It wasn’t a choice.
It was just the only option that didn’t break the people I loved.
Lena
“No.”
The word escaped before I even realised I was going to say it.
My body rejected the idea of being summoned the way lungs instinctively reject water—violently and without asking for permission.
I was still sitting at the kitchen table.
The letter was still between us.
My coffee had gone completely cold.
“No,” I said again, louder.
“I’m not going.”
My mum opened her mouth to speak, but I cut her off.
“I know how it sounds. I know you’re going to say I don’t have a choice. That there’s a covenant, a contract, some ancient binding thing I was born into.” I shook my head.
“But twenty minutes ago, Mum. Twenty minutes ago, I thought werewolves were something people wrote fiction about.”
My voice cracked on the last word.
I felt tears threatening to fall, and I pressed them back.
It wasn’t yet time for that.
I wasn’t done yet.
“Twenty minutes ago, my biggest problem was whether to text Tessa before or after breakfast.” I laughed, broken and wrong.
“I was thinking about waffles. And now you’re sitting here telling me I have to leave—not just this house, not just this city, but this entire world—for a king I have never met in my life, because of the position of stars the night I was born?”
I pushed back from the table slightly.
“My education, my future, Tessa? Everything I’ve been building, everything I’ve been planning…” My throat tightened.
“You two. You’re everything I have. And you’re asking me to say yes? Pack a bag? And go?”
“Lena.” My dad’s voice was very quiet.
“I’m not finished.”
“I know,” he said.
His voice held a terrible steadiness.
“But there’s something else you need to hear.”
I went still.
“What,” I said flatly.
He exhaled.
He didn’t rush it.
He delivered the news without any softening around the edges.
He had decided I deserved the full weight of the truth.
The covenant didn’t simply expire if I refused.
It didn’t dissolve or fold itself away, leaving us alone.
It rebounded.
It would follow the bloodline back to the people tied to me—my parents.
I frowned.
“What does that mean?” My voice had dropped without me deciding to lower it.
“Turn on you… How?”
My dad looked at me directly, with no hesitation.
“It means we die.”
These three words.
Said quietly in a kitchen on a Tuesday morning, and something inside my chest fell as if the floor had given way. Find the original chapter at g.com.
I couldn’t find a single word in any language to answer that.
It means we die.
My mind tried to reject it.
It tried to shrink it to something manageable.
I looked at my mum.
She was in that rigid, controlled stillness she used when she refused to fall apart.
Her shoulders were set, but her eyes were wet.
She couldn’t look at me.
Her eyes were wet.
“Mum,” I whispered.
She shook her head barely once.
Don’t…
it was her way of telling me not to do that, not to make it about her in this moment.
But it was already about her from the second she sat down.
“How long?” My voice was smaller than I intended.
“How long have you been living with this?”
The world outside was indifferent.
The birds continued singing.
The fridge was still humming.
Then my mum’s voice broke through.
“Since the night you were born.”
I blinked hard.
“Every single day since that night.”
“…Every day?” She nodded barely.
“Every morning I woke up and thought…” Her breath broke on the word.
She steadied herself and tried again.
“Just one more year. Let her have just one more year of being just Lena.” She paused, chin trembling.
“And then one year became two, two became five and five became ten. And I still…” Her voice fractured completely.
“I still wasn’t ready. I don’t know how I thought I ever would be.”
She lifted her eyes to mine, and I saw it all—the grief, the guilt, and the desperate love that had been trying to outrun a fate it couldn’t escape.
For eighteen years, she had given me a normal life because that was the only gift she had left.
Something inside me broke.
I didn’t mean to cry, but I couldn’t stop it.
I genuinely didn’t.
I had held it together with every stubborn, desperate thing I had, and then I looked at her face and I just couldn’t anymore.
The tears came before I could stop them.
My mum was out of her chair in a second, wrapping her arms around me.
I pressed my face into her shoulder, smelling her familiar scent, and sobbed like a child.
“I don’t want this,” I whispered into her shoulder.
My voice was wrecked.
“I don’t want any of it.”
“I know,” she whispered back, her hand in my hair.
“It’s not fair.”
“I know, baby.”
“It’s not… I didn’t choose this. I didn’t ask…”
“I know.” Her voice broke. This story is hosted at g.com.
“I know. I know. I know.”
She said it like a prayer and a confession at once.
Then my dad’s hand came down on my shoulder from behind.
The three of us were in a kitchen that had no idea how much was ending inside it.
When I finally pulled back, I wiped my face with my sleeve.
Took a breath and looked at the letter one last time.
Four days.
Three days left until everything I knew—this kitchen, this garden, this life, and everything waiting on the other side of a name I had already read four times.
I looked at my dad.
He looked like a man who had been carrying a boulder for two decades and had finally set it down.
I looked at my mum.
She was watching me with that expression she’d had my whole life, the one that lived somewhere between ‘I would burn the world for you’ and ‘please don’t ask me to watch you walk into it’.
Then I made my decision.
I didn’t choose it because I felt brave.
I chose it because I couldn’t live with the alternative.
I couldn’t trade my freedom for their lives.
I would survive this.
I had to.
And my parents would survive because I was going to walk through that door and face whatever was on the other side.
“I need to know everything,” I said.
My voice was quiet, but it didn’t waver.
My parents looked at me.
“Everything you know,” I continued.
“About Erevon, about the covenant, about the king.” A breath.
“About what happens when I get there and what I’m walking into.”
My dad exhaled slowly, clearly relaxing.
“Okay,” he said.
My mum reached out and pressed her palm to my cheek.
“You don’t have to be brave for us,” she whispered.
I almost laughed.
I didn’t feel brave.
I felt like someone standing at the edge of a cliff, looking into a drop I couldn’t see the bottom of.
But I was going to jump anyway.
Maybe that’s what bravery truly is: moving while the fear is still eating you alive.
I looked at the window one last time.
The garden swayed softly in the morning breeze.
The peach tree was standing tall, and the flowers were.
I thought…
Beyond everything I had ever known, a king I had never met had already written the end of my choice into wax and black paper.
She will come.
I pressed my lips together and looked away from the garden.
He wasn’t wrong.
If you were in Lena’s position… would you go?
Or would you choose to stay, no matter the cost?