Chapter 3: Three Years of Silence

I used to believe the bond would fix everything.

That first month, I clung to that belief like a drowning woman gripping driftwood. The elders said mate bonds deepened with time. That even arranged pairings, even bonds forged from politics rather than passion, would eventually bloom into something real if both wolves were patient. So I was patient. I was so goddamn patient it should have earned me a medal.

I cooked for him. Not the formal meals the kitchen staff prepared for the Alpha's table, but personal ones. Dishes I spent hours learning because I'd overheard him mention them in passing. Braised lamb with rosemary. Honey-glazed root vegetables. A spiced apple cake his mother used to make before she died, the recipe tracked down through three different pack archives because I thought it might crack something open in him. Something soft. Something reachable.

He never came home to eat them.

The food sat on the counter until it cooled, then until it congealed, then until I scraped it into the bin and washed the plates and told myself tomorrow would be different. Tomorrow he'd walk through the door and see the table set for two and understand that his mate was trying. That she wanted him. That she was right here, waiting, if he would just turn around and look.

Tomorrow never came.

I learned his schedule. Memorized which meetings ran late, which training sessions he supervised personally, which evenings he spent reviewing patrol reports in his office. I timed my appearances to coincide with the gaps, the fifteen-minute windows between obligations when a husband might glance up and notice his wife standing in the doorway. He filled those gaps with more work. More meetings. More reasons to be anywhere I wasn't.

I stopped timing my appearances after the sixth month.

The public moments were worse. A Luna stood beside her Alpha at pack functions. That was tradition, protocol, law. Damien followed the letter of it and gutted the spirit. He positioned me at his side like a piece of furniture, acknowledged my presence with the same attention he gave the table decorations, and spoke to me only when someone important was watching. Even then, his words were clipped. Functional. The verbal equivalent of a locked door.

The night he called me "adequate" in front of the pack council, I sat in the bathroom afterward and pressed a towel against my mouth so no one would hear me fall apart.

Adequate. His Luna. His bonded mate. The woman who shared his name and his territory and, theoretically, his life. Adequate. Like a report card. Like a performance review for a position I never applied for but gave everything to fill.

Lyra found me on the bathroom floor an hour later and held me without saying a word. She didn't tell me it would get better. She didn't lie. She just held me, and I loved her for it.

Then came the night I will never speak about without tasting blood in the back of my throat.

Seven months into our second year. I woke at three in the morning with cramps that bent me double, and by the time I reached the pack hospital, the sheets I'd wrapped around myself were soaked through. The healers moved fast and spoke in low voices and used words I couldn't process through the white noise roaring in my skull.

Miscarriage.

I hadn't even known I was pregnant.

The healer asked if she should contact the Alpha. I said yes. I said yes, please, tell him. Tell him I need him. Tell him to come.

Ryder showed up forty minutes later with a bouquet of white lilies and a message: the Alpha sends his regards and hopes for a swift recovery.

His regards.

I stared at those lilies until my vision blurred. Ryder set them on the bedside table and stood at the foot of the bed with his hands clasped behind his back and his face locked in that rigid expression he wore when he was carrying out an order he disagreed with. He didn't leave until the healers made him, and before he walked out, he paused at the door and said, so quietly I almost missed it: "I'm sorry, Luna. I'm sorry."

He wasn't apologizing for himself.

I never told Damien about the miscarriage. He never asked. Two days in the hospital, and he didn't visit, didn't call, didn't send a second message. I came home to an empty bedroom and a note on the kitchen counter about a council meeting that had been rescheduled.

That was the night I stopped cooking for him.

That was the night my wolf stopped howling and started going quiet.

I buried all of it. Packed it down tight, layer after layer, until the grief compacted into something dense and smooth and almost manageable. Almost. On the surface, I was Luna Aurora Blackthorne: composed, capable, present at every function, tending her garden, smiling her appropriate smile. Underneath, I was a woman living in a house full of wolves who saw her every day and never once looked closely enough to notice she was disappearing.

Three years. That's what silence cost me. Three years of shrinking myself small enough to fit inside the space Damien allocated for me, which got narrower every month until I could barely breathe inside it.

And now I sat in my garden, two days after Selene Ashwood walked back into my life, staring at something that made every carefully buried wound split open at once.

Flowers.

New ones. Planted along the eastern wall of the manor, beneath the windows of the private wing. Crimson dahlias and white jasmine and trailing moonvine, arranged in elegant cascading rows by a professional landscaper I'd never seen before. The soil was fresh, dark, recently turned. The blooms were perfect, lush, selected with the kind of care that said someone had thought about what would look beautiful and then spent real money making it happen.

I knew these flowers.

I'd asked Damien to plant them for our first anniversary. Crimson dahlias because they symbolized devotion. White jasmine because it was my favorite. Moonvine because it bloomed under the moon and I thought it would make the garden feel magical at night.

He said no. He said they were a waste of resources. He said the grounds budget was allocated for security upgrades, and decorative planting wasn't a priority.

That was two years ago.

Selene Ashwood had been back for forty-eight hours, and the garden was already blooming.

I pressed my palms into the dirt beside my dying sage plants and felt the earth cold and gritty beneath my fingernails. My wolf lay flat inside my chest, silent, watching through my eyes as I stared at the flowers my husband planted for another woman.

The exact flowers he refused to plant for me.

I pulled my hands from the soil and looked at them. Dirt under every nail. Calluses on both palms from three years of tending a garden no one cared about. The hands of a woman who built something beautiful in a place that didn't want her.

Something shifted behind my ribs. Not grief this time. Not the dull, familiar ache I'd learned to live with.

Something hotter. Something with teeth.

I stood up, brushed the dirt from my knees, and walked toward the manor without looking back at Selene's flowers.

Because if Damien Blackthorne could find time, money, and devotion for a woman who vanished for five years, then the problem was never resources.

The problem was me.

And I was done being the problem.