By morning, the decision was no longer mine.
The boundary markers rose out of the trees like pale scars, carved stones half-buried in the earth. I had passed them countless times growing up. They had always meant safety. Home. Belonging.
Now they marked the edge of it.
I stood a few feet away and waited, as if the land might speak up and tell me this was a mistake. As if someone would come running through the trees, breathless, angry, too late but trying anyway.
No one came.
The bond lay quiet beneath my ribs, coiled and watchful. Not gone. Never gone. It was worse like this. Silent, like something holding its breath.
I crossed the line.
The moment my foot hit the other side, something subtle shifted. Not dramatic. No lightning. No pain. Just a thin, slicing awareness that I had stepped out of the place where I was known.
I kept walking.
The road stretched ahead, narrow and uneven, bordered by scrub and tall grass. My pack crest was still stitched into my jacket. I noticed it with a dull kind of surprise, then reached up and tore it free.
The sound of fabric ripping felt louder than it should have.
I dropped the crest onto the dirt and ground my heel into it until the stitching came loose, threads splaying like veins. I didn't look back when I stepped over it.
By midday, the sun burned overhead and my legs ached. Hunger gnawed softly, distant but growing. Every few steps, my mind tried to drift back to the clearing. To his voice. His eyes.
I forced it away.
Exile was not announced with ceremony. It arrived quietly, in the absence of familiar scents, in the way the forest no longer felt like it recognized me.
By the time I reached the outpost, the guards were already watching.
Two men stood at the gate, arms crossed, expressions tight with discomfort. Not hostile. Worse. Apologetic.
"You can't stay," one of them said before I even spoke.
"I know," I replied.
They exchanged a glance, surprised by the lack of argument. The second guard cleared his throat.
"The Alpha's order," he said, as if I needed reminding.
There it was. The final cut.
"I'll be gone by nightfall," I said.
Neither of them moved to stop me as I passed. I wondered if he had told them to let me through. If this small mercy was his idea.
The thought made my chest tighten.
I found water at the edge of the settlement and washed the dust from my hands, my face. The woman reflected back at me looked older than she had the day before. Quieter. Sharper around the eyes.
Good.
As I straightened, a familiar pressure stirred low in my body. Sudden. Unwelcome. My breath caught.
I froze.
For a split second, I thought he had followed me. That he stood somewhere just out of sight, watching, regretting, wanting.
Nothing. Only the bond, restless, angry, reminding me that distance did not mean freedom.
That was the revelation that settled cold and heavy in my gut.
He had rejected me, exiled me, erased me from his world.
And still, my body remembered his.
Still, some part of me responded as if he had the right.
I pressed my palm flat against my ribs, grounding myself, anger flaring hot enough to burn through the ache.
No.
If he could choose power over me, I could choose myself over him.
As the sun dipped lower, shadows stretching long across the road, I shouldered my bag and turned away from the settlement. The path ahead disappeared into unfamiliar land, dark and uncertain.
Good.
Let it be dangerous. Let it be hard. Let it strip me down to something unrecognizable.
Because if fate thought it could discard me quietly, it had made a terrible mistake.
I walked on, pulse steady, jaw set.
Behind me, the pack lands slept without me.
Ahead, something waited. Something sharp. Something that would demand I become more than the girl who had been rejected.
And somewhere, bound to me whether he wanted it or not, an Alpha would feel the echo of my leaving.
Even now, the bond flared once more, low and intimate, like a touch remembered in the dark.
I did not slow.
I did not look back.
But my body did not forget.