone.
Warm.
Certain.
The way someone speaks when they have decided something irrevocable and made peace with it.
Elara had been six when her mother was taken.
She barely remembered the face.
But the tone, that she had kept.
You carry more than you know, it seemed to say, from somewhere very far away.
She didn't know what that meant.
She didn't know a great many things about herself.
She was beginning to understand that this was not an accident.
She opened her eyes anyway.
That was the thing about her, the thing she had not yet learned to name.
She kept opening her eyes.
Whatever she was, whatever had been placed inside her or inherited or burned into her bones by blood she didn't understand yet, it refused to let her go quietly.
She lay in the dark and breathed and was, against all reasonable probability, still alive.
Then she heard it.
Footsteps.
Not panicked.
Not searching.
Slow.
Deliberate.
Like someone who already knew exactly where she was.
She didn't move.
Didn't breathe.
The footsteps stopped.
Right outside her hiding place.
And then a voice, low and unhurried, cut through the dark.
"I've been looking for you, Elara Voss."
Her blood turned to ice.
She had never told anyone her name.
- Writer
