The Luna he threw away

Seraphina POV There is a version of me that no longer exists. She used to hum while she made coffee. She used to read with her feet tucked under her on the window seat, marking pages with folded corners because she always meant to come back to the good parts. She used to believe, with the kind of stubborn, embarrassing certainty that only young women possess, that love was something you could earn if you were patient enough and quiet enough and good enough. She was twenty-two when she married Damien Voss. She was twenty-three when she understood that some men are not built to be loved. They are built to be obeyed. I stopped humming sometime around month four. I wore a green dress the morning he divorced me. That's the thing I remember most. Not the papers on the table. Not his face. Not even the sound of the pen scratching across the page. The green dress. It had small gold buttons down the front and a hem that stopped just below my knees. I'd bought it two weeks earlier from a boutique on Fifth and Crest, the kind of place I never would have walked into before I became Damien Voss's wife. I held it up in the dressing room mirror for a long time, turning left, then right, telling myself that maybe this was the one. Maybe this dress would make him look at me the way he looked at everything else he owned. With want. Our first anniversary was on a Saturday. I had a reservation at Aurum, the restaurant on the top floor of the Silverpeak Grand. I made it myself, three weeks in advance, using my own name because his assistant never answered my calls. I had planned a whole evening. Candles. A speech I'd practiced in the bathroom mirror until the words stopped feeling like begging and started feeling like something close to brave. A small gift wrapped in silver paper that sat on the nightstand in the room he never slept in. I stood outside his office door at nine in the morning holding a cup of coffee I made for him, two sugars, no milk, the way he liked it and I told myself today was different. Today, he would see me. I knocked twice. "Come in." His voice came through the door flat and cold, the way it always did when he spoke to me, like I was an interruption he had learned to tolerate. I used to flinch at that tone. By month twelve I had simply stopped noticing it, the way you stop noticing a bruise once it's old enough. I pushed the door open. He was standing behind his desk in a grey suit, his back half-turned to me. The morning light cut through the glass wall behind him and made everything in the room look sharp and expensive. He looked expensive. He always did. He didn't turn around when I walked in. "I made you coffee," I said. My voice was smaller than I wanted it to be. "Put it on the desk." I put it on the desk. That was when I saw the papers. They were laid out in a neat stack, already separated into sections with small sticky tabs marking where signatures went. A pen sat beside them, uncapped. Like someone had arranged it all and then stepped out to wait. My chest went cold. I looked at the papers. Then at the back of his head. Then back at the papers. "Damien." He turned around. His eyes went to my face first, and something moved in them .. not guilt, not grief, not even discomfort. Just flat recognition. The way you'd look at a piece of furniture you'd decided to replace. "Sit down, Seraphina." I didn't sit. "What is this?" He walked around the desk and stood on the other side of the papers, and I understood then that he had positioned himself deliberately. The desk between us. The papers between us. Everything calculated. "Divorce papers," he said. Like it was obvious. Like I was slow for asking. Something started ringing in my ears. "Our anniversary is today," I said. "I know what day it is." "I made a reservation at.." "I won't be going." He picked up the pen and held it out to me. "The terms are fair. You'll receive a settlement. My lawyers have been reasonable." I stared at the pen. And then something cracked open. Not loudly. Not the way I'd always imagined heartbreak would sound, like something shattering, like a sound you could point to and say there, that's the moment. It was quieter than that. It was the sound of a door closing in an empty house. "A year," I said. My voice didn't shake. I was surprised by that. "I spent a year in this house. I went to every pack function alone because you always had somewhere else to be. I ate dinner at a table set for two while your chair stayed empty. I smiled at people who whispered that the Alpha had married a wolfless girl from a dying bloodline and what a waste, what a waste.." I stopped. Pressed my lips together. He was watching me the way you watch weather through a window. Present but unmoved. "And you're handing me a pen," I finished. "Sign the papers, Seraphina." "Look me in the eye and tell me why." He did. He looked me straight in the eye, and his were so dark and so empty that I felt the last small thing I'd been holding onto inside me shrivel up and go still. "Because I don't want this," he said. "I never did." For a moment I couldn't move. I thought about the speech I'd practiced in the bathroom mirror. I thought about the silver-wrapped gift on the nightstand. I thought about the girl who used to hum while she made coffee, who had believed so completely in the quiet, patient kind of love, the kind that builds slowly, the kind that rewards you eventually if you just hold on long enough. I thought: she would have cried. I thought: I am not her anymore. I picked up the pen. I signed every page he'd marked. I didn't read them. I couldn't, because my vision had gone blurry in a way I refused to acknowledge. When I finished, I set the pen down with a small, careful click, and I looked at him one last time. He was already looking at his phone. I walked out. Down the hall, down the stairs, through the front door of the house that had never been my home. I didn't take the gift off the nightstand. I didn't change out of the green dress. I left with nothing. And he didn't come after me. That was three years ago. Now I am sitting in the back of a black car, watching Silverpeak's skyline come into view through the tinted window. It looks the same. Glass towers catching the morning light, the Voss tower tallest among them, its logo cutting into the sky like a brand. My phone buzzes with a message from Marcus, my lawyer. They know someone bought in. They don't know it's you. You're still clean. I type back: Keep it that way. For now. I look back at the tower and I feel it, just for a second, just one unguarded moment .. the ghost of that girl in the green dress. The one who knocked on his door with coffee she'd made exactly the way he liked it, hoping today would be different. Then I put her away. I smooth my blazer, check my reflection in the dark glass, and let the corner of my mouth lift. Just slightly. The woman he threw away is back. And this time, she's not leaving until he feels every single thing he made her feel.