While he was eating, my thoughts drifted far from the quiet crackle of the hearth and the familiar comfort of his presence.
It had all begun a week ago, beneath the pale blessing of the moonstone altar when I still believed the Moon Goddess had woven something gentle for me. I had just returned from the healer’s hut when she confirmed what my senses had already begun to whisper through the bond—I was carrying his child. Not one, but twins, their presence small but undeniable, like two faint pulses beneath my own heartbeat.
I remember standing there for a long while, one hand resting over my abdomen, feeling something I had never allowed myself to hope for settle into place. I had imagined telling Lucan beneath the sacred willow where we once swore, through trembling mindlink, that whatever storms came, we would face them as one. I even carried the crystal vial of the healer’s confirmation, wrapped carefully in cloth, as though it were a blessing too fragile for the world to see.
I went to his dwelling that evening with a heart too full to contain itself, but as I reached the carved wooden door, I heard voices within, the heavy timbre of laughter spilling through the narrow opening that had been left ajar.
Lucan’s voice came first, light, careless, as though speaking of something trivial rather than a life shared beneath the Goddess’s gaze.
“She is easy enough to deceive,” he said, and I remember how the sound of it unsettled something deep within me, though I could not yet understand why. “I only needed to show her what she wanted to see. All of this,” he added with a low chuckle, “is nothing more than repayment for what her bloodline took from Ellie.”
There was another laugh inside, rough and approving. “You have truly committed yourself to it then.”
Lucan did not hesitate. “She believes we are bound by fate, as though the Moon Goddess herself placed her in my path. It is almost laughable. She clings so desperately to the idea of being chosen. And Ellie—Ellie understands me in ways she never could. She is fire where Elowen is nothing but quiet obedience.”
The words struck through me like iron dipped in frost, but I remained where I stood, unmoving, as though the earth itself had anchored me in place.
Ellie.
The name was not unfamiliar. It belonged to a girl whose life had always seemed to echo my own in ways I never understood, as though the threads of our existence had been tangled long before either of us could speak our names.
I had been born beneath the blessing of a powerful bloodline, the only daughter of a house the elders once said was favored by the Moon Goddess. But beneath that same roof had lived Marga, a servant whose silence concealed a truth no one suspected. She carried a child of her own, born only hours apart from me, and in her desperation, she committed a sin that altered every path that followed.
She stole me away and left her own daughter in my place.
For years, I grew up in a world that was not mine, until fate—or perhaps punishment—unraveled the lie. When truth returned like a storm across the pack lands, I was taken back to the life that had always been meant for me, while Ellie was cast out of it, stripped of everything she had believed was hers.
And she never forgave it.
Now, standing outside Lucan’s dwelling while his voice spoke of me as though I were nothing more than a tool in another’s vengeance, I understood that the past had never truly remained buried. It had only been waiting.
I do not remember how long I stood there before I finally turned away, but I remember the hollow feeling that followed me like a second shadow.
Even as I sat across from Lucan now, watching him eat as though nothing within him had ever been false, I could no longer see the man I had loved. I could only see the shape of what had been used.
That night, when sleep finally claimed the silence between us, he held me as though I were something precious, his arms heavy around my waist beneath the furs, his breath steady against my neck. For a moment, I almost wanted to believe it was still real, that warmth could still mean safety. But the bond no longer answered the way it once did, and something in me had already begun to wake.
When he rose carefully from the bed and left without sound, I did not move.
I waited until the door closed fully behind him, until the night itself seemed to swallow his footsteps, before I followed.
Barefoot beneath the cold breath of the earth, I moved through the shadows of the path that led beyond the dwelling, my pulse striking hard against my ribs as though warning me to turn back. But I did not.
I saw them beneath the old iron gate where the boundary stones marked the edge of the pack lands.
Lucan did not hesitate when he reached her.
Ellie stepped into his arms as though she had been waiting there all along, and then they kissed with a hunger that was not gentle, not restrained, but something raw and consuming, like wolves no longer bound by reason. The sight of it tore through me more cleanly than any blade ever could.
And still I did not look away.
Even when their bodies pressed against one another with a familiarity that made my stomach twist, even when his hands—hands that had once rested so carefully over the life growing within me—gripped her as though I had never existed at all.
Their voices came between breaths and fractured movements, low and unguarded, carried by the night wind as though the Moon Goddess herself had chosen to reveal what I was never meant to hear.
“She has already accepted everything I showed her,” Lucan said, his tone unsteady but satisfied, as though speaking of a victory already secured. “Her trust, her name, her place within her house. It will all open itself to me soon enough.”
“And after she breaks?” Ellie’s voice followed, sharp with something like satisfaction.
“Then there will be nothing left for her to protect,” he answered without hesitation, a quiet laugh slipping through his words. “Everything she is will belong to us.”
The world around me did not move after that. Even the wind seemed to forget how to breathe.
I understood then that I had never been part of their story in the way I believed. I had only been the path they walked upon.
But something within me, something deeper than grief and sharper than betrayal, began to harden in the silence that followed.
If they had written me into their tragedy, then I would learn how to rewrite the will of fate itself.
