Chapter 8: Thirty Days

I turned away from him, curling my knees toward my chest, putting whatever distance I could manage on a bed this size, the silk sheets cool against my bare arms despite the warmth still radiating off my own skin from everything the day had already put me through, from the altar to the courtyard to this strange, enormous room.

“Leave me alone.” My voice came out cracked, exhaustion and fear finally catching up to me all at once, the adrenaline that had carried me through the cathedral and the courtyard and the long, silent drive finally draining out of me completely, leaving nothing behind but raw nerve endings and the sudden, overwhelming weight of everything that had happened since sunrise. “What do you want from me? Just let me go back. I never asked for any of this — not the ceremony, not this house, not you.”

“You think I bought you.” His voice stayed level, but something sharpened beneath it, a flicker of genuine offense crossing his otherwise composed features. “Like some prize I picked off a shelf because I could afford the price tag.”

“Didn’t you?” I twisted to face him, my hair falling loose around my shoulders, the last pins from the ceremony finally giving up entirely and scattering across the sheets. “Who do you think you are, showing up out of nowhere and deciding my life belongs to you because you’re the Supreme Alpha? Because you have men who beat people bloody on your command and a house full of staff who bow the moment you clear your throat?”

“No one has ever spoken to me the way you just did.” He crossed his arms, studying me with something between amusement and disbelief, tilting his head slightly like he was reassessing an assumption he’d walked into this room already holding, some old certainty about the world quietly rearranging itself behind his eyes. “I should be furious. I find, strangely enough, that I’m not.”

“Then get used to it.” I sat up fully, meeting his gaze without flinching, some reckless part of me deciding I had nothing left to lose by pushing back, not after everything I’d already survived once and refused to survive quietly again in whatever life this had become. “Because I’m not going to bow to you the way your staff does. I’m not your Luna. Not really. Not just because you decided it in a cathedral full of people too afraid to argue with you.”

“You are my Luna.” He said it simply, without heat, like a fact he had no interest in debating further, the same tone he might use to state the color of the sky. “By law. By ceremony. By the ring on your hand right now, whether you look at it or not.”

“I AM NOT YOUR LUNA.” I shouted it, the words tearing out of me with everything I had left, six years — or one lifetime, or however many I’d apparently been given — of being handed off between men without ever once being asked what I wanted, of watching my own fate decided in rooms I wasn’t invited into.

Something flickered across his face at that, gone almost as quickly as it appeared, something that looked, for just a moment, almost like respect. He took a step closer, and the air in the room seemed to shift with him, charged in a way that made my pulse climb despite everything, despite every reason I had to want distance instead.

“Then learn it.” His voice dropped low, quiet enough that I had to lean in slightly just to catch it, though I hated myself for the instinct, hated how easily my body responded to a voice I had every reason to distrust. “You’re mine. By every right this world recognizes, I could claim you fully tonight, and no one — not your father, not the council, not the goddess herself — would question it.”

I opened my mouth to argue, but he wasn’t finished.

“I won’t, though.” He leaned in slightly, close enough that I caught the low, warm scent of him, close enough that my breath caught somewhere in my throat despite my best efforts to stay furious, despite every instinct telling me to pull away. “Not tonight. Not until you want it. Until you come to me yourself, asking, instead of running from me the way you’re doing right now, curled up on the far edge of your own bed like I’m something to be survived rather than faced.”

“That will never happen.” My voice shook despite my best effort to sound certain, betraying exactly how much his closeness had rattled the confidence I’d been clinging to. “I could never want that. I could never love you.”

Something almost like a smile crossed his face — not triumphant, not mocking, just quietly, infuriatingly confident, the expression of a man who’d heard that particular declaration before and never once found it to be true.

He turned away from me and crossed to the small counter near the window, pouring himself a glass of water with the unhurried calm of a man who’d already decided how this conversation would end long before I’d raised my voice, ice clinking softly against the crystal in the otherwise silent room.

“Thirty days.” He didn’t turn around, didn’t raise his voice, simply spoke the words into the quiet room like he was stating tomorrow’s weather, utterly certain of himself in a way that made my skin prickle. “That’s all I need.”

“For what?” I demanded, hating how unsteady I sounded, hating that some traitorous part of me actually wanted to know the answer he was so clearly waiting to give.

He finally looked back at me over his shoulder, and the certainty in his expression made something cold and uneasy settle low in my stomach, a feeling I couldn’t quite name, somewhere between dread and a curiosity I refused to acknowledge.

“For you to love me madly.”