Fake Vow, True Luna

The tall hedges that surrounded the property reminded me of the days I would spend with my childhood best friends, Nathan and Alvin, as we would play hide and seek amongst the thick branches. The cupolas on either side of the house reminded me of how we would climb up there against my aunt’s wishes so we could look at the birds’ nests, and how we would get a good scolding from my aunt afterwards. Inside, I could see a light on upstairs in my aunt’s bedroom. Seeing that light filled me with a bit of warmth, and I paused for a moment to look up at it with a smile on my face. “Olivia?” a somewhat familiar voice suddenly said. It sounded different, gruffer, but I still recognized it immediately. I spun around to see my aunt’s gardener, an old man named Clint, standing behind me in his wool sweater and worn overalls. “Clint,” I said with a smile. The gardener, who was getting on in years now, walked up to me and wrapped his arms around me. He had a limp now, which he didn’t have

“Your villa?” Nathan’s voice sounded disbelieving. “This isn’t your villa. This is my wedding house.”“What?” I scoffed. “You have to be joking.” Surely Nathan was just playing a joke on me. My aunt left me the deed to the house with my name on it, and her gardener, Clint, never mentioned any of this. Maybe Nathan was in charge of the renovations, and it was supposed to be a surprise.But the more that I thought about it, I was only reminded of how he had mentioned his fiancee’s needs when he was talking to the builders.“Isn’t it obvious?” Nathan asked. “This is my wedding house. I paid a high price for the most beautiful villa in town.”This all felt unreal. My aunt’s villa was my childhood playground. My aunt and I didn’t have the closest relationship, but I spent a lot of my time here growing up. I knew this house and its surrounding property like the back of my hand. In fact, I had spent a lot of time as a kid talking to Nathan about how I would change this place if I owned it my

Nathan placed his hand on my belly and smiled up at me while the rest of the wedding guests watched us with shocked faces. “Olivia, I promise that I will take care of you… And our baby,” he said.The bride’s face was as white as a sheet. The entire church, which was just murmuring angrily over the scene before them, now fell so utterly silent that the sound of Layla’s white lily bouquet falling to the floor echoed throughout the walls.All I could hear, however, was my own heart beating too fast inside my chest as I wondered what the hell was happening today. Not only did Nathan refuse to marry his bride, Layla, but he also claimed that he would take care of me! And our… baby?! We hadn’t seen each other in a decade. This couldn’t be possible; it had to be a joke, or a bad dream, or a nasty prank…“What is all of this, Nathan?!” Colin, Nathan’s father, shouted. His loud, domineering voice boomed throughout the dead silent church and was the only thing to finally drown out the overwhelm

“Why choose me, then?” I whispered.It wasn’t fair that Nathan suddenly decided to choose me to take the fall for wanting to pull out of his wedding at the last moment. Unless he had real feelings for me, it felt totally unwarranted.Any honest man would have ended the wedding privately without causing a huge scene; he could have talked to his fiancee when he found her kissing her bodyguard, but instead he decided to drag me into it.And in a strange way, I didn’t want to shatter the illusion that maybe Nathan chose me out of all of the other pretty girls in the church because he may have actually had secret feelings for me after all these years.But, much to my dismay, Nathan simply shrugged at my question. I felt sickened by his blase attitude about the entire situation. “Everyone else around here knows each other well,” he said. “Since you’ve been gone for ten years, you’re the only one around here who’s untestable.”Nathan was right; only fated mates knew who their fated mate was.

Before Nathan could say anything else, I ran out of the room. I couldn’t be there anymore; I couldn’t believe that this day had turned so sour so quickly. Not only did Nathan destroy my reputation in a matter of minutes as he lied and told everyone that we were fated mates in order to get himself out of a marriage, but he also revealed that I was… pregnant?The Alpha of a pack could sense all of the members in the pack. Even if the members were unborn, the Alpha could still sense them. Traditionally, women in a pack would go to the Alpha if they thought they were pregnant, and some packs made a ritual out of it. And although it was too early in the pregnancy for me to even know myself, if Nathan could sense it then I was pretty certain that he was right.I still needed to check, though. For all I knew, this was all some sort of sick prank; maybe they wanted to torture me a little instead of really having me come back to the pack, which would explain the reason why everything seemed to