The woods were colder than they had ever been.
Dawn had not yet broken. Frost curled along the edges of fallen leaves, a quiet silver hush wrapping the forest in stillness. Selene stood just beyond the outer ring of the Nightfang territory, where the patrols no longer watched, where the land was no longer hers.
She carried no bags. No coat. Just the ceremonial dress she'd been given to wear for her Luna ceremony—now a mockery of what could've been.
Each step she took was a goodbye.
To the den where she had grown up.
To the sparring fields where she'd bled to prove herself.
To the boy who had once kissed her like she was worth the war.
Selene didn't cry. Not yet. Not here.
The trees thinned behind her, and with them, the past. Before her lay the unclaimed wilderness—rogue lands where no pack ruled, where no laws protected anyone.
She felt the bond between herself and Lucien burn away, the frayed edge of it retreating like smoke into the sky. The ache in her chest wasn't from the broken mate bond—it was from the lies she'd swallowed to believe in it.
Behind her, she heard footsteps.
She didn't turn.
"You should've fought it," said a familiar voice. Low. Gravel-edged.
Liora.
Selene's only friend. Beta's daughter. The only one who hadn't turned her back yet.
"I did," Selene said, still staring ahead. "Just not with claws."
Liora moved to her side. Her eyes were red-rimmed, lips chapped from the cold.
"They planned it. The Elders, Lucien's father. I think even Lucien—" She cut herself off, guilt flashing across her face. "No. I know Lucien was part of it. He didn't even flinch."
Selene exhaled slowly. "He flinched. Just not for me."
Liora shoved her hands into her coat pockets, voice thick. "Come back with me. We'll go to the Riverfangs. They're neutral. You can petition for asylum—"
"No."
The word was simple. Final.
"I'm not begging another pack for scraps," Selene said, gaze hardening. "Let them believe they cast me out. Let them sleep easy thinking I'm gone."
Liora looked at her with quiet worry. "Then where will you go?"
Selene smiled faintly, her breath curling in the cold air. "To find what the Nightfangs buried. My bloodline didn't die with my father. They just wanted it forgotten."
She stepped forward, out of the territory line.
Out of her old life.
Liora's voice stopped her again. "You won't survive out there alone."
"I already did," Selene said. "Every day in that pack, I survived."
She didn't wait for a response. The wind had changed, and so had she.
---
She walked until her feet bled.
Hours passed in silence. The sun never fully pierced the canopy above, only streaked it in faint golds and grays. Her ceremonial heels were discarded long ago; she walked barefoot now, numb to the cold.
Her wolf stirred uneasily within her—unmarked, unsettled. It wasn't used to being outside pack land, to breathing air without the scent of familiar bond markers.
They were truly alone.
And still, Selene didn't stop.
She walked until the trees swallowed the sky and the earth no longer remembered her name.
---
Night fell again.
She found shelter beneath an outcrop of rock, a shallow cave barely enough to keep the wind off her skin. Hunger gnawed at her belly. Her body ached, but the pain kept her grounded.
She had no food. No fire. Only fury.
Selene curled her knees to her chest, and for the first time since the hall, let herself break.
The sob was silent. No dramatic weeping, no screams. Just quiet shaking, her face hidden behind her hands, the grief coming like a tide she could no longer hold back.
Not for Lucien.
But for everything else.
Her father. Her mother. The future she'd been denied. The future she had believed in like a fool.
The rejection wasn't just about love. It was about erasure. About being told, publicly, that she was nothing.
Her wolf whined low, uncertain.
Selene looked up at the sky—black, endless, indifferent.
"I will make them remember me," she whispered.
Not as a Luna.
But as a reckoning.