On the night of our eighth anniversary, I cooked everything Ethan loved.

He didn't come home.

I sat alone at the table until the food went cold.

Then I did what I always did.

I opened Selene's profile on the pack network.

New post.

One hour ago.

A photo of Ethan, shirtless, building a fire in her den.

Her hand on his shoulder.

Her face turned toward the camera with a smile that showed too many teeth.

The caption read:

Grateful for old friends who drop everything when you need them. Even their marking anniversaries.

I stared at it until my eyes burned.

Then I liked it.

Filed the bond-dissolution request.

And started packing the trunk I'd kept ready for months.

Ethan didn't believe it when he found out.

"She's throwing a fit," I heard he told his packmates.

"Give her three days."

"I'll crook my finger and she'll come running back."

"She always does."

What he didn't understand was why I always came back.

It was because I loved him.

That was gone now.

On the night of our eighth anniversary, I cooked everything Ethan loved.

He didn't come home.

I sat alone at the table until the food went cold.

Then I did what I always did.

I opened Selene's profile on the pack network.

New post.

One hour ago.

A photo of Ethan, shirtless, building a fire in her den.

Her hand on his shoulder.

Her face turned toward the camera with a smile that showed too many teeth.

The caption read:

Grateful for old friends who drop everything when you need them. Even their marking anniversaries.

I stared at it until my eyes burned.

Then I liked it.

Filed the bond-dissolution request.

And started packing the trunk I'd kept ready for months.

Ethan didn't believe it when he found out.

"She's throwing a fit," I heard he told his packmates.

"Give her three days."

"I'll crook my finger and she'll come running back."

"She always does."

What he didn't understand was why I always came back.

It was because I loved him.

That was gone now.

...

The Blood Moon rose at dusk.

Elena stood at the window of the Voss Pack manor, watching it stain the eastern mountains red.

Eight years.

Tonight marked eight years since Ethan had marked her throat in this very room, his canines breaking skin while the pack howled their approval outside.

She touched the scar.

Still sensitive.

Still his.

The bond between them hummed — thin, distant, but present.

She reached for it the way she always did, seeking his mood, his location, the background warmth of their connection.

Cold.

He was cold.

And moving fast.

She didn't need to check her phone.

She felt him through the link — thirty miles east, heart rate elevated, the particular chemical signature of his wolf when it was hunting.

Or protecting.

Or with her.

Selene had returned three days ago.

The foster sister, presumed dead in the rogue attack that had devastated the northern packs five years ago.

She'd walked through the manor gates at noon, still beautiful, still carrying the scent of lilies that made Elena's wolf want to bare teeth.

Ethan had gone to her immediately.

He hadn't come back.

Elena turned from the window.

The table was set for two — roasted venison, herbed roots, the dark wine he preferred.

She'd prepared it herself, a tradition for their marking anniversary.

The bond had been fraying for months.

She'd told herself this night would fix it.

The door opened.

Not Ethan.

Kael, his beta, looking everywhere but at her face.

"Luna. The Alpha sent word. He's... detained."

"Where?"

"The eastern border. Rogue activity."

The lie sat between them, heavy as stone.

She felt Ethan's location through the bond — not east toward the border, but north, toward the old hunting cabin where Selene had stayed before her disappearance.

Where they'd spent their first night together, years before Elena existed.

"Thank you, Kael."

He left.

She stood in the dining room, looking at the candlelight flickering on empty plates.

Then she reached for the bond and pushed.

It was like pressing her hand into deep water.

Resistance, then sudden clarity.

She saw through his eyes — briefly, violently — before he slammed shut the mental walls that kept pack members from his mind.

But she'd seen enough.

Selene, laughing.

Ethan's hand on her waist.

The cabin's familiar rough walls, unchanged in five years.

And his wolf, rising inside him, responding to her scent with a hunger Elena hadn't felt directed at herself in months.

She withdrew.

The bond snapped back into place, quivering with his shock at her intrusion.

He'd felt her.

He knew she'd seen.

Her phone buzzed.

[Don't wait up. Pack business. —E]

She looked at the message.

Then she opened the pack's shared network.

Selene's thread was at the top.

Grateful for old friends who drop everything when you need them. Even their marking anniversaries. The Voss Pack always takes care of its own.

Below: an image.

Ethan, shirtless, building a fire.

Selene's hand on his shoulder, her face turned toward the camera with a smile that showed too many teeth.

Elena stared at it until her eyes burned.

Eight years.

She'd been his Luna for eight years.

She'd bled for this pack, buried their dead, sat through every council meeting, every border negotiation, every night he came home smelling of someone else's den.

She'd told herself the bond's thinning was natural.

That his distraction was stress.

That Selene's return was temporary.

She'd been lying.

She picked up her wine glass.

Drank it.

Set it down with precise, careful movements.

Then she opened her trunk — the one she'd prepared months ago, just in case — and began to pack.

But she didn't leave yet.

First, she liked Selene's post.

Then she filed the bond-dissolution request with the pack council.

Let him see.

Let them all see.

Midnight came and went.

Ethan didn't.

Once, that would have kept Elena awake until dawn.

She would have lain in bed replaying everything, looking for what she'd done wrong, waiting for the bond to tell her he was on his way home.

Tonight she slept fine.

Maybe letting go of someone who was never really yours is its own kind of rest.

...

He came back in the morning.

She woke to the sound of him in the kitchen.

She found him with his sleeves pushed up, reheating the venison she'd cooked the night before.

All of it.

Every dish, still arranged on the table like she'd left it.

"I'll stay with you today," he said, not looking up.

"Make up for last night."

He tasted a piece of the venison off the serving fork.

"Good," he said. "You've gotten better."

She looked at him.

Ethan never ate leftovers.

It was one of his things — fresh kills only, food prepared the same day.

The fact that he was standing here reheating yesterday's meal and calling it a gesture told her everything about how seriously he was taking her dissolution request.

He was waiting for her to soften.

To thank him for the effort.

To step down off whatever ledge he'd decided she was standing on.

"That's not necessary," she said.

He looked up then.

Something flickered across his face.

He turned to the counter and came back with a small package.

Set it in front of her.

"From the night market. The herb-cake stall you always wanted to try."

She looked at it.

Wrapped in leaves, the way Selene liked.

Her preference, from a comment she'd made once about how the best food came simply packaged.

She'd mentioned her allergy to those particular herbs the first winter they were together.

Twice more after that.

He'd never remembered.

Seven years, and he knew everything about Selene's tastes.

He didn't remember what made Elena sick.

She didn't say any of that.

She just sat down and looked at the table.

The silence stretched.

She felt his patience thinning through the bond — that familiar pressure, the warning that came before he stopped trying.

"You've made your point," he said.

"I came back. I'm here. What else do you want from me?"

She didn't answer.

"Selene told me to come back," he said.

Like that was a point in his favor.

"She said you'd been patient with her being here, that I wasn't being fair to you."

There it was.

He'd come back to coax her because Selene asked him to.

"Ethan," she said.

"Don't file the dissolution again. I'm asking you—"

His phone buzzed.

He glanced at it.

And she watched his whole body change — shoulders dropping, jaw loosening, the careful patience he'd been performing replaced with something real and effortless.

"Selene."

He was already standing.

"I'll be right there."

He hung up.

Looked at her.

His expression had already returned to neutral, like a door closing.

"She needs help with the boundary mapping. It won't take long."

He left without waiting for her to respond.

She heard the front door close.

His footsteps on the path outside, moving quickly.

She sat at the table for a while longer.

The reheated venison.

The herb-cake she couldn't eat.

The bond between them, vibrating with the particular warmth he only ever felt around her.

She'd been about to tell him.

She was going to say it — I'm done, I'm going home, my family has been waiting.

But he'd already left.

That was fine.

She'd say it the next time.

She'd been saying things to the back of his head for years.

She could do it once more.

She didn't go to the gathering place in the lower valley to find them.

She went because she was leaving in three weeks, and she'd wanted to go with Ethan for two years.

Every time she'd suggested it, he'd had somewhere else to be.

Now she went alone.

She saw them the moment she walked in.

They were sitting close, the way people sit when they've stopped being careful.

The table between them was covered in dishes — everything spiced, everything she liked.

He didn't eat spiced food.

He'd always told her it affected his sense of smell for tracking.

He was eating it now.

Neither of them had seen her.

Selene was laughing, and she picked up a piece of meat from her plate and held it to his mouth.

He took it.

She let her fingers brush his jaw when she pulled her hand back.

He didn't flinch.

He looked young.

That was the thing she couldn't stop staring at.

Ethan always looked controlled, self-contained, the Alpha's son who'd been raised to hold everything in.

But sitting across from her, watching her laugh, he looked like someone who hadn't learned yet to hide what he wanted.

"We should mark this," he said.

Low, like he was trying to sound casual and failing.

"The tavern. Together—"

Selene looked up.

She was looking directly at Elena.

Her expression flickered — surprise, then calculation, then something like satisfaction.

"Elena." Her voice carried.

"Are you following us?"

The room went quiet.

Ranked wolves, mid-bite, turned to look.

Ethan froze, his hand halfway to his wine cup.

Elena didn't move.

Didn't run.

Didn't let her wolf rise to the challenge in her voice.

"I'm here to eat," she said.

"And we're not bonded. Not anymore."

She walked to the counter, ordered from the menu — everything spiced, everything she'd denied herself for years.

Then she found a table with her back to them.

She could still hear them.

"When did you become so impatient?"

Selene's voice, teasing, intimate.

"I remember when you'd spend months planning surprises. The winter solstice, you spent three weeks tracking that white stag just to impress me."

"I was fifteen," Ethan said.

But he didn't sound dismissive.

He sounded nostalgic.

"Fifteen, twenty-five. You still know how to make someone feel chosen."

A pause.

The sound of her hand on his arm, familiar, proprietary.

"Why can't you do that for her?"

"She's not you."

Three words.

Simple.

Final.

Elena took a bite of the spiced meat.

It burned.

She kept eating.

She'd spent seven years telling herself she could earn that warmth.

That patience and care would eventually make her enough.

He'd just told her she never would be.

She finished her meal.

Paid in full.

Walked out without looking back.