The Alpha Who Claimed My Fire

Chapter 2

CHAPTER TWO: Packing What's Left

I didn't go home that night. I couldn't. My parents' house sat two streets over from the club, close enough that I could have walked there crying and let my mother hold me while I fell apart. That's exactly why I didn't go. I knew if I let myself be held, I would stay soft. I would stay the girl who needed rescuing. Something in me had already decided that girl was finished.

Instead, I walked to the old bus stop bench outside the pack border, sat down with my ruined heels in my lap, and let myself shake until the shaking stopped. The night air was cold enough to bite through my thin dress, and I welcomed it, almost grateful for something sharp enough to distract me from the ache in my chest. I sat there long enough to watch the sky shift from black to a deep, bruised blue, my mind replaying the same ten seconds over and over until they lost all meaning, just noise and lights and Damon's voice saying a word that was never meant for me.

Eventually I walked home the long way, sneaking in through the back door so I wouldn't have to explain the state of my feet or my dress or my face to anyone. I climbed the stairs slowly, careful to avoid the two steps that always creaked, a skill I'd perfected years ago sneaking out to meet Damon after curfew. The irony of using it now to sneak away from him wasn't lost on me.

I didn't sleep. I lay on my bed staring at the ceiling, replaying it over and over. Damon's face turning. His hand lifting that stranger's palm to his nose. The word mate coming out of his mouth like a gunshot. By the time the sun came up, I had cried myself dry and something harder had settled into the empty space where the tears used to be.

My mother knocked on my door around nine. "Mira? Sasha called the house. She said something happened last night."

Of course Sasha called. Of course everyone already knew.

"I'm fine," I said, which was the first lie of many I would tell that week.

I went to school on Monday because I didn't know what else to do, and it was worse than I imagined. Worse than the whispers, worse than the stares, worse than Priya suddenly finding somewhere else to sit at lunch. The worst part was Damon walking the halls with Nadia's hand in his, both of them looking dazed and glowing the way fated mates are supposed to look. He caught my eye once, in the hallway between classes, and had the nerve to look sorry for himself, like he was the one who'd been publicly gutted in front of two hundred people.

I didn't cry in front of him. I want that on record. Whatever else happened, I didn't give him that.

By Wednesday, I couldn't walk into a room without feeling every eye land on me and then slide away, embarrassed on my behalf. Pack members who used to wave at me in the street now gave me tight, careful smiles, the kind you give someone who's sick, like my humiliation might be contagious. Even my own friends, the girls who had squealed with me over blue dresses and future Luna jokes, couldn't seem to look at me for longer than a few seconds.

One of the younger pack kids, a boy who couldn't have been more than ten, asked me loudly in the market why Damon didn't want me anymore. His mother yanked him away, mortified, whispering an apology over her shoulder, but the question hung in the air anyway, plain and unbearable in its honesty. Even children could see what I hadn't wanted to.

I understood something that week that I wish I hadn't needed a public rejection to learn. None of those people had ever actually seen me. They saw Damon's girlfriend. Damon's future mate. Damon's whole reflected shine. The second that shine disappeared, so did I. I wasn't a person to most of them. I was a role I'd been playing, and now the part was recast.

I couldn't stay.

I waited until Thursday night, when my parents were both asleep, and packed a single duffel bag. Two pairs of jeans, some shirts, my toothbrush, the photo of my grandmother that sat on my dresser. I stood in front of that photo for a long moment before slipping it into the bag, remembering summers spent at her cabin as a little girl, running barefoot through her garden while she yelled at me good-naturedly to mind the tomato vines.

I left a note on the kitchen table, short, because I didn't trust myself to write more without falling apart.

Going to stay with Grandma Odette for a while. I need to be somewhere nobody knows my name. I love you. I'm okay. Please don't come get me.

My grandmother lived alone past the northern tree line, a two-hour walk from Ravenwood Ridge, close enough that pack members knew of her but far enough that most never bothered to visit. She'd left the pack politics behind decades ago, married a man who wasn't a wolf at all, buried him, and stayed out there ever since, growing her own vegetables and telling anyone who asked that she preferred trees to people. My mother called her stubborn. My father called her difficult. I had always thought she was the most interesting person I knew, and right now, difficult sounded like exactly what I needed.

I walked out of my house at midnight, the same hour that had ruined my life four days earlier, and I didn't look back at Ravenwood Ridge until the lights of it had shrunk to nothing behind the trees. Part of me expected to feel afraid, walking alone through unfamiliar woods in the dark, but mostly I just felt numb, one foot in front of the other, my duffel bag thumping steadily against my hip like a second heartbeat.

The walk took longer than I remembered, my duffel bag straps cutting into my shoulder, my feet still tender from the gravel cuts that hadn't fully healed. I passed the old stone marker that used to mark the edge of pack territory when I was little, back before the borders got redrawn twice over some dispute I never understood. I kept walking past it into land that didn't belong to anyone, just forest and starlight and the sound of my own footsteps.

Somewhere around the two mile mark, exhaustion started to catch up with me, my legs heavy, my mind foggy from lack of sleep and days of crying I'd tried to hide from everyone. I stopped once to rest against a tree, and for a moment I let myself wonder if I was making a mistake, if running away was just another version of the same weakness that had let Damon walk all over my expectations for six years. But turning back meant walking into that pack again, into those pitying faces, and I found I would rather face an unknown road than a familiar humiliation.

By the time I reached my grandmother's porch light, my legs were shaking and the sky was starting to turn grey at the edges. I knocked, and I heard her moving before she even opened the door, because Odette never slept much, not since Grandpa Theo passed.

She opened the door in an old flannel robe, her white hair loose around her shoulders, and looked me up and down without a shred of surprise on her face.

"Took you long enough," she said, stepping back to let me in. "I heard what happened three days ago. The whole northern woods heard the wolves howling about it, one way or another."

I stood in her doorway, exhausted, humiliated, carrying everything I owned in one bag, and I felt the first genuine relief I'd had all week.

"Can I stay?" I asked.

"You can stay as long as you need," she said. "But I'll tell you right now, girl, I'm not going to feel sorry for you. Feeling sorry for yourself is how you got here in the first place, thinking some boy's nose deciding who he wants makes you worth less than you are. We're going to fix that. Starting tomorrow."

I didn't understand yet what she meant. I would understand it over the next year, one hard lesson at a time. That night, all I did was drop my bag by her door, climb into the same guest bed I used to sleep in as a little girl during summer visits, and finally, for the first time in four days, sleep.