On his knees for the worthless Luna

Chapter One

The pain hits before I'm even awake.

It rips through my chest like something has torn loose inside me, a sharp, physical wrongness that has no source and no shape — just the mate bond, screaming that the man on the other end of it is somewhere he shouldn't be. My wolf is already up, already at the door, clawing at the inside of my ribs like the house is on fire.

I'm Rose Blackwood. Luna of Blackwood Pack. Five years married to Alpha Derek Blackwood — five years of being told, in a hundred small ways, that a woman my size should be grateful he chose me at all — and in five years, the bond has never hurt like this.

Derek's side of the bed is empty. Cold enough that he's been gone a while.

I know this house better than I know my own hands. Sixty rooms, three floors, a training barn behind the east wing that always smells like sawdust and sweat. You learn a place without meaning to, when it's the only place you're allowed to belong.

I walk the east wing barefoot, my wolf hauling me forward by something under my ribs, and I tell myself it's nothing. He's checking the night patrol. In a meeting with the betas. There have been other nights like this — never this bad, but nights where I woke alone and built myself a reason before I let myself think of a worse one. I believed every excuse because believing them was easier than the alternative, and because I'd spent five years telling myself I shouldn't be paranoid about a husband like Derek.

I stop telling myself that when I get close enough to smell it.

Sex. Thick and unmistakable, rolling out from under the training barn door. My hand stays on the handle a second too long, some stubborn part of me still hoping I've got it wrong.

I'm not wrong.

I push the door open and there they are. My mind gives me pieces. His shoulders. Blonde hair fanned out beneath him. And then one detail lands so hard it knocks the breath out of me.

Rachel.

Jay's nanny. She was ten years old when she first walked into this pack house, all elbows and a school backpack, because her mother worked for us and Derek said we should help the family out. I bought her her first bra. I taught her to drive. I stayed up until two in the morning helping her write her college essay. Ten years I watched her grow up under my roof, and now she's grown up enough to be underneath my husband in the room where our son trains.

Derek doesn't stop when I walk in. He sees me. And he finishes anyway, like I'm furniture, like I'm nothing worth interrupting himself for.

"Derek." My voice comes out smaller than I want it to. "How could you—"

He gets up slow. Doesn't reach for anything to cover himself. Just irritated, like I've walked in on a phone call.

"Don't make a scene, Rose. Get back to your pack duties."

Rachel stands up behind him, uncovered, unembarrassed. Her smile is smug. Like she's been waiting five years for exactly this moment.

"I just caught my husband inside another woman," I say, "and you want me to go do my duties."

"Don't be dramatic." Derek pulls his pants on, unhurried. "What did you actually think, Rose? That I'd stay celibate?"

"We're married."

"I can't even touch you anymore." He says it like he's reading me a weather report. "You disgust me. Your body disgusts me." His eyes go up and down me, slow, the way you'd size up livestock. "You're the size of two cows."

The tears come before I decide to let them. I cross the room and grab the front of his shirt with both hands.

"How could you do this to me? I gave you everything I had. I sacrificed my career for you. I gave you an heir, even though it nearly killed me. I gave you my kidney, Derek." My hands are shaking. "You have two. I have one. And this is what you do with what I gave you."

He peels my hands off him, not gently.

"I never asked you to do any of that. You did it on your own free will." He straightens his shirt where I wrinkled it. "I made you Luna, Rose. Even though you were too weak to be Luna in the first place."

Too weak to be Luna. The words loop, louder each time.

"And don't think I feel guilty," he says. "I feel zero. Because I never loved you."

"Then why did you marry me?"

"Because you were useful at the time." A shrug. "Now you're not."

Rachel walks up and puts a hand on his shoulder, rubbing it slow, like I'm the problem in this room and not the woman watching her marriage end in real time.

"Calm down, Derek." Then, to me, honey-smooth: "What did you actually think? That he loved you? That you'd get to keep being Luna forever?" She smiles wider. "Take a look at yourself. Oversized. Pathetic. No man would ever want you. It's a good thing you got to be Luna at all. It was never going to happen twice."

And then, behind me, a small voice.

"Mum?"

Jay. Even now, hearing his voice does something to me nothing else in this house can touch. I wipe my face and turn around, try to look like his mother.

He's in his school uniform, hair sticking up on one side. Something in his face is already deciding something.

"Mummy's crying again? Why are you always crying? My friends say my mummy is weak. And fat. An ugly cow." His voice is sharper than a ten-year-old's should know how to be. "I don't want you to be my mum anymore. Aunty Rachel is way prettier than you."

He runs past me. Past my open arms. Straight to her.

I kneel down anyway, arms still out, like some part of me hasn't caught up yet.

He doesn't turn around.

Rachel lifts him onto her hip, easy, practiced, natural — because she has done this a hundred times, because I let her do it a hundred times, because I trusted her with the one thing in this world I would have died for.

I stay on my knees. My husband finishes dressing without looking down. The woman who helped me raise my son holds him now instead of me, and I understand, all at once, exactly what I have been in this house.

Furniture. Duties. Useful, until I wasn't.

I'm still trying to get my legs to hold me when the door creaks open again.

Dawn, one of the housemaids, comes in carrying a folded towel and a glass of water like she was sent for exactly this. She doesn't look at me. She kneels in front of Rachel and starts patting the sweat from her collarbone, gentle, the way you'd tend to someone who matters.

"There you go, miss." Then, low, though wolves hear everything, "You know, you're a lot more fit to be Luna than that buffalo ever was. She acts so big just because of some little favors she did for us over the years. Honestly, I feel bad for the Alpha, having to wake up and look at someone this size every morning."

Rachel's smile changes. Warm, in a way it's never once been for me.

"You've really impressed me." She pats Dawn's cheek, light, almost fond. "When I become Luna, I'm going to make sure you're head maid. First thing."

Dawn's face lifts. She dips her head — not to me, never to me — and slips back out the door, already smiling to herself.

I hear every word. I'm three feet away. Neither of them lowers their voice enough to pretend they didn't want me to.

I stay on the floor a long time after they've all stopped looking at me, until the barn is empty and the only sound left is my own breathing.

When I finally stand, my knees are stiff, my face is dry, my hands have stopped shaking.

The door creaks open one more time before I make it two steps.

Mara stands there. The same woman whose mate died three winters ago, the one I sat with through the worst of it, the one whose shifts I covered for a month so she wouldn't lose the pay. She's carrying folded clothes and a towel of her own. Her eyes move over the room and settle nowhere near my face.

She walks past me and holds the clothes out to Rachel. "For you, miss. The boy's breakfast is ready when you're finished."

Rachel takes them with a small, pleased smile. "Thank you, Mara."

Mara glances down at me, finally, and for one second I let myself think it might be sympathy. It isn't. Her voice stays soft, which is somehow worse.

"You're blocking the door, Luna. Master Derek doesn't like scenes in the training rooms."

She waits until I shift out of the way, then leaves without another word.

Outside, two younger staff are already whispering. One of them laughs under her breath, light, almost cheerful, like something good just happened to somebody.

I walk back through the house that isn't mine anymore. Past the nursery I decorated myself. Past the kitchen where I used to pack Jay's lunch with my own hands even though we have staff for that. Past the bedroom I shared with a man who just told me, without blinking, that he never loved me for one single day of the five years I gave him.

I don't pack a bag. Not tonight. Tonight I stand in the dark in front of the mirror in the room that used to be ours, and I look at myself the way he looked at me. The way Rachel looked at me. The way my own son looked at me. The way a girl I once helped through her first heat looked at me, right before she called me a buffalo to my face and got promised a title for it.

Oversized. Weak. Useless.

And somewhere underneath the ringing in my ears, underneath five years collapsing into one night, something else starts to move. Small at first. Quiet. But it's there, and it isn't crying, and it isn't begging, and it isn't asking anyone in this house to love me back.

I think about the kidney scar under my ribs, the one I used to run my fingers over at night like proof I mattered. Proof I'd given enough to be safe. I was wrong about that too.

I don't know yet what I'm going to do. I don't know what's left of the woman standing in this mirror once the shock wears off and the real grief moves in to take its place. But I know I am done asking this house, this man, that little boy who ran past my open arms, or a single person under this roof, to tell me what I'm worth.

Whoeve

r walks out of this room tomorrow morning is not going to be Rose.