After My Mate Named Another Woman His Luna

I spent an hour on my dress that morning.

It was the nicest thing I owned — a soft cream-colored wrap dress I'd found at a thrift shop in the nearest town, fourteen miles from the cottage. I'd taken in the waist myself, stitching it by hand with the same patience I used for everything out here. Three years of patience. Three years of learning to make do, make small, make quiet.

I pressed it flat with a warm iron and hung it on the back of the bathroom door while I braided my hair. Then I unbraided it. Then I left it down, the way Damian used to say he liked it, loose around my shoulders, long enough to cover the mark on my neck.

My wolf stirred as I pulled on my coat. Not an excited stir — something else. Something restless and low, like she was trying to get my attention without knowing what to say.

"It's fine," I told her quietly. "We're going home."

She didn't settle.

I picked up the small wrapped package from the kitchen table — a hand-knitted scarf, deep green, the color of the Ironveil pack crest — and walked out to the road to wait for the bus. The October air smelled like pine and rain. My wolf lifted her head at the scent, just for a second, and I felt something move through me that I couldn't name. Something almost like recognition, attached to nothing I could see.

I pressed my palm flat against the cold metal of the bus shelter wall and waited.

---

The central pack house was nothing like the cottage.

It was a compound, really — a sprawling stone building set back from a gated drive, surrounded by cabins and outbuildings, cars in the lot, pack members moving in clusters across the grounds. There were banner poles along the path, green-and-black bunting strung between them for the Ascension. Everything looked deliberate and festive and organized, and I stood at the edge of the drive for a moment before walking in, feeling the particular sensation of arriving somewhere that doesn't know you're coming.

A woman near the front steps glanced at me and then looked away. Two teenage boys moving equipment through a side door didn't acknowledge me at all. I waited for someone to say my name — to say anything, to place me, to confirm that I belonged here.

No one did.

I tightened my grip on the package and walked inside.

The front hall smelled like woodsmoke and pine cleaner. I followed the sound of voices toward the east wing, where I thought Damian's study was — he'd described it to me in letters. The hallway was long and unfamiliar and I moved through it slowly, reading the layout as I went, aware that I was learning my mate's home for the first time the day before his Ascension Ceremony. That thought sat wrong in my chest and I didn't examine it.

I was almost at the study door when I heard his voice.

Deep, assured, carrying the particular ease of a man in his own territory surrounded by people who agree with him. I stopped walking.

"—Shaw as my Luna at tomorrow's ceremony. You have my word."

Natalie. He said Natalie Shaw.

I stood in the hallway with the wrapped scarf in my hands and my wolf completely, absolutely silent inside me. Not the restless stir from the morning. Just — nothing. A switch turned off.

I pushed open the door.

There were six men in the room. Alphas, from the feel of them — I could sense it even now, even with my own aura pressed down to almost nothing from years of practice. Damian stood at the head of the desk, and when the door opened, every head in the room turned toward me.

Damian looked at me.

He didn't flinch. He didn't go pale. He didn't even blink.

He just looked at me the way you look at something mildly unexpected — a changed weather forecast, a slightly wrong coffee order — and then he looked back at the assembled Alphas and said, calmly, "Gentlemen, this is Gabrielle. A distant packless relative who assisted with my mother's care for the past few years." A brief pause. "She'll be staying through the ceremony."

Distant packless relative.

Assisted with my mother's care.

The Alphas nodded, politely disinterested, and returned to their conversation. Damian raised one hand without looking at me again and two pack enforcers appeared at my shoulders as though they'd been waiting there all along.

"Omega quarters," he said quietly, to one of them. Not to me.

I didn't say anything. I don't know if it was shock or some older, trained instinct — three years of making myself small, making myself manageable, making myself easy to dismiss. My mouth was open and then it was closed and then I was in the hallway again with the enforcers on either side of me, walking down a set of stairs I hadn't come up, down into the lower level where the floors were concrete and the light was different.

The Omega quarters were a long room with cots along both walls. Clean enough. Cold. A single high window near the ceiling showed a strip of gray afternoon sky.

They left me there.

I sat down on the nearest cot, still holding the wrapped scarf, and I tried to reach him.

Three years, I had used that mind-link every night from the cottage. Goodnight, Damian. I'm thinking of you. How is the preparation going? It always felt faint — distant and slightly muffled, the way a phone call sounds through a bad connection — but I had told myself that was the distance. Fourteen miles was a long way for a partial bond.

I reached now, and there was nothing.

Not faint. Not muffled.

Nothing. A room with no walls, no echo, no sound. My own voice going out and falling into silence before it got anywhere at all.

I set the scarf down on the cot beside me.

Somewhere above me, I could hear the muffled sounds of the pack preparing for tomorrow's ceremony. Footsteps, voices, something heavy being dragged across a floor. Life continuing at its normal volume in a building where I had just been erased.

My wolf didn't stir. She didn't comfort me. She just sat in the back of my chest with her head down, and the silence between us was the quietest, most total thing I had ever felt.