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Maybe my dad was even the one who put the idea in my head. Maybe he mentioned it once. Maybe we can blame him. I would like that, I think, if we could make me a victim, innocent and helpless, trapped just as sure as any of us in an awful melodrama where everything is heightened and everything is pain and there is no relief.

The truth is, though, I didn’t decide to do it until I was in heat, and then I don’t know what was motivating me—whether it was me or my wolf or my omega or just the part of me that was afraid of the future.

By now, you know about the Easlings.

It was a blow, I have to admit.

At first, it wasn’t really because I was going to probably die before I was forty years old, because you know how it is when you’re young? Forty seems ancient. You can’t even conceive of dying. You feel invincible.

Instead, it was because I felt tainted and undesirable. I felt as if I was defective. I’d never felt that way before.

It all happened so fast, too.

Within weeks of each other, I got the diagnosis and then you showed up.

I had spent my whole life groomed to be a princess, to marry the next cyning, to be wolf royalty, essentially. I was my parents’ only child, and they both adored me. They never let me suffer. They couldn’t bear it. They fixed the whole world for me. I had a charmed childhood. Maybe you could say I was spoiled, I don’t know.

But when the diagnosis happened, it was the first thing that no one could fix for me.

And it was the first time I had been anything other than pretty and perfect and poised.

Then, you, Leona.

You appeared, and you were effortlessly beautiful, with an appeal that you didn’t even understand or quite know how to wield. I could see the effect you had on people, and I realized that it was an effect I had never had on people. I was too sure of myself, and it came off as snobby. Your genuineness and your innocence? People would die for you, Leo. You never knew, and you never called in their devotion.

I guess that’s a good thing.

They would have straight-up murdered me.

I don’t know why I’m even writing this to you. Partly, it’s because I miss you. I have friends now, but there’s something about those friendships you have when you’re a teenage girl. I don’t know if any other friendship approaches the intensity of that bond. We told each other everything. You knew me in ways that no one else knew me. You loved me, Leo, in a way that no one has ever loved me.

I know I repaid that love badly.

But I am dying. I am afraid. I miss it, especially now that my dad is gone. I miss having anyone who loves me.

I don’t write this because I want you to forgive me. I don’t even want you to feel sorry for me. I know you won’t.

I suppose I want you to understand that I didn’t prosper, that whatever I did, it did not mean that I had an easy life afterwards.

I regret it, you know?

If I could go back, I would undo it.

No, sorry, I wouldn’t, actually, but not because of enjoying the pain I inflicted, only because I can’t unwrite the birth of my sons. I can’t undo their existence. Whatever happened, they are the one perfect and beautiful thing that came out of this. He loves them, and whatever you do with him, Leo, please try to love my sons. Love his sons. Please, Leo. My baby, my little one, he’s still so very tiny, and I am too sick now to be a good mom to him most of the time.

Damian is doing the best that he can, but you know how Damian is. He feels all his responsibilities and he never prioritizes any of them, just tries to do them all at the same intensity, and this means that he does none of them the way they really need to be done. I’m not saying he’s a bad father, but I am saying that most fathers would put their children above the pack. Damian doesn’t. Maybe that makes him a good pack leader. I don’t know. But I worry about my boys when I am gone. I worry because I don’t know if there is enough of him for them, not when he stretches himself so thin.

You’re young enough still. You can have a baby with him now, and maybe he’ll be different with children he has with you. If so, maybe it will show him how to retroactively love my children.

This is assuming you want him. Damian, I mean. I don’t know if you still do.

I look you up sometimes. Other people who you haven’t blocked on social media will let me look at your profile, read your status updates, look at pictures of you. In a way, it feels like I’ve kept in touch with you, because I have read your words and seen you in videos. You are reading this now and you’re probably angry, feeling as if I’ve violated you in some way. I guess that’s fair. I’m sorry.

So, anyway, I know you never got married, and I know that there was a point in time, right after college, where you had boyfriends, a different one every four months or so. But at some point, you stopped, probably five or six years ago. It was like you gave up.

I don’t know what it would be like to be scent matched to someone. I honestly have only ever felt pity for the two of you having to go through that. I know that lots of people think it’s a magical and wonderful thing. They crave it, because it’s some kind of certainty in this world of uncertainty and confusion.

They think that if they knew that someone would love them like that, it would make life better and easier somehow, that it would mean that that part was settled, that they were chosen and safe.