Elara’s POV

The darkness smelled like damp earth and old stone.

I pressed my spine against the cellar wall. My knees were drawn up to my chest, arms locked around them so tight my fingernails bit into my own skin. The space was barely wider than a coffin. Rough wooden beams formed the ceiling just above my head—the underside of the guest room floor.

His footsteps shook dust loose from the boards.

Each one landed like a hammer blow directly over me. Heavy. Frantic. The stride of a man unraveling.

"ELA!"

My name ripped through the house. Through the floorboards. Through my ribs. It burrowed into some deep, primal place inside my chest and pulled.

I clamped my hand over my mouth. Bit down on the flesh between my thumb and forefinger until I tasted copper.

Don’t move. Don’t breathe. Don’t make a sound.

Margaret’s voice filtered down, anxious but firm. I could almost picture her wringing her hands. "There is no one else here, young man," she insisted. "Only family members are present."

She was lying. For me. This sweet old woman who baked bread every morning was standing in front of the most powerful man on the continent and lying through her teeth.

Because I was a coward.

Heavy boots strode up the stairs. Kaelen burst into the guest room directly above me. The wardrobe doors crashed open. I heard hangers scraping across the rail. He was touching my clothes. The woolen shawl I’d worn yesterday. The linen dress I’d hung up that morning.

A sound escaped him. Low. Broken. Like something had cracked inside his throat.

He was smelling my shawl.

My eyes burned. I squeezed them shut. Tears slid down my face anyway, tracking hot lines through the grime on my cheeks.

Through a narrow crack between the floorboards, I caught a sliver of movement—his dark gold eyes searching frantically, wild and devastatingly desperate.

"Don’t lie to me," Kaelen snarled, the vibration of his voice rattling the dust in my hiding place. "My wolf is on the edge of breaking. I know she’s here. I heard a woman’s laughter."

Finnian’s voice drifted in, incredibly calm and smooth. "You must have heard the comedy playing on our magical memory stone, Your Majesty."

He was lying too. Smoothly covering for me.

The comb clattered onto the washstand above me. I flinched, pressing harder against the wall. A violent, desperate urge to reveal myself clawed at my throat. I ached to be found by him. To let him tear through the floorboards and pull me into his arms. But I bit down harder on my hand, forcing myself to maintain absolute silence.

A few inches of wood between us. Just a few inches.

What could I offer him now? I was just a mortal. Weak. Broken. Moonlight—my wolf, my other soul—was gone. Ripped away during Lyra’s birth like a thread pulled from fraying cloth. The healers had no explanation. The moon goddess offered no comfort. One moment she’d been there, howling inside me, fierce and silver and mine. The next—silence. An emptiness so vast it swallowed everything.

Without her, I was nothing but a fragile shell. I didn’t deserve a mate as magnificent as Kaelen. I’d be nothing but a liability.

His footsteps moved, pacing with increasingly desperate rhythm. Then, silence.

Slow footsteps descended the stairs. Each one heavier than the last, as though he were carrying something unbearable down with him. I counted them, waiting.

At the front door, Kaelen’s voice rang out one last time, leaving a final message for Finnian to pass on. "Tell her I’m not going to stop. I will look for her every single day for the rest of my life. Tell her Valerius and her baby girl, Lyra... they need their mother."

The words hit me like a blade slipping between my ribs. My boy with his father’s dark gold eyes. My baby girl I’d held for barely a heartbeat before running away.

A sob clawed up my throat. My whole body began shaking in violent, uncontrollable tremors.

The heavy front door closed.

Silence.

Absolute, dead silence.

I couldn’t breathe. The darkness pressed in from all sides, suffocating me with the unbearable weight of my own choices.

Three soft taps sounded against the floorboards. Finnian’s signal.

Then the trapdoor lifted.

Light flooded the cellar. Finnian’s face appeared above me, gentle and patient. "It’s safe now, Ela. He’s gone."

I tried to stand. My legs were completely numb. Finnian reached down, catching my hands. With careful strength, he pulled me up from the dark space.

My knees buckled the instant my feet touched wood.

I went down like a puppet with severed strings, collapsing completely onto the floorboards.

"Easy." Finnian crouched beside me. "Take your time."

Margaret hurried over, wrapping her arms around me tightly. She smelled like dried lavender and safety. "Oh, dear," she soothed, stroking my hair. "Oh, sweetheart."

The sob that tore out of me was ugly and raw. It came from the hollow place where Moonlight used to live. Another followed. And then I couldn’t stop.

I burst into violent sobs. I cried for the torture of the past three weeks. For the three hours crammed in that black cellar. And for the agony of those fucking three minutes when he’d stood at the door and broken me completely. I wept hysterically, apologizing over and over.

"I’m sorry." The words tumbled out between sobs. "I’m really sorry. I’m really, really sorry."