Dno't Be His Forbidden Mate

I found it by accident.

That's the worst part. I wasn't snooping. I wasn't suspicious. I was just reaching across the nightstand for my water glass when his phone lit up, and the preview was right there, and my name was in it, and I made the mistake of picking it up.

Darius had left his screen unlocked.

The group chat was called The Boys. Twelve members. Hundreds of unread messages. And somewhere in the middle of all that noise, a pixelated image that I recognized — not because I could see it clearly, but because I recognized the sheets. Our sheets. The pale gray ones I'd picked out myself from the store on Fifth.

My hands went cold.

I scrolled up. I don't know why. Some part of me needed to see the full shape of it, needed to hold the whole ugly thing in my hands before I could believe it was real. The messages went back weeks. Months, maybe. Jokes I didn't understand at first, and then understood too well. Timestamps that matched nights I remembered. Nights I had thought meant something.

*Seven times and she passed out.*

*Easier than a doll, bro.*

*Send more lmaooo*

Laughter. Emojis. One guy asking if she — if I — knew. Another saying it didn't matter.

And then Darius, responding to someone who'd asked if he felt bad about it, with the four words that split me open clean:

*Relax. She's nothing.*

I set the phone down very carefully. I remember that. I remember being deliberate about it, placing it face-down on the nightstand like it was fragile, like I was still a person who handled things with care. Then I sat on the edge of the bed in his apartment — in the apartment I had spent the night in forty, fifty, sixty times — and I stared at the wall.

The wall had a poster on it. Some band I didn't know. He'd never told me who they were.

I realized I was shaking.

---

I don't remember leaving. I remember the elevator, the lobby, the cold air outside hitting my face like a slap. I remember walking, and then walking faster, and then standing in front of a bar I'd never been to because it was simply the first door I reached.

The bar was loud and dim and smelled like spilled beer and something fried. I sat at the counter and ordered whatever was cheapest and drank it without tasting it. Then I ordered another.

Darius Kane. Heir to the Ironhaven Pack. Golden Alpha with the easy smile and the voice that had once said *my Luna* like it meant something sacred.

I had believed him. That was the thing I kept circling back to, the thing that made my chest feel like it was caving in. I had believed every word. I, Elara Thorne — wolfless, packless, the girl everyone in Ironhaven looked through like glass — had believed that he saw me. That I wasn't nothing to him.

I ordered a third drink.

The bartender gave me a look. I ignored it.

I was halfway through the glass when I felt the shift in the air behind me — that particular stillness that meant an Alpha had walked in. I didn't turn around. I already knew.

Darius slid onto the stool beside me. He smelled like his apartment, like the sheets I now wanted to burn.

"Elara." His voice was low, careful. Remorseful, even. He'd had enough time to put on the right face. "I've been looking for you."

"I know."

"Whatever you saw on my phone—"

"I saw enough."

He was quiet for a moment. I stared at the row of bottles behind the bar and felt him watching me, calculating. Darius was always calculating. I just hadn't noticed before.

"It was just talk," he said. "Guys say stupid things. It doesn't mean anything."

The word *nothing* echoed in my skull. I didn't answer.

He leaned closer. I could feel the warmth of him, that Alpha warmth I had once found so comforting, and now it turned my stomach. "Come on. Let me make it up to you." His hand found my wrist, gentle, practiced. "There's a private room in the back. We can talk. Just the two of us."

He steered me off the stool before I'd fully decided to move. That was another thing I hadn't noticed until now — how often he moved me before I'd decided anything.

The private room was small and dim. A leather couch. A table with two glasses already on it. And on the walls, printed large, the kind of images that made the room's purpose very clear. I stood in the doorway and looked at them and felt something inside me go very, very quiet.

"Pick a position," Darius said from behind me. His voice was light, almost playful. The same voice. The exact same voice he used to say *my Luna*. Like there was no difference between those two sentences. Like I was just a variable he could swap out depending on his mood.

I turned around.

He was smiling. A small, patient smile. Waiting.

"No," I said.

It came out barely above a whisper. But it was the clearest thing I'd said all night.

Something shifted in his expression — irritation, quickly smoothed over. "Elara—"

"I want to go home."

"You're being dramatic."

Maybe I was. Maybe that's what I was — dramatic, easy, nothing. Maybe that's all I'd ever been in this room, in his apartment, in this pack. A body that was convenient. A girl with no wolf, no rank, no leverage, nothing to offer except what he'd already taken and shared with twelve strangers who laughed about it.

I stepped back into the hallway.

Darius didn't follow. I heard him exhale behind me — that short, sharp breath that meant he was annoyed but not enough to bother. Not enough to come after me. Because I wasn't worth the effort of a scene.

I walked back through the bar and out into the cold.

The night air hit me again, but this time I didn't feel the slap of it. I didn't feel much of anything. Just the strange, hollow quiet of something dying — some last soft piece of me that had still believed, even after the messages, even after the photo, even after *she's nothing*, that I might have been wrong. That there was some explanation. That he was the person I had thought he was.

He wasn't.

And I had been nothing all along.

I stood on the sidewalk outside the bar and looked up at the sky and thought: *Okay. Now what?*

I didn't have an answer. But the question felt important. It felt like the first honest thing I'd asked myself in months.