Marked By His Brother: A Luna's Revenge

Chapter 4: Into The Forest

Astrid's POV

I didn't wait for morning.

I went back to the room, pulled my bag from under the bed, the one I'd packed for the hospital, still half full and emptied what was left onto the mattress, and kept what was important. A change of clothes, my documents, the small roll of emergency cash I'd kept in the zip pocket, I guessed a some quiet part of me had always known.

I zipped the bag, swung it over my shoulder, and walked out.

The corridor was empty. The music from the great hall followed me down the passage, laughter rising and dipping, glasses touching glasses, they were still celebrating while I carried myself and my single bag through the back exit or the pack house and out into the cold.

Nobody stopped me, no one even looked, I wasn't expecting them to.

The night air hit me like a wall. Cold, sharp, carrying the pine smell of Bloodfang's northern treeline. Each step made my body ached, my hips, my spine, everything below my waist still ached and was sore. Nine hours of labor and I was walking on it six hours later.

I was so stupid, I thought. Stupid and stubborn

I was offered pack resources, whatever I needed for a smooth transition, resources to start somewhere else and I'd said nothing and walked out without any of it. Because I would rather crawl through twenty miles of this forest than to take a single thing from their hands, I wouldn't be their charity case anymore, I wouldn't give them the satisfaction of helping me leave a place I should never have been made to leave.

Even now, with my legs aching and sore, I didn't regret it that much.

Six years ago, I had thought Bloodfang was a miracle.

I'd been sixteen, packless and alone after my mother died three months ago and I never knew who my father was. Caden's father had found me at a border town, starving and trying to look like I wasn't.

He stood and told me to follow him and I did without questions. Because when you're sixteen, starving and completely alone, you don't ask where someone is taking you, you just go.

When I got to Bloodfang and he handed me to my adoptive parents. They gave me a room, meals, a school with pack children who had grown up together, and then there was Layla, their real daughter, who was a year younger than me and was the first person to ever show kindness to me, or so I thought.

A cold gust of wind moved through the trees and I pulled my jacket tighter and kept walking.

Layla had been kind to me, the same way you would to strays. She was the real daughter, born in the pack and was pretty, while I was the girl in the east room who cleared her plates quickly and said thank you too many times and never fit in.

Not at the table, not in the corridors, not in the training yard. The pack had a way of reminding me that I was always an outsider and I had gotten very good at pretending I didn't notice.

A branch snapped somewhere to my left and I shook, my heartbeat spiked, but it was nothing, just the forest. I exhaled, pressed my arm against my ribs, and kept moving.

The pain was getting harder to breath through. Every step I took came with an ache. My mind kept going to the great hall, Layla's neck, the cold dead space in my chest where the bond used to live, making the ache almost forgettable.

I thou about the day the Alpha had called me into his office.

I had been nineteen then, he'd sat behind his desk and said I was going to be Kaiden's Luna.

I had never been noticed, not once in three years had anyone in Bloodfang looked at me like I was something worth choosing, I hadn't expected it, hadn't even let myself dream of it, but I was in love with Kaiden since I first laid eyes on him.

He had been eighteen when I arrived, he was the Alpha in training with dirty blonde hair and a laugh that made everyone including me fall for him. He had never noticed me, but I had watched him for three years anyway and told myself that was enough and then suddenly I was standing in his father's office being told he was mine.

I had said yes before he finished the sentence.

My wolf stirred, the faintest movement underneath my ribs, sluggish and distant and I pushed warm toward her out of instinct.

Still here, I told her. Keep going.

She offered the thinnest pulse back.

The trees around me had changed without me noticing, they were darker, denser, and colder, the ground cover was also different under my feet. I slowed down, and looked around.

The scent of the territory had shifted completely. There was no pine smell, no grey rock smell of Bloodfang's northern border, this was deeper, heavier.

I had walked past the border without feeling it cross.

My legs were aching so bad they could no longer hold my weight, they buckled, my knees hit the ground and my bag slid off my shoulder, my palms were flat in the dirt. The dark pressing in at the edges of my vision, something warm was spreading through my shirt at the side, something had torn loose somewhere on the walk and had been quietly bleeding since.

The cold came up through my palms. My wolf went completely still and everything I had been holding back, I hadn't let myself feel yet, pressed against the inside of my chest.

I could hear heavy boots on the ground, multiple sets, moving towards me.

I raised my head slowly, three men stepped through the treeline. All armed and broad.

The one at the front stopped when he saw me and assessed me, one fast, sweeping look at my bag, the blood z the state I was on both knees in the dirt.

He said something low to the man behind him, I didn't catch the words, then he crouched down in front of me.

"Hey." He said. "Can you hear me?"

I nodded, or tried to.

"She's bleeding," the man behind him said. "On the left side."

"I can see that." He hadn't move his eyes from my face. "Is there anyone with you?"

I shook my head slowly.

"Do you know where you are?"

The darkness was getting thicker at the edges. His face was beginning to blur.

"I... I... I don't know."