After My Alpha Husband Declared Another Heir

Greta told me about the dinner before I asked.

She found me in the stillroom, where I'd been re-labeling jars nobody needed re-labeled, and she set a folded dish towel on the counter like it was evidence. "Dorothy had three elders up to the main house last night. Nadia Holloway among them. Roast lamb, the good wine, and a document nobody was allowed to touch before dessert."

"What kind of document."

"Parchment. Old-style. One of the kitchen girls saw the seal drying on the sideboard when she cleared the plates." Greta's mouth flattened. "Territory language. That's all she could make out before she was sent back downstairs."

I thanked her and kept labeling jars, because my hands needed something to do that wasn't shaking, and because Selene had gone very still and very attentive under my ribs, the way she does before a hunt.

Dorothy had never once in ten years invited me to dinner without a purpose. She wasn't starting now. She was building a room full of witnesses who would nod when she needed nodding and stay quiet when she needed quiet — and Nadia Holloway, whatever else she was, had sat in that room and said nothing, which meant either she agreed or she was waiting to see which way the wind broke. I filed that away too. Everything, lately, went into the file.

***

Elijah came to the herb garden again the next evening, which told me he'd stopped believing the rosemary beds were an accident.

"Harvest Moon is in four days." He stood at the edge of the bed, careful not to crush anything, which was its own kind of performance. "Mother wants to hold a family circle. A healing ritual — the whole pack's felt the strain since the ceremony, Rosie, and she thinks it's time we... came back together. Publicly. As a family."

"Whose family."

His jaw worked. "Ours. Yours and mine. Chloe's. Zain will be there, yes, but that's not — it's not about him. It's about showing the pack we can heal."

I straightened, brushing dirt from my gloves, and looked at him directly for the first time since the yard. "You want me to stand in front of the elders in a ceremonial circle four days after you told me how long it doesn't matter now."

He flinched. Good. Some part of him still knew the shape of his own sentences.

"It's tradition," he said, quieter. "Luna's presence is required for a family circle to hold weight. You know that better than anyone."

I did know that. I knew it the way I knew the exact ratio of wolfsbane to chamomile that would thin a bloodline scent without killing the wolf underneath it — a fact useful only because someone had once needed me to be useful with it.

"I'll be there," I said.

Something eased in his shoulders. He actually smiled, small and grateful, the smile of a man who has mistaken silence for surrender so many times he no longer checks his math.

"Thank you, Rosie. It means—"

"Was there anything else?"

He blinked. The smile held a moment longer than it should have before it understood it wasn't wanted, and then he nodded and left me among the rosemary, and I went back to turning the leaves over one by one, checking each for rust, the way I have for ten years, the way I will keep doing until the day I have no reason left to.

***

The courier came after midnight.

I heard the gate before I heard the knock — Selene's ears, sharper lately, catching the low idle of an engine that didn't belong to anyone on pack grounds. I was already at the window in my robe when the black car rolled to a stop at the base of the drive, headlights off, the way official business moves when it doesn't want to be a spectacle.

The enforcer at the door wore no pack colors, only the plain gray of Council service, and he didn't smile when he handed me the scroll. "Bloodline-Fraud Division, formal writ," he said. "Council Seal. Alpha Elijah Reynolds, named in full." He waited while I signed for it, then bowed his head — not to me, exactly, but to the seal in my hands — and was gone before the gate had finished closing behind him.

I carried it upstairs and unrolled it once, standing in the lamplight, reading every line the way I read everything now — slowly, twice, checking for the places where language could be twisted later.

Enforcer action authorized. Full Alpha title. My name nowhere on it, which was correct. This was never mine to hold; it was mine to deliver.

My Harvest Moon gown hung ready on the wardrobe door, the deep green one with the interior sleeve my mother had sewn into every ceremonial dress she ever made me, a pocket meant, she'd told me once, for things a Luna needed close and hidden.

I rolled the scroll tight, slid it into the sleeve, and smoothed the fabric flat until no one could have guessed what it held.

Then I turned off the lamp and went to bed, and slept, for the first time in weeks, without dreaming at all.