I had just finish having sex with Alpha Mike when i ran into goody too shoes Arora, the notorious femal warrior
I would like to say I had no idea what I was doing when I slipped out of Alpha Mike's room at four in the morning, hair wrecked and dignity somewhere on his bedroom floor
But that would be a lie, and I've told myself enough of those to last a lifetime.
I knew exactly what I was doing. I always do. That's the part nobody ever talks about — the knowing. The way I smooth my dress in the dark of his corridor and tell myself the same thing I always tell myself: it means nothing to him. It should mean nothing to you. The way I believe it just enough to get through the walk back. Just enough to sleep for two hours before the pack wakes up and the day begins and I go back to being invisible.
My name is Laura. I'm an omega. I have no wolf.
And in approximately fourteen hours, I will stand in the great hall with every member of this pack and pray to the Moon Goddess to give me a mate from somewhere far away from here — someone I've never met, someone who carries no history with me, someone who will let me walk out of these walls and never look back.
That was the plan.
That was always the plan.
The packhouse corridor was silent at this hour, which was the only reason I used it. Long stretch of stone floor, torches burning low on the walls, and me moving quickly with my shoes in my hand so my footsteps wouldn't carry. I'd done this walk enough times to know which boards creaked and which ones held their peace. I knew exactly where the torchlight thinned out enough that I could cut left toward the east wing and disappear.
I almost made it.
"Coming from Mike's room, are we?"
I stopped.
The voice came from the alcove just before the turn — light, almost bored, the way someone sounds when they already know the answer to the question they're asking. I didn't need to look to know who it was. I would know that voice in a burning building.
Aurora stepped out of the shadow like she had all the time in the world.
She probably had. She'd likely been there a while.
She looked exactly the way Aurora always looked — like she had been assembled from finer materials than the rest of us and was quietly aware of it. Hair perfect despite the hour. Posture like something about to strike. She was dressed for early training, which meant she'd been awake for hours, which meant she had been waiting for hours, which meant she had known exactly where I was and had simply decided to be standing here when I walked past.
She let her eyes move over me slowly. My dress. My hair. The corridor behind me. She took her time with it the way you do when you want someone to feel every second of being seen.
Then she smiled.
Not warmly.
"Ceremony day," she said softly, tilting her head just slightly, like I was something mildly curious she'd found at the bottom of her boot. "Of all the mornings to be making that particular walk." The smile didn't shift. "Aren't you supposed to be resting? Preparing?" A small sound, not quite a laugh, that managed to be worse than one. "Hoping the Moon takes pity on you tonight?"
I said nothing.
I had practice. Years and years of it.
"It's almost impressive, you know." She took one step closer. Her voice stayed pleasant — that particular brand of pleasant that is impossible to quote accurately afterward because the words themselves sound reasonable and it's everything underneath them that cuts. "The resilience. No wolf. No rank. Nothing that would make any reasonable person look twice at you." A pause that had been calculated to land exactly where it did. "And still you show up. Every single day. Still you try."
Don't. I pressed my thumbnail into my palm. She came here for a reaction. Don't be what she came for.
"I suppose when a girl has nothing real to offer—" The pleasantness thinned. Not suddenly. Just gradually, the way light goes when a cloud moves over it. "—she finds other ways to keep herself relevant."
Her eyes moved to the corridor behind me. Mike's corridor. And back.
I held very still.
"The sad part," Aurora continued, her voice dropping into something that wore the shape of sympathy without any of the substance, "is that you actually believe tonight will be different for you. That the Moon is going to look down at you — you, Laura — and decide you deserve something." She let that sit for exactly the right number of seconds. "A mate. A future. A fresh start somewhere." She tilted her head the other way. "As if the Moon doesn't see exactly what the rest of us see."
Walk away. I knew I should walk away. I had walked away from worse than this. I had tucked my chin and kept moving and survived it and come back the next day and survived it again. That was what I did. That was what I was good at.
But then she sighed.
Like I had tired her out. Like this whole thing — me, my life, my existence in her orbit — was something she was almost bored of.
"Honestly it makes sense that you turned out this way," she said. Casual. Offhand. Like the next thing she said was barely worth the breath. "With parents like yours, what else could anyone expect?"
The air in my chest went very still.
"A mother and father who took one long look at what they'd made—" She gestured at me, one elegant lift of her hand that managed to take in everything, "—and decided they had somewhere better to be." The smile returned. Softer now. More dangerous for it. "Can you blame them, really? Raising a wolfless daughter with no future and no dignity, sneaking out of men's rooms before the sun comes up—" She clicked her tongue gently. "I'd have left too."
Something cracked open in the center of my chest.
Six years.
Two thousand one hundred and ninety marks on my wall. Six years of waking up in a house that no longer had them in it. Six years of telling myself there had to be a reason, there had to be an explanation, they would not have just left — they would not have just left me —
"Poor things probably didn't know how to tell you," Aurora said, and her voice had gone almost tender, which was the most vicious thing she had done yet. "That you were the reason they ran."
My hand moved.
I did not decide to move it.
It simply moved — fast and certain and with six years of grief and fury and every swallowed, silent, surviving morning behind it — and the sound of my palm connecting with Aurora's cheek split through that corridor like a crack of lightning.
Her head snapped sideways.
The torchlight seemed to flinch.
And in the enormous silence that rushed in afterward, I became aware of two things at the same time.
The first was the sting spreading across my palm, hot and immediate and real.
The second was Aurora's gaze — head still turned from the impact — sliding slowly, deliberately, to something behind me.
I turned.
At the far end of the corridor, stopped mid-step like the sound had frozen them where they stood, were all three of them.
Kai. Mike. Luke.