Chapter 5 Leaving
Elara threw clothes into her suitcase without folding them, her hands were shaking as the clock on her wall showed 6 AM and she still had eighteen hours before the exile took effect but eighteen hours felt like eighteen seconds.
Something crashed against her front door and she jumped, as voices started shouting outside… "Omega whore!" and "Get out!" ….followed by more impacts.
She looked through the peephole and saw three of her neighbors from down the hall, people she'd smiled at for years, now throwing garbage at her door while Mrs. Kim stood behind them with her arms crossed and her face twisted with disgust.
Elara grabbed her second suitcase and kept packing, ignoring the noise until the little glass in her window shattered, along with more shouts about how she'd disgraced the pack.
Her phone buzzed with a message from her former supervisor at pack administration: Don't bother coming for your last paycheck, we're keeping it to cover the embarrassment you caused.
She shoved her documents into a folder (birth certificate, ID, bank statements), then she heard footsteps in her apartment, spinning around to find two of her ex-coworkers standing in her living room holding spray paint cans.
"Get out," Elara said but her voice came out weak.
"This is pack property," Jennifer said, the woman who used to bring Elara coffee and chat about weekend plans. "And you're not our pack anymore."
They sprayed red paint across her walls—LIAR, WHORE, REJECTED—while Elara stood there with her suitcase in hand and rage building in her chest but she was outnumbered and pregnant and had no authority here anymore.
She grabbed her bags and ran for the door, pushing past the neighbors who tried to grab at her clothes, and made it to her car in the parking lot where someone had keyed deep scratches into the paint and slashed one tire.
"You've got to be kidding me," she whispered and popped the trunk to grab her spare, changing it with shaking hands while people watched from their windows and no one offered to help.
She threw her suitcases in the back seat and started the engine, pulling out of the lot as someone threw an egg that splattered across her windshield, and she turned on the wipers without stopping.
The road to the territory border was empty this early and she'd planned to drive straight through, maybe stop for gas once she crossed into neutral land, but headlights appeared in her rearview mirror moving fast and getting closer.
Pack security vehicles, two of them with lights flashing.
"No," Elara breathed and pressed the gas pedal harder but her old sedan couldn't match their speed and they pulled up on either side of her, boxing her in.
The driver's side vehicle lowered its window and she recognized one as Kai's personal guards, the one who'd stood beside him at the rejection ceremony.
"Pull over," he shouted. "Alpha's orders."
"What do you guys want, I still have eighteen hours…"
"Orders changed, and your time has elapsed, so we came to arrest you for trespassing."
Elara's hands tightened on the wheel and she saw the border marker ahead, maybe two miles away, and made a split-second decision that was probably stupid but felt necessary.
She slammed the gas pedal to the floor and swerved right, cutting off the vehicle beside her and sending it skidding sideways while she shot forward with her engine screaming.
The guards recovered fast and came after her, their vehicles built for speed and power while hers was built for grocery runs and commuting, but she had desperation and they only had orders.
One mile to the border and they were gaining on her, they were close enough that she could see the driver's face in her mirror, close enough that when they hit her bumper her whole car jolted forward and fishtailed across both lanes.
She overcorrected and the car spins, the tires squealing as the world rotated and she lost track of which direction was forward, and then her car hit something solid and everything went black for a moment before pain exploded through her shoulder and chest.
When her vision cleared she was stopped sideways across the road with her airbag deployed and white powder covering everything, and through the cracked windshield she saw the border marker twenty feet away.
The security vehicles had stopped and the guards were getting out, walking toward her car with grim expressions.
Elara kicked her door open and fell out onto asphalt that scraped her palms, dragging herself forward on her hands and knees while blood dripped from a cut on her forehead and her shoulder screamed with pain.
Ten feet, then five, and she heard the guards shouting at her to stop but she kept crawling until her hand touched the border marker's base and she collapsed against it, gasping.
"She's past the line," one guard said, stopping at the marker like there was an invisible wall.
"Alpha's not going to like this."
"Not our problem anymore, she's exiled, let the borderlands have her."
They walked back to their vehicles and drove away, leaving Elara bleeding on the ground with her car smoking behind her and everything she owned scattered across the back seat, and the sun rising over territory she could never return to.