Chapter 6 Six
ELARA’S POV
I was awake already when Selene entered.
I had not slept. I had lain in the dark with my wrist turned toward my face and breathed that strange amber thing until it was less a mystery than a question I hadn’t found words for. Thorne lay next to me, unperturbed, the man with a clean conscience.
The door opened without knocking. That was how I recognized it was Selene.
She strode across the room in four steps, seized the edge of the curtain and yanked it back with so much force that the rings rattled, then dropped a scroll on the bed between me and where Thorne had already been sleeping until apparently rising early and leaving without a word.
"Read it," she said.
Her tone was the particular kind of quiet that meant she was making a definite effort to not be loud.
I sat up slowly. Picked up the scroll. Unrolled it.
The official pack record. Silvercrest’s Luna register, stamped and sealed with the elder’s mark. My name was gone. The ink, where it had been, still appeared slightly fresher than the rest, an erasure clean and deliberate.
Instead, in careful formal script: Vespera Reece Vale.
It hadn’t even been 12 hours.
I placed the scroll down on the blanket. I flattened its edge with my thumb. I sat there, and I felt something move through me that was not really painful. Pain was hot and immediate. It was cold. The kind of feeling that began at the base of your spine and crept up, creeping all the way until it looked behind your eyes and just hung there, no movement.
Selene was watching me. I could feel it.
"Elara," she said.
“I have to get dressed,” I said.
The expression on her face told me my immobility was scaring her more than tears would have. Good. I was scaring myself a bit too but not for the same reasons. I was not still, because I was breaking. I was quiet because something had shifted overnight, and I was waiting for the contours of it to emerge.
I washed my face. I dressed meticulously, donning the deep green gown I’d always felt most like myself in, which Thorne had once told me was too gaudy for a Luna’s breakfast table. I pinned my hair back neatly. I stared into the mirror for a long time.
I looked like Luna.
And for the first time in three years, I thought: good.
I walked to breakfast.
The great hall was full. It always had been at this hour, Omegas weaving between tables, guards eating quickly before their rotations and a handful of mid-ranking pack members who liked being seen getting up early. Conversation buzzed at its usual low thrum. I felt it change when I entered, like the subtle rearrangement of the air that happens when a room notices something it doesn’t know how to react to.
I moved to the head table and took Luna's seat.
Without invitation, Selene sat next to me. She was quaking with nervous energy, but she kept it together, pouring herself tea with a steady hand.
We waited.
Twelve minutes later, she arrived.
I had counted.
Vespera entered the great hall just like she always did, golden hair catching the morning light, that tiny secret smile on her face as if the earth had ordered itself for a place where only she could find comfort. She was in a cream gown with silver trim, Luna colors, and she wore them as though they had been born to her — which maybe she thought they were.
She walked up toward the head table. Toward the chair.
She saw me.
I watched the smile remain immaculate as something behind her eyes recalibrated.
She paused at the side of the table. I glanced up at her and then down again at the food in front of me and I reached for my fork.
Neither of us spoke.
The room had gone quieter. Not silent. The particular quiet of people pretending they weren’t looking.
Vespera stood there. I sat there. Selene next to me drank her tea as though all of this was perfectly ordinary. The stalemate lasted long enough that two Omegas by the window exchanged a glance and a guard by the door shifted his weight.
Then Thorne walked in.
He materialized all the clues—deep silence, positioning, the quality of air—Alpha like in one passing glance. His gaze flicked from Vespera to me. Something passed across his face.
"Elara," he said. Unhurried and deliberate, which meant public. "Would you mind."
He didn't finish the sentence. He didn't need to.
I set my fork down. I lifted my tea and I got up, and I moved from the chair with a kind of slowness that turned the movement itself into a statement. Not rushing. Not arguing. Just so that every person in that room could see how little I was being hurried.
I walked past Vespera as I headed out.
I leaned in close. Her perfume was heavy and floral and it made my stomach turn. My voice was low enough so only she could hear it.
I said what I said.
And then I walked out.
Three full seconds passed behind me of silence. Then the soft noises of the hall picking back up. Chairs, cutlery, low voices.
Selene was outside in the corridor at my shoulder, her hand catching my elbow.
"What did you say to her?" she demanded. Her eyes were wide and sharp. "Elara. Her face went completely white. What did you say?"
I didn't answer.
"Elara."
"I need information," I said.
Selene blinked. "What?"
"About Draven," I said. "The Lycan territories. His pack. His identity, his operating territory, Elder Council intel on him and why they black-listed him.” I kept walking. "Everything you can find. Quietly."
Selene stopped walking. I felt her eyes on my back like a hand.
“Are you crazy,” she said. It wasn't really a question.
I paused. I turned back to look at her. Selene, who’d known me long before Silvercrest, before Thorne, before all of it. Selene who knew all of my iterations.
I held up my wrist.
Even in the dusky corridor light she caught it, that shadow of dark amber still clinging to my skin, something that had smelled as if it belonged to no world Silvercrest had ever laid a finger on.
Her eyes narrowed. Then they widened.
“Perhaps I lost my mind,” I said. “Or perhaps I finally discovered it.”
I turned and walked away, and she did not call after me this time.
But as I turned the corner toward my chambers, I heard it. Faint, from deep inside the hall I had just exited. The sound of a ceramic object hitting the ground. Vespera's teacup, I suspected.
Whatever I had said was still in effect.