CHAPTER TWO _I Want a Divorce[Part 1]

Lucian’s office was all sharp lines and cold order.

Tall shelves lined the walls, filled with leather‑bound ledgers and neatly arranged files. A map of Blackmoon territory hung behind the massive dark‑wood desk, tiny flags pinning outposts and borders like trophies. The scent of ink, old paper, and pine smoke curled beneath the heavier, more dangerous scent that belonged only to him.

He sat behind the desk, pen poised over a document, as if my appearance were an appointment squeezed into his schedule.

Golden eyes lifted, taking me in.

For a second, nothing moved—not even the scratch of pen on paper.

His gaze swept from my bare legs up the line of my black dress, over my exposed collarbones, up to my face. His expression didn’t change, but I saw his jaw tighten, just a fraction.

In my last life, he had only ever seen me in the demure, high‑necked dresses my sister approved. I’d dressed every morning like I was standing trial and trying not to offend the jury.

This time, I could feel the weight of his stare like a hand.

“Aria,” he said at last, as if tasting the name. “You’re late.”

His voice was smooth and cool, the measured cadence of an Alpha who expected obedience. The same tone he’d used to sentence me to death.

Old instinct told me to lower my head, apologize, and scramble to explain.

I walked forward instead, letting my heels sink into the rug with each step, and didn’t hurry.

“I didn’t realize there was a schedule,” I said. “No one told me my time was still yours.”

One of his brows rose, just slightly.

The rumors never mentioned his expressions. They talked about the curse—about black eyes and dark veins - and waking up with blood on his hands, asking what he’d done. They whispered in corners where they thought Lunas didn’t listen that some nights, the Alpha of Blackmoon was more beast than man.

They said if he lost control… someone always died.

They also said he woke with **blood under his nails and hours missing from his memory**, left with nothing but the echo of screams and a guilt he couldn’t explain.

I knew better than any of them how true that was.

He set the pen down with deliberate care.

“There’s always a schedule,” he replied. “You’ve simply never had reason to look at it.”

“Maybe that’s the problem,” I said.

His gaze sharpened. “Sit.”

He gestured to the leather chair opposite his desk.

In my last life, I would have sunk into it like a scolded child, fingers clenched in my skirt, waiting to be told how I’d disappointed him this time.

I stayed on my feet.

“No,” I said.

A small, electric silence filled the room. Even the candle flame on his desk seemed to hold its breath.

He leaned back in his chair, studying me as though I were a stranger who’d wandered in by mistake.

“No?” he repeated.

“I prefer to stand.”

His eyes narrowed, not in anger yet, but in assessment. “You seem… different this morning.”

I let my mouth curve, just barely.

“I finally looked at the schedule,” I said. “Decided I didn’t like my time being handed out without my consent.”

He watched me for a heartbeat longer, then slowly rose from his seat.

Lucian was tall enough that I had to tilt my head to look at him. Up close, the faint stubble on his jaw darkened his face, making him look less like a statue and more like something carved out of a winter storm.

“How long have you been awake?” he asked.

“Long enough,” I said.

Long enough to remember you tearing me apart. Long enough to remember you never once asking if I wanted this life.

He stepped around the desk, closing the distance between us with unhurried, predatory grace. When he stopped, there was only a breath of air between my chest and his.

That scent hit me again. Pine. Smoke. Something darker, like iron and winter.

“Did something happen?” he asked.

I stared up at him. Once, his nearness had turned my bones liquid, had wrapped my ribs in hope and aching, desperate wanting.

Now, my heart pounded for an entirely different reason.

“Yes,” I said. “Something did.”

“And what was that?” His voice remained low, even, but there was tension in the lines of his shoulders, in the way his hands flexed at his sides.

The words perched on the back of my tongue, heavy and sharp.

*You killed me.*

I swallowed them.

“Clarity,” I said instead.

One corner of his mouth twitched, not quite a smile. “Clarity.”

“I realized something,” I went on. “About us. About this… arrangement.”

His gaze moved over my face, searching for something. “And?”

I drew in a breath and let it out slowly. My fingers wanted to twist in my skirt to fidget. I kept them loose at my sides.

“Lucian,” I said. “I want a divorce.”

The last word dropped into the space between us like a stone into deep water.

For a long moment, nothing moved.

His eyes hardened, the gold sharpening, like metal catching the light.

“Divorce,” he repeated, carefully. “You.”

“Yes,” I said. “Me.”

He studied me in a way that made me want to peel my own skin off, each second stretching thin, thin, thinner.

“On what grounds?” he asked.

My lips twitched. “On the grounds that this marriage was a transaction you made with my father,” I said. “On the grounds that you don’t want a wife, only a Luna who keeps quiet and looks pretty in the background. On the grounds that—”

My throat tightened. I forced the words through anyway.

“—I’m done being sold, and I’m done killing myself for people who would watch me die and tell me I should be grateful.”

There it was. Naked on the floor between us.

A muscle jumped in his cheek.

“You think I married you to punish you?” he asked softly. “To kill you?”

“I think you married me to make a convenient bargain,” I said. “And I think you let that bargain end in blood.”

His jaw locked.

“In case you’ve forgotten,” he said, voice turning to ice, “you are my Luna. You bear my name. You live under my roof. You eat my food. You—”

“Don’t say I should be grateful,” I cut in. “I’ve heard that enough for several lifetimes.”

His eyes flashed.

He took another step forward.

The desk pressed against the back of my thighs; I hadn’t even felt myself move. One of his hands came up, planting on the desk beside my hip. The other hovered near my shoulder, fingers flexing, as if he were fighting with himself, not to touch me.

Power, hot and electric, radiated from him, prickling along my skin.

“Careful,” he murmured. “You’re treading on thin ice, Aria.”

“Then maybe you shouldn’t have dragged me out over the lake without asking if I could swim,” I said.

His gaze dropped, briefly, to my mouth. Heat curled, unwanted, in my stomach.

“They said the girl from town would be grateful,” he said quietly. “Eager. Obedient. That you understood what your family’s situation required.”

“My family’s situation,” I echoed. “Not mine.”

“You knew the terms,” he went on, as if I hadn’t spoken. “Alliance. Support. A roof over their heads and yours. In exchange for your name on my ledgers and your presence at my side. Nothing more was promised.”

“I know exactly what was promised,” I said. “A Luna who did whatever she was told. A daughter you could buy for cheap because her parents told her she should be grateful to be worth anything at all.”

His hand moved.

In a blink, his fingers were wrapped around my wrist, not hard enough to bruise but firm enough that I could feel every ridge of his calloused palm. Heat flushed up my arm where he touched me.

The beast inside him stirred. I could feel it, could almost see it in the way his pupils widened, swallowing more of the gold.

“You seem very eager,” he said, voice gone low and dark, “to throw away the roof over your head and the title others would kill for.”

“I would have killed for a family once,” I said. “Didn’t stop them from killing me first.”

His brows knit. “What are you talking about?”

I smiled without humor. “Metaphors. Don’t worry about it.”

He tightened his grip, dragging me that last inch closer so that my body brushed his. My breath caught.

Danger hummed under my skin, singing with something traitorous and hot.

“They loved you enough to hand you to an Alpha,” he said. “That’s more than many get.”

“Love doesn’t sell their daughters,” I said. “And it doesn’t let them die for convenience.”

His fingers flexed around my wrist again. My skin burned under his touch.

Something inside my chest, still raw from being ripped apart, pushed back.

*Never beg again.*

I lifted my chin.

“My father might have sold me,” I said, “but you signed the contract. You can sign the dissolution just as easily.”

His eyes darkened. The room seemed to shrink.

“You want a divorce,” he said slowly. “Now.”

“Yes.”

“Because you don’t want to be Luna of this pack anymore.”

“Because I don’t want to be your Luna anymore,” I corrected. “I don’t want to belong to you. Or to them. Or to anyone who treats me like I should be grateful just to be allowed to exist.”

Silence.

Then, very clearly:

“No.”

The word had weight. It settled on my skin like frost.

I stared at him. “Excuse me?”

“No,” he repeated. “You are my Luna. You will remain my Luna.”

Anger flared, cutting through the fear and the ache and the ghost of old longing.

“I’m not a piece of land you can hold by right of conquest,” I said. “I didn’t choose you. I didn’t choose this. I’m choosing now.”

He leaned in, so close his breath skated over my lips, warm and maddening.

“You think you can unmake a bond because you’re suddenly unhappy with its terms?” he asked. “Because you woke up one day and decided you’d been wronged?”

Heat rose in my face. “This isn’t waking up unhappy, Lucian. This is waking up to the reality that my life is worth more than your convenience.”

His nostrils flared.

“Convenience,” he echoed, almost to himself, like he was tasting the word and finding it bitter.

His grip on my wrist tightened further, enough that I hissed. Pain speared up my arm.

Before I could yank back, something surged up from the place under my ribs where the cold of death still lurked. A bright, hot pressure raced down my arm and into the point where his skin met mine.

A spark snapped between us.

Lucian froze.

His breath hitched; his pupils blew wide. For a heartbeat, his eyes went almost black, gold swallowed by shadow. Veins at his throat and temple bulged, darkening beneath his skin.

I felt it under my hand—beneath his shirt, the faint buzz of something wrong over his heart. The curse mark.

It pulsed.

So did whatever was waking inside me.

The air between us thickened. The candle flames on his desk guttered, then flared higher.

Then, slowly, the hardness in his face eased.

The dark veins receded. The wildness in his eyes dulled back to sharp, wary gold.

His fingers slackened on my wrist.

He looked down at where we touched, then back up at me, confusion flickering across his features.

“What did you just do?” he asked, voice rough.

I swallowed, pulse rabbitting.

I had no words for what had just passed between us. For the way my skin still tingled where it had met his, the way that wrong hum in his chest had softened under my palm.

“I reminded you how to breathe,” I said, because the truth—that I had just reached into the heart of the curse that bound him and nudged it aside by sheer stubborn will—was too big to say.

His gaze lingered on my face, searching for something I wasn’t ready to let him find.

His thumb stroked, absent, over the inside of my wrist.

“Don’t touch me like that if you intend to walk away,” he said quietly.

I yanked my hand back.

“How I touch you,” I said, “will be my choice. Just like whether I stay.”

His expression hardened again, but there was something wild under the ice now. Something almost… panicked.

“By contract, by mark, by law,” he said. “You will not walk out of here and pretend we were nothing.”

A humorless laugh escaped me. “We are nothing, Lucian. That’s the problem. You’ve never touched me like a wife. Never looked at me like anything but a duty.”

His jaw flexed.

“You don’t know what I look at you like,” he said.

“Don’t I?” I asked softly. “Because from where I’m standing, all I see is a man who signed for a body and hoped it came with silence.”

Color flared in his cheeks. His wolf pressed closer; I could feel it, restless, under his skin.

“Careful,” he repeated. “You’re not as untouchable as you seem to think.”

*Never beg again.*

I straightened as much as the desk behind me allowed.

“I don’t need to be untouchable,” I said. “I need to be free.”

His eyes burned.

“My answer is still no,” he said. “You want freedom? You can have it. Within these walls. Under my name. Under my protection.”

“Protection?” I echoed. “From who? My father? My sister? The curse you refuse to talk about? Or from you, when your control slips and someone always dies?”

His hand shot out again, palm slamming down on the desk beside my hip with a force that rattled the inkwell and made the pen jump.

He was breathing harder now, chest rising and falling.

“I have never laid a hand on you in anger,” he said.

“No,” I agreed. “You saved that for the wolves.”

Something flickered in his eyes—pain, sharp and quick, there and gone. A headache line cut between his brows.

He pushed past it.

“You are not leaving this marriage,” he said. “You are not leaving this pack. And if you attempt to,” his voice dropped to something dangerous and low, “you will discover exactly how far I’m willing to go to keep what’s mine.”

The words should have chilled me.

They did.

They also sent a different, traitorous shiver down my spine.

For a second, my body forgot the night in the forest and remembered only long, lonely months lying two feet away from a man who never reached for me. Remembered how I had once wanted to be anything—prettier, stronger, better—if it meant he would look at me the way he was looking at me now: like I was the most important, infuriating thing in the room.

I shoved that memory down.

“I am not yours,” I said quietly. “I was never yours. I belonged to my father’s debts and your convenience. I won’t belong to anyone again.”

His gaze dropped once more to the line of my throat, to the faint scar of his incomplete mark.

“I should’ve finished that mark,” he said, almost to himself.

“Maybe,” I replied, “you should have learned how to treat a wife before you took one.”

His head snapped up.

We stared at each other.

The tension in the room was a living thing, pacing between us.

After a long, brittle moment, he stepped back.

“Go,” he said, voice clipped. “Get out of my sight before I say something I can’t take back.”

“Already done,” I murmured.

My legs prickled as the blood rushed back into them. I slid along the desk and walked to the door on unsteady knees, refusing to let him see the shake.

His voice reached me as my hand closed on the knob.

“This conversation is not over, Aria,” he said.

“It is for me,” I answered, without turning. “I told you what I want. You told me what you won’t give. That’s all there is.”

“Don’t test me,” he growled.

“Don’t ask me to be grateful,” I shot back.

I opened the door and stepped out before he could reply.

***