Chapter 2: The Ghost Who Came Back

I knew something was wrong the moment I walked into the assembly hall, because every single person in it stopped talking at the same time.

Not a gradual hush. Not a polite fade. Silence hit that room like a blade, clean and total, and three hundred pairs of eyes swiveled toward me with an expression I'd never seen directed at the Luna of the Blackthorne Pack.

Pity.

My fingers curled at my sides. I hadn't slept. The green dress was gone, replaced by a plain charcoal tunic and trousers, my hair pulled back in a knot that hid how badly my hands had been shaking when I tied it. I'd spent the hours between midnight and dawn sitting on the floor of my bedroom with my back against the door, listening to the silence of the private wing and hating myself for not having the courage to open that last door.

I still heard it. That name on his lips. Selene. Spoken like a prayer.

The assembly hall stretched before me, a vaulted stone chamber lined with iron sconces and the mounted crests of every Blackthorne Alpha dating back six generations. Morning light cut through the high windows in pale shafts, catching dust motes and the glint of armor on the warriors flanking the central aisle. At the far end, elevated on the Alpha's dais, Damien stood in his formal blacks with his jaw set and his shoulders squared in that particular way he held himself when he wanted the pack to look at him and see strength.

I looked. And my heart stopped.

A woman stood beside him.

Tall. Taller than me by half a head. Raven hair that fell in loose waves past her shoulders, catching the light like polished obsidian. Skin like honey. A face so symmetrical, so effortlessly perfect, that it barely looked real. She wore white silk, a draped gown that pooled at her feet like spilled milk, and she stood on the Alpha's dais as though she had been born on it.

As though she had never left.

Selene Ashwood.

The name I'd heard whispered through the halls of this manor since the day I arrived as Damien's bonded mate. The woman he'd loved before me. The woman he'd grieved for two years after she vanished into the Southern territories without a word. The woman whose ghost had lived in every cold silence, every turned back, every night he chose an empty hallway over our bed.

She was supposed to be gone.

She was standing three feet from my husband with his hand on her waist.

Not resting there. Lingering. His fingers pressed against the curve of her hip with a casual possessiveness that sent something hot and sharp through the center of my chest, because in three years of marriage, Damien Blackthorne had never once touched me like that in front of anyone. Not at bonding ceremonies. Not at pack gatherings. Not even in private, when no one was watching and it would have cost him nothing.

But he touched her. In front of three hundred wolves. On the morning after our anniversary.

The mate bond between us pulsed, and I nearly staggered. Warmth flooded the connection, bright and unmistakable, a sensation I hadn't felt from Damien since the earliest days of our bond when I still believed the connection might grow into something real. My wolf lunged toward it instinctively, starving for it, desperate for it.

Then I understood.

The warmth wasn't for me.

It was bleeding through the bond because Damien was feeling it. Standing beside Selene, with his hand on her waist and his pack watching, he was radiating a warmth he had never, not once, directed at the woman he'd actually married.

I was feeling my mate's love for someone else.

"Don't."

A hand clamped around my forearm. Lyra Moonwhisper materialized beside me, her grip fierce enough to bruise, her copper eyes blazing with a fury she was barely containing. She was shorter than me by three inches, but she had the presence of a wolf twice her size, and right now every ounce of that presence was focused on keeping me upright.

"Don't you dare cry in front of these people," she hissed through her teeth. "Not one tear, Aurora. Not one. You hear me?"

I heard her. I also heard the whispers restarting around us, a rising tide of murmurs that scraped against my skin like sandpaper.

Did you see... she just walked in like... the Alpha's face when he saw her... poor Luna, she must...

Poor Luna.

That's what I was now. Not the Luna nobody wanted. The Luna everybody pitied.

"Who is she?" I asked, even though I already knew. Even though the answer was written in Damien's body language, in the way he angled himself toward Selene like a compass finding north.

Lyra's jaw worked. "Selene Ashwood. She arrived last night. He had her installed in the private wing before the moon cleared the trees."

Last night. While I stood on the balcony in my green dress, asking the sky how many more years I should waste, Damien was welcoming another woman into our home.

Damien raised his hand, and the hall fell silent again. His voice carried without effort, deep and commanding, the voice of an Alpha who expected obedience and always received it.

"The Blackthorne Pack welcomes an honored guest. Selene Ashwood has returned from the Southern territories, where she spent the last five years conducting diplomatic work on behalf of allied packs. She will reside here under my protection for the foreseeable future."

Under his protection.

Not "as a guest of the pack." Not "at the Luna's invitation," which protocol required for any female wolf staying in the Alpha's household. Under his protection. A personal claim. A public declaration that Selene belonged to him, spoken in front of the entire pack while his bonded Luna stood at the back of the hall with her best friend's nails digging crescents into her arm.

Selene smiled. A small, gracious curve of her lips that was calculated to look humble and landed like a slap. Her gaze swept the hall, acknowledging the pack's attention, and then it found me.

Our eyes locked.

And she smiled wider.

Not with warmth. Not with challenge. With the quiet satisfaction of a woman walking back into a house she had always considered hers, regarding the temporary occupant with the gentle certainty that the arrangement was almost over.

My wolf snarled, low and vicious, a sound that vibrated through my bones and nearly broke past my teeth. Lyra's grip tightened until I felt the joints in my wrist grind together.

I tore my gaze from Selene and looked across the hall, searching for the one person who had always stood between me and Damien's worst impulses. Beta Ryder Nightfang stood at the base of the dais in his formal uniform, arms folded, jaw clenched so tight the muscles in his neck stood out like cables.

I willed him to look at me. To give me some sign, some explanation, some defense of the Alpha he'd sworn his life to.

Ryder kept his eyes on the floor.

Not because he was loyal to Damien. I knew Ryder's loyalty. I'd seen it bend under the weight of Damien's choices a hundred times, straining but never breaking.

This was different.

Ryder wouldn't look at me because he was ashamed. Ashamed of his Alpha. Ashamed of what was happening on that dais. Ashamed that he'd stood by and let Damien parade another woman in front of his bonded Luna without saying a single word.

And if Ryder was ashamed, then there was no one left to defend me.

Lyra pulled me toward the side exit, her voice a razor in my ear. "We're leaving. Now. Before you do something they'll use against you."

I let her lead me. My feet moved. My face stayed blank. Three years of practice made the mask effortless.

But under the mask, beneath the silence and the composure and the years of swallowed grief, something was shifting. Something that had nothing to do with heartbreak and everything to do with the look in Selene Ashwood's eyes when she smiled at me from my husband's side.

Because that smile told me something Damien's absence never had.

She wasn't here to visit.

She was here to stay.

And whatever place I'd carved for myself in this pack, in this marriage, in this life, she intended to take it.