She Rejected the Alpha and Became Her Own Moon Chapter 09
Five years of living side by side, her gentleness,Â
her thoughtfulness, her quiet waiting, had allÂ
seeped into his blood without a sound long ago.Â
He’d only been blinded by a boyhood obsession,Â
always believing the thing he couldn’t have wasÂ
the best thing, taking the devotion of the personÂ
right beside him for granted, and he came to hisÂ
senses far too late, only after he’d lost herÂ
completely.Â
What frightened him more was that he couldn’tÂ
sense her.Â
The bond between them seemed to haveÂ
vanished.Â
As dawn came near, he picked up his phone and called his Beta, his voice wrecked and hoarse.Â
“Track down where Aurora went. She gave up the Pack apartment, and she changed her number. I need to know where she is right now, this instant.”Â
The Beta worked fast, but all he could turn up was that she’d once bought a ticket to Florida, and after that, there was no record of her under her name anywhere, as if she’d vanished off the face of the earth.Â
Ethan panicked.Â
For the first time, he understood what it was to be utterly at a loss.Â
It was only then that he realized how pitifully little he knew about Aurora.Â
He didn’t know what cities she liked, he didn’t know who her friends were, and he didn’t know she’d swallowed so much hurt and never once complained about any of it to his face.Â
She’d loved him quietly for five years and then quietly pulled herself free and left, without ever once looking back.Â
He made a special trip back to the Pack to ask Aurora’s parents where she’d gone.Â
Her parents assumed he’d come to settle a date for the bonding with Iris, and they warmly poured him coffee, but the moment he asked aboutÂ
Aurora, their faces fell.Â
“That ungrateful little snake? Who knows where she’s run off to. Gone over a year and hasn’t so much as called home. We raised her for nothing.“.Â
Aurora’s mother twisted her mouth, her tone sour.Â
“If she hadn’t shamelessly clung to you back then, Iris never would have suffered all this.”Â
“It’s all worked out now. Iris’s leg is better, so the two of you should hold the bonding ceremony soon, before that troublemaker crawls back out toÂ
stir things up again.”Â
Ethan looked at this pair of parents, biased to theÂ
very bone, and the anger he’d held down for soÂ
long surged up all at once.Â
For the first time, he turned a cold face on theÂ
elders, his voice heavy as ice.Â
“Iris has already left the country. She never onceÂ
intended to bond with me.”Â
“Years ago it was the two of you who forcedÂ
Aurora to bond in her sister’s place.”Â
“For five years she walked on eggshells in the Pack, and she never wronged you in the slightest,Â
nor me.”Â
“At the airport, you tore up her ticket in front of all those people and called her shameless.”Â
“If you had even a shred of feeling for her as your daughter, you never could have said such a thing.”Â
“From this day on, Aurora’s affairs are none of yourÂ
business to weigh in on.”Â
With that, he turned and walked out, leavingÂ
Aurora’s parents standing there stunned, unable toÂ
react for a long moment.Â
Coming out of Aurora’s parents‘ place, Ethan feltÂ
heavier still.Â
He remembered how Aurora had mentioned nowÂ
and then that she’d seen southern gardens in a book as a child and badly wanted to see one forÂ
herself.Â
He’d been busy with training back then and hadÂ
brushed her off with a careless “we’ll see about itÂ
sometime,” and after that, it never came up again.Â
On the off chance it might work, he had someone pull the small–business registrations around Florida and sift through them one by one.Â
It took a full three months before he finally found,Â
in the business records of St. Augustine’s old town, a small flower shop called Spring Blossom,Â
with the owner’s line reading exactly Aurora.Â
The day he got the address, Ethan booked the earliest flight to Florida.Â
He was anxious and afraid at once, desperate to see her, afraid she’d truly let the past go, afraidÂ
someone else was already at her side.
