He Buried My Heart, I Buried His Empire

His voice came sharp and urgent through the phone. "Elena, you're not playing games with me, are you? After three years of silence, you're finally calling?"

I stayed quiet, gripping the phone tighter.

"I've been waiting for you to realize what that bastard really is. You chose duty over happiness once—now you're suddenly ready to choose yourself? What finally broke you?"

Alpha Damon. The mate the Moon Goddess had originally chosen for me before pack politics interfered. The man I'd rejected to fulfill my parents' arrangement with Kai.

He'd waited three years for this call. Three years of sending letters I never answered, flowers I never acknowledged, protection from shadows I never saw.

"I'm sorry," I whispered. "I wasn't thinking clearly. Forget I….."

"Don't." His voice turned deadly serious. "Don't you dare take it back, Elena. You chose to call me this time. Don't think about running back to him again."

"I'm giving you thirty days," he warned. "Handle that worthless mate of yours. After that, I'm coming to take what should have been mine from the beginning."

Damon didn't give me a chance to refuse. With a click, the line went dead after that promise.

I ended the call and stepped backward, only to feel something sharp pierce through my bare foot.

"Ah!" I gasped, looking down to see blood pooling around a jagged piece of glass.

It was our wedding photograph—the one that used to sit on the mantle. Shattered completely, with my face split down the middle by a crack that made me look broken in half.

"Oops... sorry Elena. I didn't mean to knock that over."

I turned around to find Sophia standing in the doorway, wide-eyed and innocent. She was wearing my silk nightgown—the one Kai had bought me for our first anniversary.

"I was looking for you to show you something, and I accidentally bumped the table. You're not hurt, are you?"

Blood was seeping between my toes, staining the white marble floor, but I just shook my head. "It's fine. Just a scratch."

Kai's heavy footsteps thundered down the stairs, and he rushed past me without a glance, going straight to Sophia.

"I heard glass breaking. Are you okay?" His hands immediately began checking her arms, her face, searching for any injury with the kind of desperate care he had never shown me.

"I'm perfectly fine," Sophia assured him, then looked at me with fake concern. "But Elena stepped on the glass. Look, she's bleeding."

Only then did Kai's eyes flick down to my foot, and even then, his expression held more annoyance than worry. "Be more careful. We can't have you tracking blood through the house."

He didn't offer to help clean the wound. He didn't ask if I needed medical attention. He just looked inconvenienced by my pain.

"Actually," Sophia said, clasping her hands together with false hesitation, "there's something I wanted to talk to both of you about. But seeing Elena hurt... maybe this isn't the right time?"

"What is it?" Kai asked immediately, his full attention on her.

Sophia bit her lip in that way that made her look vulnerable and beautiful. "Well, I wanted to show Elena what I made with the fabric I found in the storage room. I thought it might make her happy, but now I'm worried she'll be upset..."

My blood turned to ice. "What fabric?"

She disappeared for a moment and returned carrying something white and flowing. My breath caught in my throat.

It was my wedding dress.

She had cut it into pieces and sewn it into a flowing summer dress that would look stunning on her tall, graceful frame.

"I found this gorgeous material just sitting in storage, collecting dust," she said with bright enthusiasm. "It seemed like such a waste! So I made myself something pretty for the pack gathering next week. You don't mind, do you Elena? You never wear it anyway."

The dress I had saved for years to buy. The dress I had worn when I promised to love Kai forever. The dress I had planned to be buried in someday, because it was the only day he had ever looked at me with something that might have been tenderness.

Cut up. Destroyed. Remade for my sister.

"It's... it's fine," I whispered, because what else could I say? That I sometimes went to the closet just to touch the fabric and remember the one perfect day of my life?

Kai was looking at Sophia with pure adoration. "You're so creative. It looks beautiful on you."

The knife in my chest twisted deeper.

"Oh good!" Sophia clapped her hands together. "I was so worried. You're always so understanding, Elena. Which brings me to my other request..."

She turned to Kai with pleading eyes. "My apartment is being fumigated for the next month. The chemicals are too strong for me to stay there, and hotels make me nervous. I was hoping... could I stay here? Just temporarily?"

"Of course," Kai said immediately, without even glancing at me. "Stay as long as you need."

"You're so generous," Sophia beamed. "But Elena's room gets the most morning sunlight, and you know how the cold affects my joints. Would it be too much to ask... could I use her room? Just until the fumigation is done?"

My room. The one place in this house that was supposed to be mine.

Kai finally looked at me, but his expression was expectant, not apologetic. "That works out perfectly. Sophia, You'll have to move to the basement."