Chapter 8 Blindsided

Serena's POV

What exactly do you have to offer that I don't?

The question just sat there. Camille didn't push it, didn't repeat it — she didn't need to. She'd already won the moment she asked it, and all three of us knew it.

I looked at Elliot.

He was already looking at Camille. Not at me — at her. At the socket where her eye had been thirty seconds ago, his jaw tight, something moving behind his expression that I'd never once seen directed at me in an entire year of sharing a bed with the man. It wasn't pity. It was older than that. Heavier.

He turned to me like he'd made a decision.

"She was there." His voice came out low, stripped of its usual polish. "The wedding day. Cami was there, Serena."

I waited.

"Security turned her away at the door. St. Mary's." He exhaled through his nose. "She found a window on the east side — one of the stained glass panels. She saw us through it." A beat. "The kiss."

Oh.

"Forty-eight hours later she lost the sight in her left eye. Permanently." His jaw worked. "Neuromyelitis optica — acute flare. Emotional stress is a documented trigger."

The words hit in sequence, each one landing before I'd finished processing the last. I watched his face while he said it — the guilt carved into the lines around his mouth, the way he couldn't hold my gaze for more than a second before dropping it. Whatever else was happening here, that part wasn't performance. That part was real.

Or it's the most airtight story you've ever heard. Delivered by someone who had a year to perfect it.

I couldn't tell. That was the honest answer — I genuinely could not tell, and the uncertainty made the ground feel unsteady under my feet. Camille stood beside him with her hands folded and her expression composed, not adding anything, not performing grief, just letting the facts do exactly what she'd calculated they would do.

I couldn't call her a liar. Not out loud. Not with Elliot looking like that.

"Your contracted marriage has expired, sign the divorce papers." Camille's voice had gone almost gentle, which was the most calculated thing she could have done. "It's the clean move. For everyone. Dragging it out just makes the whole thing uglier than it needs to be."

She's doing you a favor. That's the angle. She's being reasonable.

The pity in her tone was so precisely measured it made something behind my sternum go cold.

And then — like a photograph developing — the image surfaced. The printout. Folded in my coat pocket, worn soft at the crease from how many times I'd touched it without taking it out. Two lines. A number of weeks. A fact I'd been carrying alone since before any of this started.

Tell him. The wolf came up fast and hard, slamming against the inside of my chest. Right now. He needs to know. That's your mate. That's your cub. You hold your ground.

I felt the words forming. Three syllables. That's all it would take.

And then I saw exactly how it would land.

Camille's face going still for one second before the sympathy clicked into place — practiced, devastating, perfectly timed. The quiet implication settling over everything like a fog: a girl from nowhere, holding onto a Harding with both hands, pulling out the one card she had left. I'd go from the wife he didn't choose to the woman who manufactured a reason to stay. The baby wouldn't be a fact. It would be a strategy.

She'd hand me the narrative and I'd walk straight into it.

You'd lose the only thing you have left. Don't.

I shut it down. Swallowed the words whole. The wolf snarled so hard I felt it in my back teeth, but I held the line.

Camille's eyes moved across my face, reading the silence. Something shifted in them — there and gone in under a second. Satisfaction, maybe. She'd read my quiet as surrender, and from where she was standing, she wasn't wrong.

I was still working out what to say — anything, something that wasn't the truth and wasn't a complete collapse — when Elliot spoke.

"Let's just split up." Casual. Practical. The voice he used when he wanted to move past something without discussing it. "Cami and I will handle the gift. You head to the venue later — dinner's at seven."

He looked at me when he said it. Not unkindly. That was the part that gutted me — there was no cruelty in his face, just the flat efficiency of a man who had already made his decision and was now managing the schedule around it.

He's choosing her. Right now, in front of me, and he's doing it like it's a logistics problem.

Something in my chest gave way. Not dramatically — no sound, no crack. Just a slow structural failure, the kind that happens when something's been under pressure too long and finally runs out of reasons to hold.

A year. I'd spent a year being careful. Reasonable. The wife who didn't make scenes, didn't ask for things she wasn't offered, didn't push. I'd built the whole thing out of restraint and called it dignity.

He'd just taken it apart in one sentence without even trying.

I moved before I'd decided to. One step forward, my hand closing around his wrist — the one resting at Camille's waist — and I pulled.

"No." My voice came out wrong. Thinner than I wanted, something underneath it I couldn't fully suppress. "You can't just —"

Elliot's expression shifted. Not softened. Sharpened. He looked down at my hand, then up at my face, and I watched him make a decision in real time.

He used his free hand to push mine away. Not rough. Firm. The kind of firm that meant final.

"Serena." Flat. "Don't."

Then he looked straight at me, and said it.

"You've got someone waiting for you anyway, don't you?"