Under His Mark, I Fell Apart

POV of Rachel

#Chapter 3

My finger hovered over his contact for a long moment.

Keanu.

The name that had once made my heart race now tasted like poison on my tongue.

I could have left quietly. Dante's promise of alliance meant I had protection, resources, a way out. Marcus would extract me in three days, and I could disappear before Keanu ever knew what hit him.

But that would be too easy for him.

Too clean.

My pride—the Moonshadow pride my mother had died protecting—wouldn't let me slink away like a beaten dog. I needed him to know. Needed him to understand that it was me, Rachel, who was ending this. Not him. Never him.

I pressed dial.

The phone rang once. Twice. Through the conference room door behind me, I heard his ringtone echo—that aggressive rock song he claimed made him feel powerful.

The laughter and crude commentary cut off instantly.

Then I heard her—Elena's breathy voice, muffled but unmistakable: "Don't answer it. Not now—"

A rustle of fabric. A soft gasp that made my stomach turn.

"Shh," Keanu's voice, low and amused. "I need to take this. Stay quiet for me, sweetheart."

The call connected.

"Hello?" His voice carried that Alpha command that used to make my knees weak, but now there was something else underneath it—a breathless edge, a distraction.

Through the phone, I heard it: a quiet, feminine whimper. The creak of leather—the conference room chair. Movement that shouldn't be happening during a "council meeting."

I took a breath, steadying myself. When I spoke, my voice was soft, almost gentle—a blade wrapped in silk.

"What are you doing right now?"

A pause. In the background, Elena's voice again, barely audible: "Keanu—"

"Quiet," he murmured, not to me. Then, louder: "I told you not to call me during council meetings."

His tone shifted to irritation, dismissing me like an inconvenient interruption. Like I was the problem.

But his breathing had changed. Slightly faster. Distracted.

And I could hear Elena's soft, pleased laughter through the door—the sound of someone who knew exactly what power she held in that moment.

Council meetings.

The audacity of it almost made me laugh. He was literally ten feet away from me, separated only by a door and his own arrogance, surrounded by his pack members who'd just watched me debase myself on camera.

With Elena in his lap, probably. Making a mockery of me even as he spoke to me.

And he couldn't even be bothered to create a convincing lie.

"Come home," I said quietly, my voice steady despite the nausea rising in my throat. "I need to tell you something important."

Another muffled sound. Was that a zipper? The shift of clothing?

"I can't leave now. The council session is critical." The lie rolled off his tongue with practiced ease, even as his breathing remained uneven. "We're discussing border disputes. I'll be back late. Don't wait up."

In the background, so faint I almost missed it: Elena's satisfied sigh.

Even now. Even knowing what I knew, even while touching another woman, he was still lying to my face with such casual cruelty.

My knuckles went white around the phone.

"I see," I whispered. "Don't rush then. Take your time."

I ended the call before he could respond.

Behind the door, I heard Elena's muffled voice: "Who was that?"

"No one important," Keanu replied.

No one important.

Aria snarled, but I was already walking away, my decision crystallizing with every step.

---

I stood in the doorway of what he called "our home."

But it had never been ours. Every piece of furniture, every decoration, every rule had been his. I'd just been a temporary resident in the space he'd designed as my cage.

The penthouse overlooked Silverfang territory—all glass and cold metal, modern and soulless. Nothing like the warm, lived-in pack house where I'd grown up, where every room had held generations of memories and laughter.

This place held nothing but ghosts of the person I'd allowed myself to become.

I walked straight to the bedroom—our bedroom—and opened the massive walk-in closet.

One side held his clothes: designer suits, casual wear, everything precisely organized. The other side had been mine.

Or rather, the person he'd wanted me to be.

I stared at the rows of dresses—sleek, form-fitting, expensive. Deep reds, blacks, jewel tones. Every single one chosen because he'd liked them. Because they'd made me look like his perfect Luna. His ornament. His toy.

My own clothes—the tailored pantsuits I'd preferred, the comfortable sweaters, the practical boots—were shoved into the far corner, untouched for months. He'd hated when I wore them. Said they made me look "mannish" and "cold."

So I'd stopped wearing them. Had stopped being myself.

"We need these," Aria said, focusing my attention on the safe at the back of the closet.

My fingers moved over the keypad—his birthday, because of course it was—and the safe clicked open.

Inside lay my father's Alpha sigil. Silver and moonstone, the symbol of Moonshadow leadership. I'd kept it hidden here, too afraid to wear it, too ashamed to let anyone see that I'd once been more than Keanu's plaything.

"We're going home," I told Aria.

"Finally," she breathed, and I felt her reaching toward the sigil with desperate longing. "Finally home."

I closed the safe, the sigil clutched in my fist.

Then I turned back to those dresses.

Two years. Two years of suffocating myself to fit his ideal. Two years of swallowing my opinions, dimming my strength, making myself small and pliant and grateful for his attention.

I grabbed the nearest dress—red silk, the one he'd made me wear to a council dinner where he'd kept his hand possessively on my thigh all night. Where he'd later fucked me in the coat room while his Beta kept watch, whispering that I looked like "such a good little slut" in that dress.

The fabric tore with a satisfying rip.

Inside me, Aria howled—part pain, part release.

The false mate bond shuddered, another crack splintering through the artificial magic holding it together.

Each tear sent a lancing pain through my chest, my spine, radiating outward like broken glass in my veins. This was the price of severing even a fake bond—agony that made my hands shake and my vision blur.

But I didn't stop.

I ripped another dress. Then another. Black chiffon, emerald satin, midnight blue silk—each one had a memory attached. Each memory was a knife wound I'd let him inflict.

The pain intensified with each destroyed garment until I was gasping, tears streaming down my face, my entire body trembling.

But I kept going.

The closet floor became a battlefield of shredded fabric and broken promises.

Only when every single dress lay destroyed did I stop, panting, sweat cooling on my skin.

I wiped my face and pulled out my real clothes from the corner. My clothes. The ones that fit the person I actually was.

Then I turned to the dresser drawer.

Our memory drawer. His idea, of course. A place to keep mementos of "our beautiful love story."

I yanked it open.

The silver necklace with the moonstone pendant sat on top—last year's birthday gift. He'd clasped it around my neck and whispered that I was the brightest light in his dark world.

A light. A star.

No. I'd been a target. A weapon aimed at my father's heart.

I grabbed the necklace and hurled it into the fireplace.

The photograph was next. Us on a mountain peak during a winter trip to the northern territories. I was laughing, tucked into his arms, my face bright with joy. He was looking down at me with such apparent tenderness that my chest ached looking at it now.

How good had he been at faking that expression? Had he practiced in the mirror?

Into the fireplace.

Love letters he'd written. Dried flowers from our first date. A pair of concert tickets from a show we'd attended. Movie stubs. Restaurant receipts. Birthday cards.

Every single piece of evidence that we'd been real, that he'd loved me, that I hadn't just imagined the connection between us.

All of it went into the fireplace.

I struck a match, watching the small flame dance at my fingertips.

Then I dropped it.

The fire caught immediately, hungry. The photograph curled and blackened, our smiling faces warping, melting, disappearing into ash. The letters blazed bright and fast, his declarations of eternal love consumed in seconds.

I stood there watching it burn, Aria silent beside me, both of us mesmerized by the destruction.

The flames grew, feeding on two years of carefully constructed lies.

Burn.

Let it all burn.

Let every false memory turn to ash and smoke.

The heat made my face flush, but I didn't step back. I wanted to feel it. Wanted the physical manifestation of everything inside me being incinerated and remade.

That's when I heard it.

The front door unlocking.

Keanu's footsteps in the hallway, confident and unhurried.

He was home.