Chapter Three
604 Words
The Girl Who Disappeared
E . Peaceleigh
Alina didn’t sleep that night.
She lay on the forest floor, curled beneath a crooked oak, arms wrapped around her knees like they could hold her together. But the pieces had already fallen. Scattered. Irreparable.
Her white dress was torn at the hem, dirt smeared across her legs. Her wolf had gone silent. For the first time in years, she couldn’t feel her anymore.
The bond had been severed—publicly, brutally.
The moon had given her a mate. And he had cast her aside like she meant nothing.
A crack of sunlight peeked through the leaves, golden and warm against her cheek. The world moved on. Birds chirped. Wind rustled through the trees. Somewhere, back at the pack house, wolves were probably waking to breakfast and training and normality.
But not her.
Not Alina Rivers—the rejected mate of Alpha Kael Blackthorn.
Her breath hitched as the memory slammed into her again. His words. Cold. Unforgiving. “She is not my equal.”
Tears pricked her eyes, but she refused to let them fall. She’d already cried everything out in the dead of night, alone with the ache in her chest and the silence of a wolf who no longer responded.
Was she even worthy of being called wolf anymore?
She stood, slowly, knees trembling, pain searing her ankle where she’d twisted it the night before. She didn’t care. Her pain made sense now. It was something real.
She limped back toward the edge of the territory. Not the village. Not the house she shared with her aunt. No. She wasn’t going to face the stares. The pity. The whispers. Not again.
She was leaving.
Where to? She didn’t know. She had no plan. No bag. Just a crumpled soul and the fierce, tiny ember inside her that refused to die.
She reached the border an hour later.
The forest thinned. The scent markers faded. She was crossing into neutral land, and once she did, she wouldn’t be protected anymore. She’d be fair game for rogues. But it didn’t matter. Not anymore.
Just one more step—
“Alina.”
She turned.
Her aunt stood behind her, shawl wrapped tightly around her shoulders, silver hair fluttering in the breeze.
“I figured you’d come this way,” the woman said quietly.
Alina said nothing.
Her aunt studied her face—swollen eyes, red cheeks, the faint, crumbling glow of a bond that had been lit and extinguished too fast.
“He shouldn’t have done that,” her aunt said after a long moment. “Kael… he has his demons.”
Alina let out a bitter laugh. “Don’t we all.”
Her aunt hesitated. “You don’t have to run. The pack will—”
“No.” Alina’s voice cracked, but her spine stayed straight. “They’ll survive without me. They always have.”
A pause. Then, “Where will you go?”
Alina looked out at the wide, open world. “Anywhere the moon doesn’t watch.”
Her aunt stepped forward, pulled something from the folds of her shawl, and pressed it into her hand—a small, worn pendant. A silver crescent moon engraved with a wolf’s paw.
“Your mother’s,” she whispered. “She’d want you to have it.”
Alina held the pendant tightly. The only part of her past she’d take with her.
Then, without another word, she turned and walked away—one painful step at a time.
Toward freedom.
Toward danger.
Toward something new.
And by nightfall, Alina Rivers was gone.
[ To be continued ]
- Writer
