After My Mate Crowned His Mistress Luna

The doors at the far end of the hall flew open.

I felt him before I saw him. Julian's Alpha aura rolled in ahead of him like a pressure front, heavy and electric, the kind that made lesser wolves drop their eyes and step back without knowing why. The pack parted for him automatically, bodies shifting to clear a path, heads bowing by reflex.

He moved fast. His jaw was set, his eyes scanning the room with the sharp, predatory focus of an Alpha assessing a threat.

He walked past Grandpa Memphis without looking down.

He walked past me.

I watched him do it. I was on my knees on the marble floor, one hand pressed over the gash on my forearm, blood seeping between my fingers, and Julian West walked past me like I was furniture. Like I was part of the floor.

He stopped when he reached Estelle.

His hands went to her shoulders, then her face, tilting it up toward his. His aura shifted—I felt it change texture, felt it soften and wrap around her like a warm current, like a shield, like everything a mate bond was supposed to feel like. He said something low, something I couldn't hear from where I knelt in my own blood.

Then, loud enough to carry: "Are you hurt?"

The room was so quiet I could hear the chandelier hum.

I pressed my thumb into my wrist. Hard. Harder than I ever had.

Then I stood up.

It wasn't graceful. My legs were shaking and the marble was slick under my knees and the arm hurt worse than I was letting myself feel. But I stood. I straightened. I looked at the assembled pack of Crescent Moon—every wolf who had ever called me Luna in passing, every face that had watched Estelle grind my grandfather's herbs into the floor and done nothing—and I opened my mouth.

"He's been sleeping with her for fourteen months."

My voice came out flat. Not raised. Not shaking. Just flat and clear, the way water is clear, the way you can see straight through it to the bottom.

"The necklace she's wearing belonged to his family's vault. He told me it wasn't appropriate for a mate bond. He said a true bond didn't need trinkets." I looked at the moonstone where it caught the light at Estelle's throat. "Then he gave it to her."

Someone near the back of the hall made a low sound. A growl, or maybe a word.

Julian had gone very still.

"He gave me a silver mate-token." I reached into the collar of my dress and pulled out the thin chain, the cheap, lightweight thing he had pressed into my palm the morning after our bond ceremony like he was settling a debt. "I kept it because I thought it meant he chose me. I thought I was enough for him to choose."

I let it fall against my chest.

"I was wrong."

Julian moved.

I saw it coming—the set of his jaw, the way his hands dropped from Estelle, the flash of something in his eyes that wasn't grief and wasn't guilt. It was fury. The specific fury of a man who has been caught and cannot tolerate the witness.

He crossed the space between us in four steps.

I didn't back up. I held my ground and looked at him, and for one second we were just two wolves standing in a ruined hall, and I thought—stupidly, for the last time—that he might stop.

He didn't stop.

His hands hit my shoulders and shoved.

The world went sideways. The marble pillar came up behind me faster than I could brace for, and the impact was a single white explosion of pain that started at the base of my skull and traveled down my spine and kept going. I heard something—the crowd, maybe, or my own voice, I couldn't tell—and then I was sliding, and the floor was cold, and there was blood, there was so much blood, and it wasn't only from my arm.

Something was wrong. Something inside me was wrong.

I pressed my hand to my stomach. A reflex. The most private reflex I had.

The last thing I saw clearly before the edges of my vision went dark was Estelle's face over Julian's shoulder. She wasn't looking at him. She was looking at me. And she was smiling—small and quiet and deeply, privately satisfied, the smile of someone who has waited a long time for exactly this.

Then the chandelier light fractured into pieces, and the pieces went out one by one, and there was nothing.