'Oh God, what have I done?'
The forest clearing materialized through my blurred vision like something from a nightmare I couldn't wake up from.
My heart was still hammering against my ribs from what had just happened at the river—from the words I'd screamed at Javrian, from the devastation I'd seen crack across his scarred face when I'd called him worse than Victor.
'I broke him.'
The memory of his silver eyes going completely hollow, as if I'd just ripped his soul out through his throat, made my chest feel like it was caving in on itself.
But I couldn't think about that now.
I couldn't let myself drown in that particular guilt when there was so much more destruction spread out in front of me.
Because there was Lila.
She sat hunched on a fallen log like a discarded doll, silver hair falling around her face in a curtain that couldn't quite hide the way her shoulders shook with silent sobs.
Every few seconds, a sound would escape her—this broken little whimper that made something inside me want to claw its way out of my chest and die.
'This is my fault. All of it.'
The pack members were approaching through the trees now, and I watched with growing horror as their faces lit up when they saw me.
"Luna!" Kael's scarred face broke into a genuine smile—the kind of expression I'd never thought I'd see directed at me. "There you are. We were starting to worry."
'Don't smile at me like that. Please.'
Vera moved with that graceful stride, but her gray eyes held something new. Something that looked almost... warm? "How are you feeling? You look different somehow."
Even Darius bounded over with his characteristic enthusiasm, completely oblivious to the devastation I'd just left in my wake. "Did something happen? You and Javrian were gone for a while—"
'Stop. Please stop looking at me like I belong here.'
They were accepting me—I could see it clearly from their familiarity.
They were actually accepting me as their leader's wife, as part of their pack family.
The recognition in their faces, the way they included me in their circle without hesitation—it should have felt like coming home.
Instead, it felt like being stabbed with hot knives.
Because twenty feet away, Lila was falling apart, and it was because of me.
"Thank you."
Sally's voice cut through my spiraling thoughts.
The black-and-white-haired woman had approached while I wasn't paying attention, and now she stood directly in front of me, tears streaming down her face.
Then she did something that made my world tilt sideways.
She bowed. A perfect ninety-degree bow that spoke of genuine gratitude and respect.
"Thank you for giving me back this life which I thought I would never get back."
'No. No, don't thank me. Don't look at me like I'm some kind of savior.'
Around us, the pack was smiling. Laughing. Joking with each other in a way that spoke of wounds beginning to heal, of a family slowly finding its way back together after being torn apart.
This was what healing looked like. This was hope taking root again.
'And I was poison to all of it.'
The memory slammed into me without warning:
⟩Purple hair framing a cruel smile... "Oh, Sister!" Livina's voice dripping with false sweetness... the casual way she'd talked about Victor like he was a prize she'd won... the way she'd smiled when she saw my face crumble...⟨
My breathing became shallow, panicked.
'I'm her. I'm Livina now.'
I was the other woman.
The interloper who'd waltzed into someone else's life and stolen what wasn't mine to take.
I was the reason Lila looked like a ghost of herself, the reason she sat alone while everyone else celebrated around me.
'But I never wanted this,' the desperate voice in my head whispered. 'I never asked for any of this. I never wanted to be the other woman. I never wanted to steal anyone's happiness.'
It didn't matter what I'd wanted.
What mattered was the result.
And the result was a woman I barely knew breaking apart in the shadows while I stood in the light that should have been hers.
'I have to fix this. Somehow, I have to—'
CRASH!
The sound was like the world splitting in half.
Trees splintered and crashed around us as something—someone—slammed into the forest with the force of a falling star.
The ground shook so violently I stumbled, and everyone in the clearing went rigid with shock.
Through the settling dust and debris, a familiar figure emerged.
Javrian.
And he looked... "J-Javrian—!?"
He was covered in blood. Fresh blood that was still flowing from wounds across his chest, his arms, his face.
Arrows protruded from his torso like some grotesque decoration, and his left hand—his left hand was mangled beyond recognition, barely held together by rapidly healing flesh.
'N-no, Ah, H-how—!?' The man whom I knew to be the strongest was standing with wounds all over his body. There was nothing that I seemed to understand about who could be strong enough to hurt him. And that realization came in the form of a voice of his resonating in my mind.
> "Do you know how weak I feel in front of you?"
Javrian's words resonated in my mind as if thunder were crackling down through all of my emotions, replaced by a rush of tears that I thought had dried on my path here.
The realization stopped my breathing, my heartbeat and thoughts within my mind.
This wasn't battle damage from fighting enemies. This was self-destruction. This was a man who'd gone somewhere to punish himself for crimes he thought he'd committed.
'Because I told him he was....'
My legs moved before my brain could catch up, carrying me forward in a desperate sprint.
'Ah... N-no, no, what I did—!' I had to reach him.
I had to apologize.
'Javrian—!'
I had to take back every horrible word I'd screamed at him by that river.
"Javrian, I'm sorry, I didn't mean—"
"Lila."
His voice cut through my panic like a blade, stopping me dead in my tracks.
I watched, my heart hammering against my ribs, as Javrian's silver eyes found the broken woman still sitting on her log.
She looked up slowly, tear tracks staining her pale cheeks, her eyes wide with confusion and pain.
'What?'
Javrian's gaze never wavered from her face. He never once glanced in my direction, as if I had ceased to exist entirely in his world.
The center of the world I thought I had become when he touched me just vanished—maybe not fully because I could still feel myself, but something was about to break within me.
"Become my mate," he said, his voice carrying that familiar authority but with something softer underneath. Something that sounded almost... resigned. "I want you to marry me."
badump
'N-no... Javrian'
I tried to speak, to tell him that it was my fault and the mistake of my luck when I let myself become weak for a moment.
I let myself stop numbing my emotions, letting all the guilt that shouldn't have been mine take over me. All of it getting poured onto him.
And now, looking at him while I felt my heart wrenched the moment he said he was choosing Lila, I realized that there had never been her to begin with between us.
It was just my shadow, a shadow I thought was her.
Then came his decree, firm enough as I stood there looking while others, overwhelmed by his injuries, just confused, looked between us, and he wasn't even looking at me.
And there, at that moment, I realized something.
Even though it had only been a few hours of knowing him, I could never withstand what I felt: a culmination of all the pain I had suffered in my life was puny in front of the soul-wrenching pain I felt for him not even looking at me.
"Sally..." he called out.
And in his voice, I felt everything silence at a point. I seemed to have just lost something, that I cannot name, but even though he was standing in front of me, I felt as if some side of him had just vanished.
Something just died within him, for which my tears were mourning.
"Accompany Luna back to her territory and serve her as her assistant..." And then, even as if my name from his mouth had lost the softness and the texture that even though was cold before held something that seemed mine vanished.
And his eyes, which finally looked towards me, just tore everything apart amidst the shedding tears as he looked into my eyes and said,
"Leave."