The days after the rejection blurred into one another like rain on dirty glass.
Wake. Work. Endure.
Luna moved through the motions of pack life as if she were an echo of herself, a pale ghost haunting the halls.
She scrubbed the Alpha's floors. She washed Selene's gowns. She ladled stew into bowls and collected them again, each action so practiced her body no longer needed her mind's permission.
Her mind was elsewhere.
It hovered over that moment in the Circle—Orion's steady voice saying, *I reject the mate bond.* The pack's collective inhale. Selene's relieved exhale.
The pain had dulled from an open wound to a deep, constant ache. Some nights it throbbed so badly she could barely breathe. Other times it lay quiet, a heavy stone at the center of her chest.
The bond was quieter too.
Not gone. Never gone. But muffled now, like a song heard through a closed door. The rawness of those first hours had receded. In its place was a steady, stubborn hum. A reminder of what the Goddess had done—and of what Orion had chosen.
It didn't matter what he felt, she told herself as she swept ash from the great hearth, as she scrubbed mud from boots, as she knelt to scrub scuffs from the hall's stone floor.
He had made his decision.
He had chosen his path.
She had to find one of her own.
"You're slower than usual," Mara snapped one afternoon, tossing a stained tablecloth into Luna's arms. "Did you leave your wits in the wash basin?"
Luna blinked, dragging her thoughts back to the present.
"Sorry," she murmured. "I'll finish faster."
Mara paused, eyes narrowing.
"What's rattling around in that head of yours?" she demanded. "Don't tell me you're mooning over that ceremony nonsense. That's done."
Luna's grip tightened on the cloth.
"I'm just tired," she said.
Mara snorted.
"We're *all* tired," she said. "That's pack life. Now move."
Luna moved.
But Mara's words clanged around in her skull even after the housekeeper stomped away.
*That's pack life.*
What did that even *mean* for her now?
She'd always been on the lowest rung, but she'd still been part of it. An omega-adjacent stray, yes, but fed from the same kitchens, sheltered under the same roofs, protected—if only incidentally—by the same borders.
Now, wherever she walked, the air felt... thinner. Colder.
Some wolves avoided looking at her, as if eye contact might summon the Goddess's attention and drop some unwanted fate into their lives.
Others stared openly, curiosity and judgment tangled together.
Once, as she carried a stack of folded linens down the corridor, a young warrior apprentice stepped directly into her path and didn't move.
She stopped short, arms straining under the weight of the cloth.
"Excuse me," she said softly.
He smirked.
"So you're the Goddess' little joke," he said. "The runt she dangled in front of the Alpha to see what he'd do."
Heat flooded her cheeks.
"I didn't ask—" she started.
He chuckled.
"Didn't say you did," he replied. "But everyone saw. You thought, for a moment, that you could be—what? Luna? Alpha's equal?" His gaze slid over her slight frame, her worn clothes. "Ridiculous."
"Torren."
The voice came from down the hall—flat, edged with warning.
The apprentice stiffened.
Selene stood in a doorway, watching them with an expression that was almost fond.
"Don't waste your time," she said lightly. "Luna knows her place. Don't you, little one?"
The old, familiar title scraped over her skin.
Luna's throat tightened. Her fingers burned around the stack of linens.
"Yes, Selene," she managed.
Selene's smile curved, satisfied.
"Good," she said. "We wouldn't want any more... confusion."
Torren muttered something under his breath and stepped aside.
Luna walked on, pulse thrumming in her ears.
That night, in her narrow bed, she stared at the ceiling and replayed the scene.
Her place.
Once, that phrase had meant *below.* Beneath. Obedient. Silent.
Now it meant something worse.
It meant *wrong.*
Out of alignment with the Goddess' mark. Out of favor with her pack's Alpha. Out of step with a future she had not asked for and been denied, all in the span of one night.
She turned onto her side, facing the small square of sky in her window.
The moon floated there, just past full now, its edge starting to wane.
"You marked me," she whispered. "Now they use it as another reason to push me down."
Her voice cracked.
"I asked you for a path," she said. "I thought maybe... maybe you were giving me one. But what kind of path starts with a wall?"
Silence pressed in.
Luna closed her eyes.
In the days that followed, her secret clearing became less refuge and more courtroom.
She went there whenever she could—between tasks, at dusk, in the thin hours when the pack slept. She knelt on the flat rock, or among the roots, and argued with a sky that would not answer in the ways she wanted.
"You must have known," she said once, hands fisted in her hair. "You see how they are. How he is. You must have *known* he would choose them over... this. Over me."
A wind stirred the leaves, soft and indifferent.
"Was that the point?" she demanded. "To show me something I could never have? To... rip open this hole in my chest and then walk away?"
The ember inside her flickered.
She pressed a hand to it, half-expecting to feel nothing.
Instead, warmth met her palm.
Stubborn, persistent.
Not comfort. Not apology.
Presence.
"I don't want *presence,*" she hissed through her teeth. "I want... I want a way out."
The word hung there.
Out.
She froze.
It wasn't the first time the thought had slipped through her mind. It had crept along the edges, disguised as fantasy.
What if I wasn't here?
What if I didn't have to see him with her?
What if every corridor wasn't a reminder?
She had always dismissed those thoughts as weakness. As cowardice. She was pack. This was her place. Leaving was for rogues—and rogues were stories told to frighten pups.
Dangerous. Mad. Alone.
But now, as she knelt in her clearing with dirt under her nails and grief in her lungs, the word felt different.
*Out* did not feel like *away*.
It felt like *elsewhere.*
She swallowed.
"If I left," she whispered, as if testing a curse on her tongue, "what would happen?"
The question terrified her.
It also cracked something inside.
She thought of the pack's hierarchy—the careful ladders of rank and status. Every rung she would never climb. Every stone in that wall the Goddess had shown her with the mate bond, then bricked up again with Orion's refusal.
She thought of Selene, with her polished cruelty. The way she wielded Luna's existence as a prop in every story about Orion's mercy.
She thought of the whispers, the pity, the smirks.
And, under all of that, she thought of the way her chest hurt every time she caught, through the bond, the faint impression of Orion's hand on Selene's back, guiding her through a door. Orion's soft exhale when Selene made him smile.
It was no longer just jealousy, or hurt pride. It was something deeper. A constant reopening of that wound the Goddess had carved.
"I can't heal here," Luna said, voice shaking. "Not from this."
Her words seemed to sink into the earth. The trees said nothing. The moon watched.
She stared at her hands, small and scarred.
"What am I, if not pack?" she whispered. "An orphan. A stray. A charity case. That's what I've always been. But if I'm not even *welcome* as that anymore..."
Images flickered across her mind like brief, sharp visions.
A stretch of unknown forest. No walls. No torches. No pack scent woven into every breath.
Silence that was not heavy with unspoken judgment, but simple and clean.
Danger, yes—teeth and hunger and cold. But danger that came honest, without the twist of betrayal.
Her heart stuttered in her chest.
"Rogue," she breathed.
The word tasted of smoke and frost and sharp edges.
Rogues were warnings in every pup's story. Wolves without packs. Without territory. Without the safety of shared strength. They starved. They were hunted. They went mad in their isolation.
But they also... chose.
Their own paths. Their own wounds. Their own ways to survive or not.
No Alpha decided their worth.
No future Luna used their existence as a prop.
No pack circle watched as the Goddess' mark on them was publicly denied.
The ember in her chest flared, surprising her.
Luna stared up at the slice of daytime sky visible through the leaves. The moon was not there now, invisible in the brightness.
"Is *that* the path?" she asked. "Is that why you marked me? So I'd have the strength to walk away? So I'd stop... clinging to a place that only ever wants me smaller?"
A breath of wind curled around her, cool against her damp cheeks. It tangled in her hair, tugged playfully at the hem of her shirt, then slipped through her fingers when she reached for it.
She could have called it a sign.
She could have called it nothing.
It didn't matter.
The thought had rooted itself.
It grew over the next days, stubborn as weed between stones.
Each small cruelty watered it.
A warrior laughing, "Careful, you'll catch the Alpha's eye again," when she tripped over a step.
Selene's quiet, cutting, "We wouldn't want to confuse fate and fantasy, now would we?" when Luna brought fresh linens to their rooms.
Mara's brusque, "Stop daydreaming, girl. This is where you *belong*," spat like a curse.
Each kindness fed it, too, in a different way.
Elia sliding her an extra heel of bread when she thought no one was looking.
A pup smiling up at her, sticky hands reaching for a story, then being yanked away by a fretful mother. "Not her. She's... involved in things. We don't know what that means yet."
Involved in things.
As if she were a spill—dangerous until fully cleaned.
At night, the bond hummed, a dull throb. Orion moved through his days with the same steady discipline. He trained. He planned. He slept fitfully.
He did not come to her.
He did not seek her out.
He had made his choice.
Slowly, painfully, Luna began to understand that now she had to make hers.
The tipping point came on an ordinary evening.
She was in the great hall, clearing plates after the pack's meal. The room was full of the usual din—voices, laughter, the clatter of cutlery, the scrape of chairs.
At the high table, Orion and Selene sat side by side.
He looked tired. A deeper kind of tired than any she'd seen before. Yet his back was straight, his gaze attentive as he listened to Gamma Rowan recount a scouting report from the northern border.
Selene leaned in, hand resting lightly on his forearm. Every so often she would murmur something that made his lips twitch, tension easing minutely from his shoulders.
They looked... right, to anyone watching. The Alpha and his chosen Luna, perfectly balanced.
Luna moved behind them, collecting empty goblets.
As she reached for Kael's cup, a snatch of murmured conversation drifted back from the high table.
"...still talk," Rowan was saying. "Some say you've angered the Goddess by refusing her choice."
Orion's jaw tightened.
"The Goddess gave me a pack before she gave me a mate," he said quietly. "If she wished me to choose differently, she should have chosen a different moment."
Selene's fingers tightened, just a little, on his arm.
"The Goddess forgives strength," she said, her tone soothing. "She is not so fragile that one choice will break her favor."
Rowan hummed noncommittally.
Luna's hand shook around the goblet.
"She forgives a great deal, if she forgave *you*," a voice behind her whispered, dripping with malice.
She turned.
Selene's cousin, Lyra—a pretty, sharp-featured wolf who often trailed in her shadow—stood there, eyes glinting.
"What did you think would happen?" Lyra hissed, keeping her voice low enough that only Luna could hear over the hall's noise. "That he'd throw away every alliance, every plan, for you? For a runt with dirt under her nails?"
Luna's throat closed.
"I didn't think—"
"That's right," Lyra cut in, smiling without warmth. "You didn't. You *don't.* That's your problem."
She leaned closer, breath hot against Luna's ear.
"If you loved him at all," she murmured, "you'd remove the temptation. Give him one less thing to worry about. Disappear." Her smile widened. "Do him that kindness."
Luna's blood went cold.
Lyra straightened, expression smoothing into something bland as she turned away.
"The dishes won't clear themselves," she said in a normal tone, louder. "Or have you forgotten your duties too?"
Luna watched her go, heart hammering.
*If you loved him at all, you'd remove the temptation.*
The words sank like stones, displacing other thoughts.
Did she love him?
She barely *knew* him. Not in any way that counted as real. She knew the shape of his shoulders when he bore too much weight. The sound of his voice when he gave commands. The feel of his emotions, now, through a bond he hadn't wanted.
But love?
No.
What she felt was more complicated. A tangle of awe and hurt and unwilling connection.
Yet the idea of being a temptation to him—a reminder of a path not taken, of a bond denied—made her stomach twist.
Was she another burden? Another weight on his already-cracked shoulders?
The bond gave her no clear answer. Just a diffuse sense of strain, of something under tension.
That night, in her clearing, under a thinning moon, Luna knelt on the flat rock and spoke the words that had been building in her throat.
"I don't belong here," she said.
The forest listened.
"I have no rank," she went on. "No family. No future. The only thing that ever tied me to this place, beyond... habit, was that promise your light revealed. And he broke it. In front of everyone."
Her hands curled into fists.
"If I stay," she whispered, "I stay small. I stay their reminder. Their joke. Their cautionary tale. The runt who thought she might be Luna. The Goddess' mistake."
She swallowed hard.
"I know what happens to rogues," she said. "I've heard the stories. I'm not... naive. I know I might die. Quickly. Or slowly. In teeth. In hunger. In cold. I know I'll be alone."
The word alone rang strangely now, colored by the pulsing bond in her chest.
"Except for you," she added, quieter. "If you're really there, like you were that night."
A breeze whispered through the clearing, slipping between leaves.
She lifted her chin, eyes burning.
"I would rather face teeth and cold and real hunger," she said, the words sharpening with each syllable, "than live one more day being... stepped on. Used. Pitied. Ignored. I would rather die *trying* to be more than this, than live out my life as their floor."
She exhaled, the breath shuddering.
"They will never see me," she said. "Not as anything but what I've always been. Even you had to drag them to a circle and blind them before they noticed I was standing there."
The ember in her chest flared, hot and wild.
"Fine," she said. "If they won't see me here, I'll go where there's nothing familiar to blind them. I'll go where the only one who gets to decide what I am is the one wearing my skin."
Her next breath came easier.
"This is me asking again," she said. "One last time. Not for them. Not for him. For *me.*"
She tipped her face up to the sky.
"Give me enough strength to leave," she whispered. "Enough stubbornness to keep walking when everything in me screams to go back. Enough... whatever-it-is you put in my bones when you didn't let me die at the border."
She pressed her palm flat against the rock, feeling its cool solidity.
"And if I die out there," she added softly, "let it be fast. Let it be knowing I chose it. That, for once, *I* decided where my feet went."
The clearing held its breath.
For a moment, nothing happened.
Then the wind shifted.
It came not as a playful swirl this time, but as a steady, firm gust, rushing through the trees in a single direction—away from the pack lands. Away from the familiar paths.
It tugged at her hair, her clothes, as if urging.
Go.
A leaf spiraled down from high above, landing not in her palm this time, but just beyond the edge of the rock. Past where she currently knelt. Onto the dirt of the untrodden path.
Luna stared at it.
She could have called it coincidence.
She could have called it imagination.
She chose to call it enough.
She stood.
By the time she returned to the compound, the decision had settled in her bones.
It did not make her walk taller. It did not shield her from the last flicks of Selene's tongue or the indifferent cruelty of passing warriors.
But it made those barbs feel... less permanent.
Like graffiti on a wall she no longer planned to live under.
She waited three days.
Not because she doubted—though she did, in the quiet moments—but because she was not foolish enough to walk into the Rogue Lands unprepared.
Such as preparation was, for someone like her.
She filched a second blanket from the laundry's forgotten pile. No one would miss it; it had a stain that wouldn't come out.
She hoarded food where she could—an extra crust of bread here, a bruised apple there, a bit of dried meat when Elia's back was turned.
"You're looking thinner," Elia muttered on the second evening, squinting at Luna across the stove. "You better not be sick. I don't have time for you dying in my kitchen."
Luna almost told her.
Almost.
But Elia's gruff concern would turn to hard resistance. To warnings. To attempts to stop her. Luna could not bear the thought of being begged to stay by the only person who had ever shown her something like care.
So she bit her tongue and lied.
"I'm fine," she said. "Just tired."
"Aren't we all," Elia grunted, turning back to her pots.
On the third night, the moon was a waning half, hanging like a curved blade in the sky.
Luna packed her stolen blanket and pilfered food into a small bundle, tying it with the leather thong from an old boot. She added the one treasured thing she owned—a smooth, pale stone she'd found as a child, with a natural crescent carved into its surface by time and water.
She had always called it her moon-stone.
Now she slipped it into her pocket like a talisman.
She waited until the compound quieted. Until the last patrol had checked the inner yard. Until the hall's fire had burned low and Mara's voice had stopped barking.
Then she crept from her little room.
The corridors looked different in the dark. Shadows stretched longer, swallowing corners she knew by day. Her footsteps were almost silent; she'd had a lifetime of practice moving without notice.
At the last turn, near the back exit that led toward the forest, a figure stepped out of the shadows.
Luna's heart leapt into her throat.
"Going somewhere?"
Elia.
The cook's hair was pulled back in a severe knot, loose strands frizzing at her temples. Her arms were crossed over her chest. Her eyes—sharp, dark—took in Luna's bundle, the set of her jaw, the direction of her steps.
Luna opened her mouth, closed it, swallowed.
"I—" she began.
"Don't insult me," Elia snapped, though there was no real heat in it. "You think I haven't seen you squirreling away food like a rat? Think I don't know the look of someone ready to bolt?"
Luna's cheeks burned.
"I can't stay," she blurted. "I—"
Elia raised a hand.
"Save it," she said. "I know why. Or I know enough." Her gaze softened, fractionally. "They've been tearing you open and calling it duty. Even an old fool like me can see that."
Luna's throat tightened.
"I—if I stay, I'll break," she said, the words barely more than a whisper.
Elia grunted.
"You might break out there," she said. "More likely, if we're being honest."
Luna nodded.
"I know."
Silence stretched between them.
Elia sighed, the sound heavy.
"When they brought you here," she said, voice oddly distant, "you were half-dead. Skin and bones. Eyes too big in your face. I thought, 'Let her die. It'll be kinder.'"
Luna flinched.
Elia snorted.
"I was wrong," she said. "You're a stubborn weed. You grew in the crack they left you. I don't know if that's the Goddess' fault or your own, but..." She shrugged. "You're here."
She stepped closer, uncrossing her arms.
"If you're going to do this," she said, "you're going to do it with more than a bruised apple and a blanket."
Before Luna could protest, Elia pressed something into her free hand.
A small, worn leather pouch.
"Dried meat," Elia said tersely. "Cheese. Hard bread. Enough for a few days, if you're smart and don't panic-eat it all at once."
Luna's eyes burned.
"Elia, I—"
"And this," Elia cut in, thrusting another object at her. "You're useless with a proper knife, but even you can jab with a pointy bit."
It was a short blade, not much longer than Luna's palm, with a simple wrapped handle. The kind used for cutting herbs in the kitchens.
Luna stared at it.
"I can't take this," she whispered.
"You can and you will," Elia snapped. "And you'll keep it hidden unless you need it, because if anyone sees you with it, they'll take it, and then I'll have wasted my time."
She grabbed Luna's bundle and tucked the pouch and knife inside with quick, practiced motions.
"Turn around," she ordered.
Luna did.
Elia tied the bundle across her back, securing the straps so they would sit low and balanced.
"When I was young," Elia muttered as she worked, "I almost left too. Thought I'd make my own way. Then my sister got sick. Couldn't walk. Someone had to cook. Someone had to stay."
She cinched the knot tight.
"I stayed," she said. "I don't know if that was the right choice. But you?" She gave the bundle a firm pat. "You've got no one binding you here but ghosts and promises other people made. If you think you can do better out there, then go see."
Luna turned back to her, eyes stinging.
"Thank you," she said, the words too small for what she felt.
Elia grunted, looking away.
"Don't thank me yet," she said. "Wait until you're not dead after the first week."
A rough, wet laugh burst from Luna's throat, half-sob, half-hysteria.
Elia's gaze flicked briefly to her face. Something like tenderness, quickly smothered, crossed her features.
"You come back bleeding," she said, "I'll patch you up. Once." Her mouth twisted wryly. "You come back whining, I'll smack you."
Luna nodded, swallowing hard.
"I'll try not to do either," she said.
Elia snorted.
"Go," she said, stepping aside. "Before I come to my senses and drag you back to the pots."
Luna hesitated one last moment.
"Will you—" Her voice broke. She cleared her throat. "Will you tell them?"
Elia's eyes hardened.
"No," she said firmly. "Let them notice what they've lost on their own time. Might be they never do."
The truth of that cut and freed in equal measure.
Luna nodded.
"Goodbye," she whispered.
Elia jerked her chin toward the door.
"Get out of here, runt," she muttered. "And... may the Moon watch where I can't."
Luna stepped into the night.
The air was cool against her face, thick with the scents she had known all her life—smoke, stone, wolf. Behind her, the compound loomed, dark and solid. The walls. The training yard. The hall where she had been marked and rejected.
Ahead, the forest stretched, black and endless.
Her feet knew the path to the Moonshadow Circle. Beyond that, they faltered. Beyond that was only rumor.
She paused once, at the edge of the trees, and looked back.
From this distance, the compound seemed almost peaceful. A handful of warm lights in the windows. A faint murmur of distant voices. She couldn't see the Alpha's wing, or the small room behind the laundry that had been hers.
The bond thrummed.
If she reached for it, she could feel Orion's presence. Not sharply; he wasn't near the border. But the awareness was there, a faint, steady pressure on the edge of her consciousness.
He was awake.
She could tell by the restless shift in his energy. Sleep didn't move like that.
Her fingers curled at her sides.
She turned away.
Every step into the trees felt both wrong and right.
Wrong, because every story, every instinct, screamed that leaving one's pack was the most unnatural act a wolf could commit. To step away from shared warmth, from known scents, from the chorus of howls that had shaped her very bones—it felt like peeling her skin off.
Right, because something in her straightened with each pace, as if a tight band around her ribs loosened incrementally.
She passed the familiar turn to the Moonshadow Circle and did not take it.
She walked deeper.
The forest grew denser. The lanterns hung by omegas for ceremonies vanished behind her, replaced by true starlight and the pale, waning moon.
Roots clawed at her boots. Branches snatched at her sleeves. The sounds of the compound faded until only the night creatures whispered and the wind moved in the leaves.
At some point, the well-marked trails of Moonshadow territory thinned. The underbrush grew thicker, untamed. The air took on a colder, wilder edge.
Luna hesitated at an invisible line she could not name.
On one side: home, however unwelcoming. The known.
On the other: everything else.
"Moon Goddess," she whispered into the dark. "If you wanted me to stay... you had your chance."
The wind rustled, a low, sighing sound.
She stepped forward.
The moment she crossed that unseen border, a shiver ran up her spine. Her wolf—small, underfed, but still there inside her—whined softly in the back of her mind.
*Alone.*
"Yes," she whispered. "Alone."
The bond pulsed, sharper now that she'd moved further from its center.
A distant impression of Orion's pause. As if some instinct in him pricked, some awareness that something tied to him had shifted.
He did not know what.
He would not know for some time.
Luna walked on.
The forest at night was not kind.
Owls watched from above, their silent wings cutting across patches of moonlight. Small creatures rustled in the undergrowth, some fleeing from her scent, others creeping closer to assess if she was threat or prey.
The ground grew uneven. Twice she stumbled, catching herself on rough bark. Once she fell to one knee, stones biting through her trousers, and hissed through her teeth.
She pushed up again.
When she finally stopped, it was because her legs shook and her eyelids felt like they were being pulled down by invisible weights.
She found a hollow between the roots of an old oak, its trunk thick and knotted. The earth there was slightly dippered, as if something had once nested or slept there.
She crawled into it and unstrapped her bundle, hands fumbling. She wrapped one blanket around herself, then bunched the second under her head as a makeshift pillow.
The forest pressed in close, every sound magnified. Cracks. Whispers. The distant howl of an unknown wolf that made every hair on her body stand on end.
Fear rose, a hot, panicked tide.
Luna squeezed her eyes shut.
"You chose this," she told herself, voice shaking. "You chose this. For once in your life, you chose."
The words didn't banish the fear.
But they gave it shape.
Her hand slipped into her pocket, fingers closing around the smooth crescent stone.
She pressed it to her chest, over the place where the bond still hummed.
"I'm not yours anymore," she whispered—not to the pack, not to Orion, but to the version of herself that had accepted every scrap as though it were all she deserved. "I'm mine."
The forest shifted around her.
The moon slipped through the branches, casting a pale sliver of light across her face.
The ember in her chest glowed, banked but brighter than it had been under any roof.
She slept.
It was not a restful sleep. It was full of jagged dreams—of eyes watching from the dark, of teeth gleaming, of the Circle and the seer's astonished face, of Orion turning away.
But beneath it all, like a low, ceaseless drumbeat, there was something else:
A sense of... forward.
For the first time, Luna's life was not defined by the walls around her.
It was defined by the space in front of her.
She had nothing.
No rank. No protection. No sure path.
But she had, somewhere deep and stubborn, a growing sense of herself—not as a runt, not as a burden, not as a thrown-away mate—but as something still unshaped.
Raw material.
A question the world had not yet answered.
The strength to walk away had not come as a sudden gift. It had come as the last option left standing when everything else had been stripped.
Yet it was strength all the same.
And as the night wore on and the pack behind her slept on in their familiar beds, the little runt who had once begged the Moon Goddess for any change at all lay in the roots of an unknown tree and took the first fragile steps toward becoming the force that would one day return to them crowned in fire and storm.
For now, though, she was just Luna.
Packless.
Afraid.
And, beneath the fear, finally—finally—free.