Chapter 3: Never truly chosen

Lyra POV

I stumbled back, one hand flying instinctively to my stomach.

The movement was small, almost invisible, but it was the only thing I could think to do. Protect the baby. Protect the one secret that had not yet been taken from me because it was all I had left. I caught myself a second too late and dropped my hands to my sides, praying no one had noticed.

No one had because no one was looking at me.

Asher had his back to me, Vivienne's face pressed against his chest, his hand cradling the back of her head. She was crying again, making soft, delicate sobs that trembled through her whole body. As usual, she was giving a masterpiece performance.

“Asher,” she whispered, her voice breaking. “Please don’t be angry with her.”

The words were kind on the surface, but that made them worse.

"I only came to check on her," Vivienne whispered between hiccups. "I was worried. She looked so upset in the courtyard, and I thought maybe if I talked to her, sister to sister, I could make things better." Her voice cracked perfectly. "But she grabbed me by the throat and told me I never should have come back. That I deserved to die out there."

The lie was so clean that for a moment even I almost believed it.

"That's not what happened." My voice came out stronger than I expected. "She grabbed my hand and pressed it to her own—"

"Enough!"

Asher growled, his Alpha command rolling through the room like a low current of electricity, pressing against my ribcage, forcing the air from my lungs. He turned to face me, and what I saw in his eyes was worse than anger. 

It was filled with disappointment.

"Vivienne has just escaped years of captivity," he said, his voice dangerously quiet. "She came home broken and terrified, and this is how you treat her? You put your hands around her throat and told her she deserved to die?"

"I didn't—"

"I saw it with my own eyes, Lyra."

My mouth snapped shut. It didn't matter what I said or what actually happened. He had already decided, and his decision had been made the moment he walked through that door and saw what Vivienne wanted him to see.

Then footsteps pounded in the hallway, and Diane rushed into the room with Gerald behind her, drawn by the commotion. Diane took one look at Vivienne's tear-streaked face and turned on me with fury.

"What did you do to her?" She demanded, pushing Asher aside and gathering Vivienne into her arms, stroking her hair and murmuring reassurances.

“You poor child. You have only just come back, and she still cannot leave you in peace.”

Vivienne cried into her mother’s shoulder. “I didn’t mean to upset her. I just wanted us to be sisters again.”

Sisters.

If I hadn’t been so angry, I would have laughed.

Diane turned to me, her voice shaking with rage. "I knew this would happen. The moment we heard Vivienne was alive, I knew you would find a way to make her suffer. You've always been jealous of her."

Gerald stood behind his wife, jaw tight, eyes averted. He didn't say a word in my defence. He never had.

"We should never have taken you in," Diane continued coldly. "We gave you a home, a family, everything, when you had nothing, and this is how you repay us."

Something went cold inside me. I stood in the middle of that room and looked at every face turned against me. Asher, who couldn't meet my eyes. Diane, who never wanted me to begin with. Gerald, who had chosen silence over his own conscience. Vivienne, who had orchestrated every second of this and was watching me now with damp eyes and a trembling chin that hid the faintest edge of satisfaction.

And I almost laughed.

Because I finally understood something I had spent my whole life refusing to see. It didn't matter what the truth was. It never had. The moment Vivienne walked back through that gate, every person in this pack slid back into the roles they had always been waiting to play. Vivienne was the victim. Vivienne was the rightful Luna. Vivienne was the one who belonged.

And I was the outsider who had been borrowing her life.

"I feel unwell," Vivienne murmured, pressing her hand to her forehead. "Could someone take me to lie down?"

They gathered around her like a funeral procession and led her out. Diane's arm was around her waist. Gerald was hovering at her shoulder. Asher was at the door, watching her go with a softness in his face that he had never once shown me.

Then they were gone, and I was alone.

Only then did I let myself breathe.

A dull pain spread through my chest, low and aching. For a moment, I thought it was grief; then I felt it again, deeper this time, like something fragile tugging loose inside me.

It was the bond, what little remained of it.

I stood there for a long time, feeling the faint thread of the mate bond between Asher and me pulse weakly — thinner than it had been this morning. Thinner than it had been an hour ago. Each time he chose Vivienne, each time he looked at me with those cold, closed-off eyes, the bond frayed a little more.

I placed my hand over my stomach. The baby was still there and still holding on.

The baby was the only thing in this entire pack that was truly mine.

Dr Harmon had said the bond was already too weak. If what I had just felt meant it had weakened further, then I could not afford to sit in this room and fall apart.

I had to know it was okay.

The pack clinic was quiet at this hour. Elliot was in the back office when I walked in, hunched over a stack of patient files, sleeves rolled to his elbows, dark circles under his eyes that told me he hadn't slept properly in days. He looked up at the sound of the door, and his expression shifted instantly from tired to alert.

"What happened?" He was on his feet before I could answer, reading my face the way only someone who had spent years studying me could. "Sit down. Tell me everything."

Elliot Crane was the one person in this pack I trusted without condition. He had been my friend since before the contract marriage, before the Council's decree, before any of it. He was quiet, steady, fiercely private, and the only person who knew the full truth of what my life as Luna actually looked like behind closed doors.

I told him about the baby, about what had happened. Vivienne's return. The courtyard. Asher's announcement. The custody clause. By the time I finished, his hands were gripping the edge of his desk so hard his knuckles had turned white.

"Let me examine you first," he said, his voice carefully controlled. "Then we'll figure this out."

The examination took twenty minutes. I lay on the table, staring at the ceiling, counting the tiles while Elliot worked in silence. When he finally pulled back, his expression was tense but not panicked.

"The baby is still relatively stable," he said. "But the bond between you and Asher is weakening faster than it should. The fetus has started drawing energy directly from your body to compensate." He paused. "If this continues, Lyra, it won't just be the baby at risk. It'll be both of you."

I sat up slowly. "Is there any option besides being marked?"

Because that door was closed, Asher was planning a wedding with Vivienne. He had called my position temporary in front of the entire pack. Asking him to mark me now would be like begging for scraps from a table I had already been dismissed from.

Elliot hesitated. He ran a hand through his hair and looked at me with reluctance that told me I wasn't going to like what came next.

"There have been documented cases of single mothers who carried to term without a mate bond," he said carefully. "But the prerequisite is that the mother must fully and actively sever the bond herself. A clean break. Only then can the body stop trying to sustain a connection that's draining it and redirect that energy to the baby."

The words hung in the air between us.

"So you're saying,” I said quietly, “I have to reject him?”

The words had barely left my mouth when a low voice came from just outside the door.

“Reject who?”