Moon Goddess, Name Him

POV Cassidy

You left and didn't even leave me your car. You fucking selfish bitch. This is the end.

The text arrives just as I'm passing the welcome sign for Moon Hollow.

"Charming," I mutter, tossing my phone onto the passenger seat where it lands next to the manila envelope containing my cottage deed and teaching contract. "Says the guy who cheated with his yoga instructor."

I won’t reply. I made the last payment last week; the title with my name is folded in the glovebox. He totaled his car in May and “borrowed” mine every day since. I’m not leaving my life on his curb again.

Rain pounds the windshield harder now, wipers struggling against the downpour. I should pull over, but I'm thirty minutes from the cottage that might finally hold answers about my father's past. Maybe even something about my mother, though Dad had been as forthcoming about her as a locked vault.

Three months since his funeral. Two weeks since Derek's betrayal. Two days since losing my teaching job to budget cuts. The math of my life has become brutally simple—subtract everything stable, carry the emotional wreckage, and drive toward the unknown.

Thunder cracks overhead, close enough to make my teeth ache. The headlights carve weak circles through sheets of rain, barely illuminating the narrow mountain road. Trees press close on both sides, their branches scraping against each other in the wind like skeletal fingers.

That's when something explodes from the tree line.

"What the hell—"

It's massive, moving with grace across the asphalt. Too big for a dog, too fluid for a deer. For one impossible second, our eyes meet through the storm—amber, intelligent, wild. Then instinct kicks in and I slam the brakes.