I Am Just Alpha’s Shield to Protect Her Chapter 07

I Am Just Alpha’s Shield to Protect Her Chapter 07

The rain came down hard.

I sat in the departure terminal, watching the board, feeling nothing in particular.

My phone buzzed against my leg. Kept buzzing.

Texts from Lucas filled the screen. Dozens of missed calls underneath.

[I got rid of her. She’s gone. Raven, I know I was wrong, scream at me, hit me, whatever you want, just don’t leave me.]

I read it.

No cold laugh. Not even that.

Just nothing.

So now he knew.

I thought about every night I’d stayed up making his study guides. The nosebleed I got over his flashcards at three in the morning. Carrying him up and down four flights of stairs every day until my heels bled raw through my socks.

He’d taken that notebook, three years of that, and used it to level a table.

Some things break and stay broken. No amount of bloodied hands can put them back together.

Another call came through.

I hesitated. Then I answered.

What came through the speaker stopped me cold. Lucas’s voice, completely wrecked. Raw. Sobbing. Engine noise underneath it, rain against car windows. He was gasping, his voice shaking uncontrollably.

“Raven, please, just tell me where you are—”

He could barely get the words out.

“I’m sorry, I should’ve believed you, I should’ve seen what she was doing from the start—”

“I’m in a car to the airport right now, the driver’s going fast, just wait for me, Raven, please don’t go—”

The terminal PA crackled on. A calm voice announced the flight to Reykjavik was boarding.

“Lucas.”

His crying stopped.

“Leave the moonstone. It’ll just cut you.”

A beat.

“Whatever Seraphina is or isn’t, that’s not my business anymore.”

“No—” His voice crumpled into something small. “Don’t talk to me like that, please—”

He begged desperately, his broken sobs audible through the phone.

“Don’t come looking for me.”

I hung up.

I held the phone for a second. Then I powered it off, popped the SIM card, snapped it in half, and dropped it in the trash next to my seat.

I stood up, grabbed my carry-on, and got in line to board.

The storm on the other side of the glass. Lucas’s world falling apart somewhere behind it.

I didn’t look back once.

After that, I changed everything. New number, new accounts, all of it.

The old SIM card in that airport trash can was probably still collecting messages. Somewhere in that broken inbox:

[I confronted Seraphina. She admitted everything.]

[I took the pendant to the best jeweler I could find. He’s working on it.]

[Where did you go? I’ve been to your Wolf House and rang the bell, but no one answered. Please just answer the door.]

Lucas stood outside my house for a month.

Then one morning, eyes completely bloodshot, he caught my mom on her way to the grocery store.

“Mrs. Taylor.” His voice had gone rough, like something had given out in his throat. He was shaking. “Where’s Raven? Is she refusing to see me?”

My mom looked at him for a long moment.

“Lucas,” she said quietly, “Raven left a month ago.”

He looked like he’d been punched. “She left? Where?”

“She didn’t tell me. She just said she wanted some time before Boston College started.” My mom paused. “She said she wanted to go somewhere far. Somewhere cold — she mentioned the Arctic.”

“The Arctic…” Lucas murmured, his face going pale. Then it hit him. “Iceland.”

He knew better than anyone that I couldn’t shift, that I ran cold, that winter was always the hardest season for me. If I’d gone to Iceland on purpose, I’d gone as far from him as I could get.

“She took everything you’d ever given her,” my mom said. “She said she needed to say goodbye properly.”