The café on Birch Street had been mine before it was anyone else's. I'd been going there every morning since before Tru, ordering the same chamomile blend, sitting at the same corner table because the window let in soft light without the glare. It was the one small ritual grief hadn't taken from me. I should have known Samson would find a way to take it too.
I saw her the moment I stepped outside, cup in hand, the autumn air sharp against my face. Paris, standing on the sidewalk in a pale blue dress that made her belly impossible to miss, one hand pressed to the small of her back like she needed steadying. She wasn't supposed to be there. Silverfang Maternity was forty minutes north. But there she was, twenty feet from my table, looking directly at me.
I told myself to keep walking. I had learned, in the last week, that engaging with anything Samson touched only fed it oxygen.
"Shay." Her voice cracked on my name, loud enough to turn heads at the outdoor tables. "Please, just—can we talk? I don't want any trouble."
"There's nothing to talk about." I kept my voice level, my pace even, and angled toward my car.
That was when I noticed them. Two men across the street with cameras slung low against their hips, angled just slightly toward us, pretending to check their phones. My stomach dropped before my mind caught up to why.
"Please don't walk away from me." Paris's voice rose, thin and trembling, and two fingers came up to touch her collarbone—a gesture I'd catalogued without meaning to, the same one she made right before she escalated anything. "I'm pregnant, Shay. You can't just—you can't keep harassing me like this."
Harassing her. I hadn't said a single word to this woman in over a week.
A man at the nearest table lowered his newspaper. A woman near the door stopped mid-step, phone already lifting. I felt the air shift the way it does right before something breaks, and every instinct I had screamed at me to leave, to just get in the car, but Paris moved first.
Her hand closed around my wrist—too hard for someone playing fragile, nails biting crescents into my skin—and I turned, more startled than anything, trying to pull free. "Let go of me."
"I just want you to understand what you've done to my family," she said, and there was nothing soft in her eyes anymore, just for that one second, cold and precise, before the mask slid back into place. "You made all of this public. You did this."
I wrenched my arm back. She let go at exactly the wrong moment, her nails catching the collar of my blouse, and I heard the fabric give before I felt it—a long tear straight down the front, the silk parting like it had been waiting for an excuse.
The morning air hit my bare skin. My blouse hung open, and there it was for anyone with eyes: the raised, silvered line of my C-section scar cutting across my abdomen, still tender at the edges even now, and above it, on the curve of my neck, the mate mark Samson had left on our bonding night—faded to a dull gray-brown bruise, neglected, barely visible unless you knew to look. I hadn't realized until that exact moment, standing on a public sidewalk with my chest bared to strangers, just how much it had faded. How long it had been since he'd touched me with anything resembling tenderness.
Cameras went off in a rapid, stuttering burst of light.
Paris staggered back, one hand flying to her mouth, the other cradling her belly. "Oh my god," she said, loud, pitched perfectly for the small crowd now frozen around us. "I didn't mean—I'm so sorry, I didn't mean to—"
I stood there in the flashing light, blouse hanging open, scar and mark on full display, and I did the only thing my body would let me do. I pulled the fabric closed with one hand, lifted my chin, and walked to my car without a single word.
I didn't cry until I was three blocks away, pulled over on a side street, both hands white-knuckled on the wheel.
By nightfall the photos were everywhere. MoonBite Weekly ran the scar in a cropped, zoomed frame under the headline LUNA'S HIDDEN WOUNDS—forums argued over whether it was "disfiguring," whether a Luna who couldn't "carry herself with dignity" belonged at Samson's side at all. Samson released a statement within hours, his name attached to careful, concerned language about my "emotional wellbeing during this difficult period"—words that made me sound unstable without ever saying it outright.
By the following morning, pack members who used to bow their heads when I passed the hall simply looked away instead. No one spoke to me directly. No one needed to. I understood, watching my own reflection thin out of every room I entered, that Samson wasn't trying to exile me.
He was making me disappear in plain sight.
