The moon hung like a pale coin over the trees, cold light spilling across the dirt paths of our pack grounds. It was the sort of night that felt like a promise or a warning. To me, at twelve, it felt like both.
Leonel was everything I'd ever wanted to be safe with: taller than the other boys, serious-eyed, already walking like someone who owned the world. He'd been my friend since we could run without falling. When I tugged his sleeve that night my stomach did a tight, foolish flip.
"Leo," I whispered, because secrets were small and heavy and needed to be handed to someone you trusted. "Promise you won't tell anyone."
He huffed, impatient but not unkind. "Aria, you're being weird again. Just say it."
I could have lied. I almost did. But secrets that sit in your throat rot into something worse. I had to tell him. He was the only one I'd ever told anything to.
"I'm… I'm an Omega," I said. The words tumbled out and sounded smaller than I'd imagined.
For a second his face was blank, like he'd been hit by a winter wind. I waited for the warm, teasing laugh he used to give me, the way he always made everything less scary. What came instead shut me down like a slammed door.
"I hate Omegas," he said, flat and simple.
No words. No sharpness, no cruelty in volume just that quiet sentence, the kind that kills without anyone knowing a thing happened. It landed somewhere behind my ribs and stayed there, making breathing hard.
I stepped back. The moonlight made his profile a statue: jaw set, shoulders squared. He didn't look at me again. He turned and walked away like I was a puddle he could avoid.
I don't remember how I made it home. I remember the hollow of the walk, the way every step sounded too loud in my ears. I remember the oath I carved into myself in the dark: never again. If being an Omega meant being looked at like something to be used, mocked, or hidden, then I would not be one. I would be something else. Stronger. Smaller. Invisible if I had to be.
Ten years is long enough to teach yourself to be someone else.
( 10 YEARS LATER)
The Moon Ceremony was always theater a pageant of status and scent and ritual where the pack's hierarchy tuned the night like an instrument. I pulled my cloak tight and blended in with the other Betas, folding myself into the shadows on purpose. Suppressants were my rules; they kept my body quiet and my scent a lie. They let me move without people's pity or appetite trailing behind me.
Tonight, the bonfire's throat threw sparks into the air. Voices ebbed and flowed with the smoke. Alphas towered, shoulders squared like storm clouds; Betas chatted in small, careful groups; Omegas tucked their faces down and tried not to be seen. I kept my hands steady and my face calm. My heartbeat was a steady drum I'd practiced to ignore.
And somewhere in the crowd, Leonel stood like he always had uncomfortable to be near, impossible not to see. Time had carved him sharper: his shoulders broader, his face with the same ruthless lines. He looked like he'd been honed by everything life threw at him. He wasn't laughing. He wasn't the boy I'd trusted.
I told myself it didn't matter. He didn't remember. He'd forgotten a dozen things from childhood small cruelties and small affections alike. He was a name, a presence. That was all.
Except sometimes the body remembers before the mind catches up. There was a moment, as the smoke curled, when Leonel's eyes flicked off a handful of people and landed on me. They held for a breath too long, like a hand finding something it wanted but not letting itself take.
I felt it then: something like a tug under my skin. Not heat, not anything my suppressants should permit just a whisper of panic threaded through my spine. My fingers flexed into the pouch at my hip. The capsule inside was a hollow comfort I'd kept for emergencies. I had a choice: take it, reveal that I was careful, or risk being noticed.
I chose control. I let the muscle memory I'd taught myself do the work. I pressed my lips together and forced a smile that didn't touch my eyes. I shifted my stance, angled my cloak, and kept my face empty. If there was danger in Leonel's look, I folded it into nothing.
He blinked, once, and his jaw unclenched. The rawness in his gaze smoothed out as if someone had plastered over it. He turned, world-stiff composure slipping back into place, and resumed whatever role the crowd demanded of him. He did not approach me. He did not speak. The moment passed, and everything snapped back into the ordinary violence of the ceremony: laughter, offers, the low hum of power being bartered.
I exhaled without meaning to. No one shifted closer. No one lunged. No one knew.
But my hands shook. The old cut in me the one he made all those years ago ached raw and familiar. The difference this time was that I had a lie in my pocket I'd been living by, and I'd almost lost it. I had kept my secret. I had, for now, kept myself.
Walking away from the fire later, the night felt colder. Leonel's silhouette receded into the dark, a question with no answer. My chest hurt in ways memory never wholly heals, but there was also a strange, hard clarity: the world I'd built to survive had to hold. No one could be allowed in to topple it. Not yet.
The moon watched us both and gave nothing away.