106. A Sense of Direction

Seff followed Kiran and Selene back up the steps into the hallway that led to the courtyard. It was still dark, but the Alphas’ eyes seemed to glow.
“I can be fair sometimes, yes?” Kiran asked with feigned hope.
His misplaced attempt at humor catered to Seff’s deliriousness and she almost laughed, but her smile barely lasted. Her mind was stretched in a dozen different directions; maybe that was why it wanted to focus on the fact that she was stark naked.
Both Alphas made to offer her their robes, but she shook her head. “It’s alright. I’m leaving now anyway.”
“Now?” Selene repeated in a suddenly harsh bark.
Kiran, searching Seff’s face with pensive gaze, spoke for her. “She must save her love before anything else.”
Her heart clenched. “Yes. You also didn’t give me much of a choice.”
His mouth quirked fleetingly. “What I say goes.”
Selene was not so agreeable. “You need a sense of fucking direction first—”
Seff rested her palm against Selene’s cheek, silencing the Luna. What a power that was, to mean enough to a conquerer’s daughter that she let someone touch her so kindly. “My sense of direction is already knowing what Hawthorn will do, where he’ll go. So don’t worry about me. I was going to leave anyway, remember?”
She dropped her hand slowly and stepped back to take them both in. Gods in human-wolf form, beautiful and broken. She had so much to say to them, but nothing seemed right, and it definitely wasn’t the right time or place for lengthy goodbyes. Or bringing up Zinnia and Calla when that last tether would snap the moment Seff left Apollo’s Keep.
“We’ll see each other again.”
Perhaps it was too ominous, too much of a promise they could obsessively cling to, but really…it just meant they would attend Hawthorn’s trial.
Nonetheless, for once they seemed unsure of what to say or do, standing there as if unaware of their own glorious bodies. *They* still had so much to say to her. But there were too many issues to address.
Finally Selene asked, “You would leave without speaking to your friend?”
“Would you?” a voice asked behind Seff.
She turned to find Allium standing there with arms crossed. “I almost didn’t,” she admitted with her gut feeling leaden. “I can’t muster another goodbye, Alli.”
Her friend’s eyes sparked with hurt, her lower lip trembling. “Then go. I saw you make peace with yourself—or with your past lives. Go find Hawthorn, and I’ll go home, and…I’ll see you…”
They didn’t close the space gaping between them. “I’m a terrible friend, Alli—”
“We both are.”
“—but I want you to live without me for a little bit.” *No time for lengthy goodbyes my ass*. “I’ve been holding you back. You’re…” Her voice cracked, but she cleared her throat and continued without looking away from the tears stealing down Allium’s cheeks. “You’re my home, but you need to go back to your *real* home—the Manor, with your parents and maybe Warrin…
“I just…need to get away for a while. Even if it’s for a tragic reason.”
Allium nodded shakily, hugging her arms around herself. “When you come back, maybe I’ll still be pregnant.” Behind Seff, Kiran stiffened, but Allium didn’t look at him.
Seff suppressed her own rising sob. “I love you, Alli.”
“I love you, too, Seff.”
She couldn’t watch her old friend vanish around the corner, so she turned back to the Alphas, who were standing closer than Seff ever imagined they would allow. Something had changed between them.
“Today’s about letting go,” she told them with the last dregs of courage she could muster. “Let go…and move on.” She paused when neither of them spoke. “And tell me what you two are hiding.”
“We are fucking,” Selene said mildly.
Seff blinked and demanded, *“What?”*
Kiran turned his eyes skyward. “For fuck’s sake, Selene.”
She lifted a shoulder. “I told her we owe the truth.”
“We did not agree—”
“We didn’t need to.”
They were bickering like adolescents in their first fight rather than one-hundred-year-old Alphas. Seff experienced enough shock in the past few hours, however, to be surprised by this too much. In fact, she thought with a growing smile, that this was one of the best things that could come out of this, as Kiran put it, “fucked situation.”
They were souls each cut in half.
And two halves were made whole.
Arguing as if Seff wasn’t watching, she knew their ragged souls were far from fitting together—knowing some soulmates weren’t right for each other at all—but they were destined to be together for better or worse.
They could love or they could fuck…and know their forevers wouldn’t be lonely.
“Kiran,” she finally interjected, “Selene.” Two sets of burning gazes snapped to hers. “I’m going to leave before you start smelling like sex.”
Their wicked grins were strikingly similar in the savageness of hedonism.
The Sun Alpha purred and took Seff’s hand to brush a kiss to the back of it. “A pleasure you sorely missed out on, my Seff.”
The Moon Luna bent to kiss her mouth. “A pleasure you received.”
Seff’s heart was close to bursting. In two months, she had gone from hating the two thieves of Omegas to now saying fond farewells. For two months she had been prisoner to gold and blue, white and black. Now she understood that she would *miss* them.
“Hawthorn had the balls to shout at me,” Kiran said in his deep voice, “that I do not deserve you. It seems he was right.”
“And the ‘useless notion of love’?” Seff wondered, her smile growing.
He glanced at Selene before grating his jaw at himself for doing so, and yet his tone was self-satisfied when he said, “I told her the only thing I want was *her*.”
“And I hate you for it.” Selene refused to look at him, but Seff saw her fingers touch Kiran’s. “Alpha males—”
“Know how to fuck excellently.”
“—are fucking knotheads. I hope yours is worth it.”
Seff let her smile beam. “I’m about to find out. So will you two—at the trial, right?”
They dipped their heads in tandem. “As promised.”
“Will you bring Altan and Elio?”
“They will be happy to see you,” Selene told her. The Luna’s eyes were the calm blue surface of water, her lips now shaped in a very un-Selene-like bow. Seff had seen her happy, but now she was *content*.
At least for the moment, before Kiran irked her.
“Seek safely,” he said as Seff began her walk toward the courtyard and the gates to the rest of the world. “Don’t die brutally. I believe it is rude to do so when you make the promise to live.”
“Do not make promises either,” Selene called after her. “They will get you killed.”
Seff threw her head back and laughed. The stone and soon the grass was smooth beneath her feet, the creeping dawn chasing away the dusty night, the air warming. It wasn’t hope on the horizon beyond the apple orchard that she now ran through in her wolf form, but it was there somewhere—and somewhere was wherever Hawthorn was.
*“Whatever you want…I’ll want too.”*
*I want to find you, Hawthorn*, she thought. The wind whistled through her fur, past her ears. She was still bloody and weak and she would need to hunt. It was possible that he was simply hiding nearby to wait out the threat. But Seff knew him; he would seek familiarity.
The difficult part was finding her way—*their* way—to the Winter pack. Being sheltered, and already far from home, which way was south?
*We need to do this on our own*, she rationalized when she started to wonder if she *shouldn’t* have. *A sense of direction indeed*.
But Seff needed to be lost first to be found. Hawthorn could still fend for himself and so could she. Letting go and moving on…that had to mean self-discovery, right? And didn’t self-discovery mean running headfirst into the wilderness without knowing which route led southward?
Maybe.
She would have to find out.
A visit to the Crystal River was needed very first. Before she trotted down the hill, something small caught between the pads of her paw. She dislodged it with a shake to find that Selene’s necklace that she gifted to Calla had miraculously found its way back. The little wood moon was still on its thin rope.
Shifting into her human form, Seff tied it tightly around her elbow so that when she assumed her wolf form, it was secured. It didn’t have the same spark as when she first touched it, nor did it bring Calla’s essence forward, but it still felt right.
She didn’t bring or burn the Amaranth records. She knew they were safe with Wisteria, who would cherish the Amaranth line’s legacy when no one else would remember.
Seff would. She would not become prey to its tragic destiny, because she had already been set free.
She would make her own destiny.
Seff Amaranth-Bleize was an Omega of the Magnolia pack; she was a wolf and a flower, and neither would bend to the will of the winter wind.