Always the villain?

Zara

Last night, Alex stood before the entire Pack and declared that Selene had returned, that she was family, and that everyone would look after her.

“Especially you, Luna Zara.”

I did not understand then that what he meant was not responsibility, but permission.

Selene moved in this morning.

Not into the Pack house itself. It would have been too obvious, too easy to question.

Instead, he gave her the guest cottage.

Fifty feet from our bedroom window.

Close enough that I could see her arrival from behind the curtain, servants moving in and out in an organized rhythm, carrying trunks, dress bags, and sealed boxes that suggested she had not come to visit, but to settle.

And when she finally came to me, it did not feel like a visit either.

“I hope you don’t mind,” she said as she stepped inside without waiting for an answer, her eyes already moving past me as if I were part of the furniture rather than the room. “The cottage is lovely, but the water pressure is terrible. I thought I’d just borrow your bath for today.”

Borrow.

She said it with such ease that for a moment I wondered if I was the one misunderstanding boundaries that had always existed.

She stayed for two hours.

Long enough for silence to grow teeth.

When I went upstairs afterward, the air in my bathroom felt subtly wrong. My jasmine bath salts had been replaced with lavender. My towels were refolded in a style I did not recognize. A delicate hairpin sat on the counter that had never belonged in this house.

The next morning, my vanity drawer had been rearranged.

My pearl comb, the one my mother had given me before everything changed, had been pushed to the very back, almost hidden. In its place rested a silver brush engraved with a single letter.

S.

As if identity itself could be quietly reassigned if placed carefully enough.

By the third day, she no longer asked.

She left things behind instead.

A cashmere wrap folded neatly across my chaise as though it had always belonged there. Her perfume lingering too long on my dresser, soft and unfamiliar, replacing the scent I had chosen for this room years ago.

And then my ceremonial Luna robes disappeared.

I found them in her cottage, draped across her chair like something temporarily borrowed rather than taken.

“I was just trying them on,” she said when I asked, smiling as if the question itself was unnecessary. “You don’t mind sharing, do you?”

I did mind.

But when I brought it to Alex, he barely lifted his eyes from the documents in front of him.

“Don’t be petty, Zara,” he said, as if I had brought him something trivial. “She’s just settling in.”

Petty.

As if the space I had built my entire life inside was something I was supposed to share without noticing it disappearing.

The flowers were the first thing I truly noticed.

White gardenias.

I had always kept them in our bedroom because they were the only thing in this house that still felt like mine.

That afternoon, I walked in and found them gone. In their place, red roses had been arranged in a vase on my side of the room, bright and deliberate.

“The gardenias were wilting,” Selene said from the doorway, already wearing my silk robe as if she had never considered it might belong to someone else. “I ordered something fresher. It felt wasteful to keep something dying in here.”

I did not answer immediately.

I picked up one of the roses and felt the thorns bite into my palm as I carried them to the trash one by one. The pain was small, sharp, and grounding in a way nothing else had been lately.

Behind me, I heard her voice soften.

“Alex—”

His voice came before I turned.

“Zara.”

I stopped.

Slowly, I turned to face him.

He was standing there as if the scene in front of him had already been categorized and concluded.

“You’re making a scene over flowers.”

For a moment, I thought I might finally say everything at once.

Instead, I smiled.

“Over flowers,” I repeated quietly. “The Luna who healed nineteen soldiers last month. The one who negotiated peace between two families ready to go to war. The one who rebuilt your infirmary with her own hands. That Luna is making a scene over flowers.”

Something shifted in his expression.

“You know that’s not what I meant,” he said finally.

“I am sure it isn’t,” I replied. “That is the problem.”

His jaw tightened.

“Stop this.”

“Or what?” I asked softly.

Silence.

Then he exhaled, already stepping away from the conversation.

“I don’t have time for this.”

He left.

Selene followed, but not before glancing back at me—just long enough for her expression to soften into something that could be mistaken for innocence if you were not looking closely enough.

I held her gaze until she looked away first.

That night, I did not sleep.

I stared at the ceiling and asked myself, for the first time without cushioning the thought in excuses, whether this life was still something I was choosing or something I was simply surviving.

My hand drifted to the bedside drawer.

Inside lay a silver locket.

Tarnished. Unopened for three years.

I clicked it open.

My mother’s face. My father. My younger self caught between them, laughing without restraint.

The memory did not arrive gently.

It came in full force.

Summer mornings on my father’s estate. Bare feet sinking into wet grass. My father lifting me onto his shoulders while I pretended I could see the whole world from that height. My little brother pulling at my hair just to make me chase him again.

I was happy in a way I no longer had words for.

And I gave it all away for a single moment of looking at the wrong man and believing it meant something.

The Pack Summit.

Three years ago.

I saw Alex across the hall, newly declared Alpha, standing surrounded by elders as if already carrying something too heavy to ever set down.

He did not see me.

But I saw him.

And I decided, without understanding the cost, that not being seen was still worth staying for.

When the Moon Goddess chose me two years later, I did not hesitate.

To this Pack, I became an orphan by record and a Luna by obligation, a woman they allowed to exist beside their Alpha because fate had insisted on it.

I chose this.

For him.

And for a long time, I told myself that choice made it meaningful.

The door opened.

Alex stepped in.

He was holding something behind his back, and for the first time in days, his expression carried something close to softness.

“You’re awake,” he said.

“I couldn’t sleep.”

He stepped closer and revealed it.

A book.

Old leather binding. Faded gold lettering.

The Complete Compendium of Rare Herbs and Their Lost Properties.

My breath caught before I could stop it.

I had been searching for this for two years.

Every archive. Every merchant. Every rumor.

And he knew.

“You found it,” I said quietly.

“I remembered you mentioning it,” he replied, offering it to me. “A gift.”

For one fragile moment, I allowed myself to believe that perhaps something in him still reached me.

I reached for it.

Hope returned in a way that felt almost unfamiliar.

Then he spoke again.

“I want you to teach Selene herb making.”

My fingers froze mid-air.

“You cannot possibly be serious.”

His jaw tightened almost instantly, as though my reaction itself inconvenienced him.

“Teach her, Zara. That is all I am asking.”

“All?” I let out a soft laugh that sounded nothing like amusement. “You move her beside our home. You let her wear my clothes, rearrange my room, walk into my life like she belongs there, and now you want me to teach your—”