Chapter 39

Luka

I was sobbing so hard I couldn’t breathe. I thought I would pass out. I knew I had gained strength only because the toll this heartache was taking on my body had sent me into the hospital months earlier.

If I stayed at Caleb’s, I would have been taken down to the dungeon. Arthur and Vincent stood with their arms on their hips, and a cadre of lesser guards followed me away from the gates of Caleb’s manor to make sure I had really gone.

I couldn’t believe they could think I was actually a threat. But I also couldn’t believe that Caleb would be so heartless, so anything was possible.

I tried my best to get back to the apartment, but I had to take a break. Snot and tears caked my skin and clothes, so that I looked like a swamp monster.

“Luka?” Mia bent down, hands on her knees. I looked around and wiped my eyes, noticing that I was in her garden, where she and I had done capoeira just a few weeks before.

I wiped my nose and sniffed. “Hi Mia. How are you?”

It felt so strange to try to hold normal conversation in the face of my world falling apart.

“Probably better than you. Come, sit on the bench with me.” She took my hand in hers, and I was grateful for the courtesy.

“Thank you.”

Mia nodded, not saying anything, ushering me forward, trying to keep me in motion. She didn’t ask me what was happening, which made me think she already knew.

Everyone in Red Moon Pack must know more than me about my situation, it seemed.

“I know this must be hard, Luka,” she said.

“Mm-hmm, it is…”

“But you have to keep on moving, you have to make your way home.”

I felt like the kindness she had just offered me just slammed in my face. I couldn’t put together the exact words to say.

“How…?”

She backed away from me even as she put her hand on mine. “You’ll get through this. It’s awkward, and it’s not easy for any of us. But we have to find a way to make a new life.”

I wanted to scream at her, ask her how she could possibly include herself in this quandary, since it affected only one person: me. She could choose to keep me as a friend, regardless of what her unpredictable, egotistical, selfish brother did.

But no.

“Do you think?”

“Yes. It might not seem like it now, but it will all be for the best. My brother…”

Just hearing him spoken stung, knowing he existed for everyone else still, but not for me.

“He’s not cruel. But this is a situation with no precedents. He will make it possible for you to live freely, better than the life you had before.”

“But…?”

“But things have changed.” Mia lifted me from the seat and began to walk me toward the path back to the far side of the village, where the apartment complex was.

“Can they ever be…?”

“I don’t know, Luka. All I can do is hope for the best. That’s all anyone can do.”

“Anyone but…”

She gave me a severe look and shook her head, conveying that there was a fine line between questioning authority and bordering on treason.

I tried to speak, but a sob seized my throat. “Th…Thank you, Mia. For everything.”

Mia gave me a kiss on the cheek filled with more love for me than I knew she could safely communicate. I kissed her back, trying not to leave a trail of mucus on her smooth, perfect cheek, and ran back toward my new life, in the opposite direction of the life dangled before me nearly a year ago, when I got here.

That first night, I slept on Jordyn and Devin’s sofa, and they treated me like a sick patient, wrapping me in blankets, giving me treatments for fever.

“Things are bad, I know,” I told them, “But they could be so much worse. The alpha k…Ca…My life at Red Moon Pack is allowed to continue, so that’s a good thing.”

I kept fighting the urge to say “continue…for now,” but that reality always hung over my head. It had been true when I lived under Declan’s rules, and it was true living under Caleb’s.

The first week, I mostly stayed in the apartment building, too afraid I might encounter Declan, or Olivia, or even Caleb. If I saw him, I had no idea if I would punch him or kiss him or break down into a puddle of sobs. Maybe all three.

After I became more comfortable venturing outside, I added a new place on the grounds to my walk, where I could handle one site of memories at a time. The first day was the fountain where I had done paintings with the set that Caleb had gotten me. I remembered when I had walked from the store in town wearing the curve-hugging dresses Mia had made me buy.

It was the first time I thought my body was anything but revolting, and I could feel Caleb’s eyes touching the contours of me. Even remembering it, I felt it.

To mark two weeks since being cast out of Caleb’s life, for real, for good, I walked to the dark forests on the edge of the grounds, the trails where I ran with Caleb when I first got out of the hospital. If he thought I could do something, then maybe I could believe in myself too.

It was a bittersweet sensation, the lacy shadows of the sun filtering through the leaves. I even picked up my pace, trying to imagine myself back then, when I really was a different person. It was so difficult on my body those months ago, when I could barely move. Now, it was my soul that had me on the verge of breaking down.

I moved my feet slowly ahead of me, one by one. I felt like I was moving underwater. I pushed myself harder.

Out of nowhere, something threw me to the floor of the forest. I thought I must be imagining, daydreaming about an earlier time.

But I felt the blood on my tongue and the hard scrape of the dirt on my cheek. The earth was sideways.

And then I was thrown up against a tree. Claws the size of knives scraped at my skin, slashing me through my clothes and my chest.

Declan? Had he followed me here?

But the hard grip of a black, leathery paw told me that this wasn’t a person, not even an ordinary shifter. It was a rogue. Drool dripped from his razor-sharp fangs.

His head bent toward my neck, and I whipped it away with my arms, which were like throwing stars. I swung around and kicked him in his solar plexus with all of the strength in my body, and he fell to the ground.

I was shocked at my strength. With each hit I landed, I got a flash of the lesson when I learned it. When I flipped the rogue, I remembered the first time Caleb used the flip on me in Judo. Feeling the heel of my hand make contact with his snout, I remembered Olivia slugging me to the ground the first time she attacked me.

The rogue leapt up and lifted me into the air, then threw me down, with a kick to the ribs that brought me straight back to the basement of Declan’s mansion at Long Lake Pack, just after he scalded my hands.

The rogue picked me up once again. I got some good bites and scratches in, enough to slow him down, but not enough to keep him from bashing me into a tree.

I could feel the blood leaving my mouth, and I hoped I hadn’t lost any teeth. The rogue’s teeth sank into my neck, and he swung his head erratically, ripping the flesh. I could feel it opening in sheets, see the blood flowing out.

I felt the world fading, yet again, as I had so many times in my short eighteen years. This was the first year of my life where I had been slightly free, and I had a feeling that it would be the last year of my life at all.

It was a good way to end it, I thought. If this was all that would happen to me, I’m glad I had this year here at Red Moon Pack, even if I was discarded, even if I was killed.

Because it meant I had lived. A warmth took over me, where I wasn’t filled with fear anymore, just the memory of my life here, from the first day that I spoke with Caleb at Long Lake Pack, when I didn’t know it was him, to waking up in the hospital. I remembered getting my room, meeting Mia, learning to fight, making friends.

If I was going to die, I thought to myself, I’m glad it was now. I was ready.