Moon Bound: the selection trial

LYRA

TW: CHILD LOSS

The blood didn't stop.

I pressed my hands against my stomach like I could hold everything together if I just tried hard enough, but the warmth kept spreading across my thighs, soaking into the thin blanket beneath me, telling me everything I needed to know.

My mother's voice sounded far away even though she was right beside me, her fingers gripping mine so tight I thought the bones might crack.

"Stay with me, Lyra. Please, baby, stay with me."

I wanted to tell her I was trying, that I was fighting, but the words got stuck in my throat because all I could think about was the tiny flutter I'd felt three days ago when I first realized. The flutter that was gone now.

The healer's face told me everything before her mouth did. She pulled back, hands stained red, and shook her head at my mother. "I'm sorry. There's nothing I can do."

Nothing.

Such a small word for something so terrible.

I turned my head toward the window where the moon hung fat and silver in the sky, mocking me with its light. The same moon that had watched him kiss me under the stars. The same moon that had let him walk away like I was nothing—like we were nothing.

My mother sobbed into my hair, but I couldn't cry. Not because I wasn't hurt, but because the tears wouldn't come. There was only this hollow ache spreading through my chest, filling the spaces where hope used to live.

I had been going to keep this part of him. Even after he left, even after he broke me. I was going to have something that was ours, something he couldn't take back with a note and cold silence.

But then I fell.

Or rather, I was pushed.

I'd been carrying supplies to the upper storage tower—alone, because omega safety was never a priority in Frostveil. The beta who shoved me thought it was funny, watching an omega stumble. He didn't know I was pregnant and certainly didn't know what he was taking from me.

Or even care.

I remembered the stairs, the way my body tumbled down them like a broken doll, the crack of my spine against cold stone. The laughter echoing above me as I fell.

I remembered waking up to blood.

So much blood.

"It was an accident," my mother whispered, still stroking my hair. "Just a terrible accident."

But she was wrong.

If he hadn't left me—if he hadn't made me believe I mattered, if he hadn't touched me with gentle hands and then disappeared like I was some dirty secret to be buried—I wouldn't have been walking through that tower in a daze. I wouldn't have been so lost in grief that I didn't see the beta coming. I wouldn't have been carrying his child.

And I wouldn't be lying here with my insides torn apart and my heart shattered into pieces too small to ever fit back together.

He did this.

Although not directly with his own hands.

But he'd set everything in motion the moment he chose cruelty over honesty. The moment he reduced me to a footnote in his life with ten words on a piece of paper.

After a while, the healer left. Other omegas came and went, changing sheets and whispering prayers I didn't want to hear. My mother stayed, her hand never leaving mine, even when I pulled away, even when I turned my face to the wall and closed my eyes against the moonlight.

Three days passed in a blur of pain and emptiness.

On the fourth day, I finally got out of bed.

My legs shook and my body screamed, but I walked to the window and stared up at that cursed moon—the one that was supposed to guide us and protect us and choose our fates.

"I will find him," I said to the silver moon hanging in the sky. My voice came out steady and cold, sounding nothing like the girl who used to laugh in his arms. "And when I do, I'll make him bleed for what he did to me."

The moon didn't answer.

It never did.

It just hung there, indifferent and bright, watching over a world where omegas like me were worth less than dirt. A world where men like him could ruin you and walk away clean.

But I wasn't that girl anymore.

The girl who believed in love died on those stairs. The girl who trusted soft words and gentle hands bled out on the healer's table.

What was left was something harder and colder.

A person that understood finally in her heart that the only person who would ever fight for me was me.

I pressed my palm against the cold glass and made a promise to the ghost of who I used to be.

He would pay.

For every lie, every touch, every moment he made me believe I was worth something.

He would pay for the child I'd lost, for the hope he'd stolen, for the girl he'd destroyed.

And I would be the one holding the blade.

The Moon Goddess had taught me my place in this world was to be on my knees, broken and bleeding.

But she'd made a mistake.

She'd pushed me so far down that I'd found the bottom.

And discovered I had nothing left to lose.

Which meant I had nothing left to fear.

They wanted me to be nothing?

Fine.

I would be nothing.

Nothing but the weapon they'd forged in blood and betrayal.

And when I finally found him—the stranger who'd called me Little Wolf and promised me freedom—I would show him exactly what he'd created.

Not with tears.

Not with pleas.

But with the kind of vengeance that would make even the Moon Goddess look away in shame.

This was my promise.

My vow.

And unlike his promises, mine would be written in blood.