Abandoned substitute Luna: The Designer Queen's Mysterious Return

Elara POV:

I walked back to the master suite in a daze, the cold ultrasound photo clutched in my hand. Each step on the plush runner felt like wading through mud. My body was heavy with a grief so profound it felt like a physical illness.

As I passed the first guest suite down the hall, I heard voices. The door was slightly ajar.

A woman's voice, soft and cloying, drifted out. "Caspian, don't be so hard on yourself. Elara is your Luna, after all..."

My feet froze to the floor. The blood in my veins turned to slush.

Didn’t Caspian just say he needed to handle some business matters? Then why is there a woman’s voice in the house besides mine?

I peered through the crack in the door. My breath caught in my throat.

Caspian had shed his jacket, his tie loosened, his alpha posture uncharacteristically weary. The moonlight outside the window painted silver streaks through his dark hair.

And the woman standing across from him was none other than the woman in the photo I saw in the study that night，Seraphina.

She stood achingly close, her slender fingers splayed against his chest like she had every right to touch him. Her amber wolf eyes glowed softly in the dark, reflecting the moon with an intimacy that twisted a knife in my gut.

She tilted her head up, her expression a perfect mask of loving concern, her scent — that unmistakable she-wolf musk mingled with jasmine，curling around him like a claim.

My feet froze to the cold marble floor.

Caspian didn't pull away. He looked down at her, and I saw something in his ice-blue eyes I had never, in three years of marriage, seen directed at me.

The kind of look a wolf gives his true mate. His hand came up and covered hers against his chest, a gesture so tender it shattered something inside me.

She pressed her cheek against his shoulder, nuzzling into the crook of his neck, inhaling his scent with a low, possessive hum.

His alpha musk rose in response, wrapping around her protectively. A low rumble vibrated in his chest — not a growl of warning, but a sound of contentment. A sound meant only for her.

Seeing all this , I collapsed.

He lied to me，there were no business matters at all.

In reality, not only had he betrayed our bond, he had brought his first love back to our home without telling me, sharing intimacies under the very moon that was supposed to bless our union.

The nausea from that morning returned with a vengeance, my stomach is in complete turmoil.

I didn't burst out the front door and confront them. The fight had gone out of me, drained by the revelation in the binder and now this final, brutal confirmation. I fled to the master bedroom.

I locked the door. Like a rabbit barring its burrow against a wolf.

Hours later, I heard him at the door. He tried the handle, found it locked.

A low, dangerous growl rumbled from the other side，slammed into my mind like a physical blow. "Open the door, Elara."

I pressed my back against it, my body trembling with a mixture of fear and a new, unfamiliar defiance. My hand flew instinctively to my belly, shielding the tiny life within.

His patience, always a finite resource, snapped.The lock gave way with a sharp, sickening snap.

Caspian stood in the doorway, a dark silhouette against the dim hallway light. His ice-blue eyes glowed with a feral light, the wolf swimming just beneath the surface, pinning me in place.

The air was thick with the scent of whiskey and Seraphina's perfume, a nauseating cocktail that made my stomach lurch.

"That little stunt at dinner," he stalked into the room, "dropping that news like a calculated weapon — and now you dare lock me out of my own den?"

My voice was a raw, broken thing, barely a whisper. "What was I supposed to do? Congratulate you on your reunion with Seraphina?"

At the mention of her name, he was stunned for a moment, and then he realized that I had seen their tryst. His face hardened into a mask of cold fury, his canines elongating slightly in a flash of predatory anger. He closed the distance between us in two long strides, his alpha pheromones spiking with dominance.

He yanked me forward, away from the broken door, and threw me onto the bed. The force of it knocked the wind out of me, the world spinning as I landed hard on the mattress.

His powerful Alpha pheromones flooded the room, heavy and suffocating, a thick blanket of dominance designed to force submission from any lesser wolf. I felt weak, dizzy, my body and early pregnancy making me even more vulnerable to the onslaught. My vision blurred at the edges.

"Don't try to play tricks on me，she is not the person you can get close to." he hissed, "Now,You are carrying my heir, it's time you started acting like a proper Luna. A Luna submits to her Alpha."

His other hand tangled in my hair, tilting my head back to expose the vulnerable column of my neck. "Tonight, I'm giving you a full mark. To remind you of your place in this pack."

Terror, stark and absolute, seized every cell of my body. “

"No! Caspian, please... I can't... I don't feel right... the baby—"

My pleading, my resistance, only seemed to fuel his rage. It was a challenge to his authority, and an Alpha could not be challenged in his own den. His wolf saw defiance where there was only desperation.

A scream tore from my throat, raw and desperate, the howl of a creature caught in a trap.

He ignored it.

And then, just as he was about to bite down and seal the bond that would chain me to him forever, a pain unlike anything I had ever known erupted in my lower abdomen.

My body arched off the bed in a violent, involuntary spasm. A strangled cry half-human, half-animal escaped my lips.

Caspian must have felt the convulsion that shook my entire frame. He pulled back slightly, his eyes narrowed, the feral glow flickering with something else.

A sudden, spreading warmth bloomed between my legs, soaking through the thin silk of my nightgown and onto the pristine white sheets beneath me.

He looked down. His gaze followed the dark stain rapidly spreading across the bed. The crimson bloom against the white.

My vision began to swim, the edges turning dark. The pain was a roaring ocean, pulling me under, wave after merciless wave.

The last thing I saw before the darkness took me completely was his face. The fury was gone, replaced by a flicker of something I couldn't name. Shock? Confusion? The first stirrings of a wolf who suddenly realized what he had destroyed?

It didn't matter.It was too late.