Chapter 6

Lyra's POV

The air felt too thick to breathe.

“Don’t call me that,” I whispered, but the words came out weaker than I intended. In my past life, Little Star had been Soren’s private endearment, whispered against my skin in the dark, murmured when he thought I was asleep. Hearing it now felt like a blade between my ribs.

Soren’s dark sapphire eyes flickered with something sharp. He had noticed my reaction. Of course, he had. He noticed everything.

“Lyra.” Caspian’s voice cut through the tension, pulling my attention back to him. He hadn’t moved from behind the desk, but his presence filled the room like a gathering storm. “You are not a prisoner. But you are not leaving.”

“That sounds exactly like a prisoner,” I said.

His golden eyes flashed. “Then perhaps you should stop acting like one and tell us what is actually happening.”

I almost laughed. Almost. The sound died in my throat, strangled by the bitter irony. Tell them what was happening? That I remembered a future where they killed me? Where Caspian’s strap left scars that never faded, where Silas watched without lifting a finger, where Soren’s mercy was poison on my tongue?

They would never believe me. They hadn’t believed me then, when I begged them to see Genevieve’s manipulations. Why would they believe something so much larger, so much more impossible?

“Nothing is happening,” I said, forcing my voice back to that calm, submissive register. The perfect omega. The one they expected me to be. “I simply recognize that I no longer have a place in this pack. Genevieve is the omega you all clearly prefer. I am removing myself from an uncomfortable situation for everyone involved.”

Silas pushed away from the bookshelves, his movement deliberately slow. Everything Silas did was deliberate. He was the strategist, the one who thought three steps ahead while everyone else was still processing the first move.

“Genevieve came to your room,” he said. It wasn’t a question.

I said nothing.

“What did she say to you?” Caspian demanded.

My silence stretched, and I watched something flicker across all three of their faces. Frustration, yes, but also something that looked almost like guilt. They knew Genevieve. They knew what she was capable of. They chose to ignore it when it suited them.

“It doesn’t matter what

The silence stretched thin, a wire pulled taut between us. I could feel their eyes on me—Caspian's heavy with command, Silas's sharp with calculation, Soren's burning with something darker, something hungry.

"It doesn't matter what she said," I repeated, quieter now. "The result is the same. You've made your choices for years. I'm simply accepting them."

Caspian rose from his chair. The movement was slow, deliberate, every inch the Alpha Prime who had led this pack through border wars and political upheaval. He rounded the desk with measured steps, and I had to fight every instinct screaming at me to step back, to lower my eyes, to submit.

I held my ground.

"You've never asked to leave before," he said, stopping an arm's length away close enough that I could smell the sandalwood and pine on his skin. Close enough that his warmth pressed against me like a physical weight. "Not once in all the years you've lived under this roof. And now suddenly you're standing in my sanctum, requesting permanent departure as if you're asking for permission to visit the village market."

"Perhaps I should have asked sooner."

His jaw tightened. "Lyra."

"My mind is made up."

"Your mind—" He cut himself off with a sharp exhale, and I watched something crack behind his carefully controlled expression. Caspian Sterling did not lose his temper. He did not raise his voice without purpose. But his hand lifted, hovering near my cheek for half a heartbeat before dropping back to his side as if he'd thought better of it.

"You're shaking," he said quietly.

I hadn't realized. My hands were trembling at my sides, fine tremors running through my fingers that I couldn't seem to stop. Not from fear—or at least, not only from fear. Something else. Something that felt dangerously close to grief.

"Lyra." Silas's voice came from my left, closer than I expected. He'd moved without sound, the way he always did, and now he stood near enough that I could see the furrow between his brows. "Sit down. You're pale."

"I don't want to sit down. I want to leave."

"And I want to understand why you look like you're about to shatter," he countered, and the edge in his voice made me flinch. Not cruelty. Concern. Genuine, bewildered concern, as if my distress was a puzzle he couldn't solve and that unsettled him more than any battlefield strategy ever had.

Soren appeared at my other side, bracketing me between the three of them. I hadn't heard him move either. They were herding me, I realized. Surrounding me. The way they surrounded threats.

Or the way they surrounded something precious they were afraid of losing.

"Little Star," Soren murmured, and the name hit me like a fist to the chest. "You come in here with fire in your eyes and death in your voice, asking to leave like you're already gone. What are we supposed to do with that?"

"Let me go."

"No." All three of them spoke at once, a chorus of refusal that sent a jolt through my bloodstream.

I laughed. I couldn't help it—a broken, breathless sound that held no humor at all. "You don't see the irony, do you? For years, you've pulled away. Every time Genevieve cried, every time she needed comfort, every time she looked at you with those big, sad eyes—you went to her. You gave her your time, your attention, your gifts. You left me standing in doorways, waiting for you to notice I was still there."

Caspian's expression went rigid. Silas's eyes shuddered. Soren's fingers stopped their restless tapping.

"And now I'm doing what you've been telling me to do for years," I continued, my voice cracking despite my best efforts. "I'm removing myself from the equation. I'm making it easy for you. You should be relieved."

The silence that followed was devastating.

Then Caspian moved.

His hand caught my chin, tilting my face up to meet his eyes. The touch was firm but not painful, nothing like the bruising grip I remembered from my nightmares. His golden eyes blazed down at me, and I realized with a shock that his hand was trembling too.

"Relieved," he repeated, the word scraping out of his throat like broken glass. "You think we would be relieved."

"I know you would."

"You know nothing."

I wrenched my chin from his grip, taking a stumbling step backward. Soren's hand caught my elbow before I could fall, steadying me with an ease that made my heart lurch. In my past life, those hands had held me down while Caspian's strap fell. In this life, they held me upright with impossible gentleness.

"Tell us what Genevieve said," Silas pressed, and now his voice had gone dangerously soft. The voice he used when interrogating prisoners. The voice that extracted truth from liars. "Tell us what happened in your room, and we will make this right."

"You can't make it right." The words tore out of me before I could stop them. "You can't undo what's already been done. You can't unsay the things you've said, undo the choices you've made. You can't bring back the version of me who trusted you."

The room went very, very still.

"What does that mean?" Soren's voice had lost all its lazy amusement. He sounded almost... afraid. "Lyra, what does that mean?"

I pressed my lips together, heart pounding. I'd said too much. Revealed too much. The memories of my first life churned beneath my skin like a second heartbeat, and I was so tired of carrying them alone.

"Nothing," I whispered. "It means nothing."

"You're lying." Silas stepped closer, and now all three of them were within arm's reach, surrounding me in a triangle of heat and Alpha energy and something that felt terrifyingly like desperation. "You've been different for weeks. Distant. Quiet. You flinch when we touch you. You look at us like you're seeing ghosts."

Because I am, I wanted to scream. Because the ghosts of you are all I see.

Caspian's hand found my chin again, gentler this time. He tilted my face up, and when he spoke, his voice was stripped of authority, stripped of command, stripped down to something raw and human.

"What are we not seeing, Lyra? What are you not telling us?"

I looked into his golden eyes—eyes that had once looked at me with love, then with doubt, then with cold, final judgment—and felt the walls I'd built around my heart begin to crack.

"You'll think I'm mad," I breathed.

"Try us," Soren said.

The study door burst open.

Genevieve stood in the doorway, cheeks flushed, sapphire eyes brimming with artful tears. Her golden hair was slightly disheveled, her rosebud mouth trembling with what looked like barely restrained distress.

It looked like distress. I knew better now.

"I'm so sorry to interrupt," she said, voice hitching on a sob. "But I just—I can't stop crying, and I didn't know where else to go. Lyra said the most awful things to me earlier, and I've been trying so hard to be kind to her, I truly have, but she's made it clear she despises me and I don't know what I've done wrong—"

She broke off with a perfect, trembling gasp, one hand pressed delicately to her chest.

And I watched, my heart turning to ice, as all of them turned toward her.

Just like they always did.

Just like they always would.