Chapter 2.

Chapter 2

Amara’s POV

She smiled.

My baby sister smiled at me from my own bed, with my husband's arm draped across her waist, and for several seconds nobody in that room made a sound.

I couldn't move. I couldn't breathe. My brain kept trying to rearrange what I was seeing into something else. A mistake. A hallucination. Grief playing tricks on me.

"Chloe..."

Her name came out of me as a whisper. Broken. Like maybe, if I said it gently enough, she would turn into someone else.

"Hi, sis," she said softly.

Hi, sis.

The room tilted and I felt dizzy. I grabbed the door frame to stay standing.

Michael sighed.

Not gasped. Not scrambled. Not reached for an excuse. He sighed, the way a man sighs when his meeting is interrupted, and sat up against the headboard.

"You were supposed to be at the cemetery," he said.

That was his first sentence. Not I'm sorry. Not it's not what it looks like. An accusation. I had come home too early and inconvenienced him.

"The cemetery," I repeated. My voice sounded like it belonged to someone far away. "You mean our son's burial. The one you walked out of."

"Amara."

"They put him in the ground, Michael." Something hot cracked open in my chest, and suddenly I wasn't whispering anymore. "They put our baby in the ground an hour ago. I gave birth to him alone because you wouldn't answer your phone. Ten calls, Michael. Ten. I screamed your name in that delivery room. I left you voicemails while I was holding his body!"

"Lower your voice."

"LOWER MY VOICE?"

I was screaming now. I didn't remember deciding to scream.

"There was no rogue attack keeping you away! The border cleared before sunset, your own warriors said so! You let me labor alone, you let me bury him alone, and the whole time you were here. In our bed. With my SISTER!"

Michael's jaw tightened. Not with guilt. With irritation.

Chloe pulled the sheet up over her chest. Not out of shame, I realized. Out of comfort. She settled against the pillows like she was getting cozy for a long movie.

I looked at her. Really looked at her. The little gold necklace I gave her for her twentieth birthday was still around her neck.

"How long?" I asked.

Silence.

"How long, Chloe?"

Chloe didn't answer me. She turned her head and looked at Michael instead, waiting, like a student checking with her teacher before speaking.

Michael gave her a small nod.

And Chloe smiled, just slightly, like the permission itself pleased her.

"Two years," she said quietly.

The floor dropped out from under me.

Two years. She moved into this house two years ago. Two suitcases and swollen eyes at my door, and I hugged her and promised she would always have a home with me.

"You were seventeen ," I whispered. "You had just moved in."

"I know," she said. "You were so good to me, sis. You paid my tuition when Mom and Dad couldn't. All three years. You bought me my little white car. You decorated my room yourself, with the fairy lights, because you remembered I loved them when we were kids." She said all of it gently, warmly, like she was reading from a gratitude journal. "I've never forgotten any of it. Truly."

"Then why?" My voice broke in half. "Why would you do this to me?"

Chloe tilted her head, and her eyes went soft with something that looked almost like pity.

"Because he chose me," she said. "I didn't take anything from you, sis. You can't take a man who wants to stay. He didn't want to stay."

Naya was snarling inside my skull, pain and fury tangled into one endless sound. My nails bit into my palms.

"Get out of my bed," I said. "Get out of my bed. Get out of my house."

"That's enough." Michael stood and reached for his shirt, buttoning it with the calm of a man dressing for the office. "You're in shock, and I understand why. It's been a difficult week for everyone."

"A difficult week." A laugh came out of me, cracked down the middle. "Our son died, Michael."

Something moved across his face at that. For half a second I let myself believe it was grief.

It wasn't. It was calculation.

"That's actually what we need to discuss," he said. "Sit down."

"I'm not sitting down."

"Fine. Stand." He walked to the window and clasped his hands behind his back. His pack announcement pose. I'd watched him take that stance a hundred times on the platform in the town square, and I used to feel proud.

"Do you know what the Elders said to me last month?" he asked the window. "They said the Silver Ridge line is one funeral away from a succession war. Six years without an heir, Amara. Six years of rival packs asking questions at every summit. Redwood pulled out of the trade alliance in the spring. You know why? Because their Alpha told me, to my face, that he doesn't sign thirty-year agreements with a bloodline that ends in one man."

"So this is politics." My voice shook. "You put my sister in my bed for politics."

"I'm telling you what I'm dealing with." He turned around. "The doctors spoke to me after the delivery. The pregnancy nearly killed you.

You lost a dangerous amount of blood, and they said the stillbirth makes the next attempt worse, not better. They told me to prepare myself for the reality that you may never safely carry a pup to term."

I stared at him.

Something about it snagged in my mind, even through the grief. The delivery room had been chaos. My doctor never left my side, and Michael had never come to the hospital at all.

"Which doctor?" I asked.

Michael blinked. "What?"

"Which doctor told you that? You never came to the hospital, Michael. You didn't answer a single call. So which doctor spoke to you, and when?"

For the first time in the entire conversation, he paused.

It was small. Half a breath. If I hadn't been married to him for six years I would have missed it.

"That isn't important," he said, and moved on like a man stepping over a crack in the pavement. "What's important is the future of this pack. An Alpha needs an heir. That isn't cruelty, Amara. That's reality."

*Liar,* Naya growled, low and certain. *Something smells wrong.*

But he was already talking again, and my world was already in pieces, and I filed the question away somewhere deep, next to the pain.

"Chloe is young," Michael continued. "Healthy. She carries your family's bloodline, so the Elders can't object to the pedigree. The alliances stay intact. The succession question dies. It's the practical solution."

"Practical," I repeated numbly. "She's my sister."

"I didn't plan for you to find out this way. But maybe it's better. No more sneaking around."

"Then divorce me."

The words left me before I thought them. And the moment they were in the air, I knew they were the truest thing I'd said all day. Naya lifted her head.

"Divorce me, Michael. Today. You can have her, this house, the pack, all of it. Just sign the papers and let me go."

Michael looked at me for a long moment.

Then he did something worse than anything he had done that day.

He smiled. Small. Patient. The smile you give a child who doesn't understand the adult conversation.

"No," he said.

"What do you mean, no?"

"I mean there will be no divorce."

"You are in bed with my sister and you're telling me..."

"Think, Amara." His voice didn't rise. It cooled. "The Alpha of Silver Ridge divorces his Luna two days after burying his heir. What does every rival pack hear? Instability. What does every partner in the Costa negotiation hear? Weakness. I have spent three years building a deal worth more than this entire territory, and it closes in six months. Until it closes, my house is in order. My marriage is in order. That is what the world will see."

"That's not my problem."

"It is your problem," he said, "because you are my wife, and you will remain my wife until I say otherwise."

I stared at him and searched his face for one trace of the man I married at twenty-two. The man who once drove through a storm at 2 a.m. because he felt my ankle snap through our bond, three towns away.

He was gone.

Or maybe he was never real, and I had spent six years married to this stranger's performance.

"Then I'll just leave," I said quietly. "Keep your marriage certificate. Keep your deal. I'll walk out with my own two feet."

"With what?" Chloe asked.

Her voice was gentle. That was the worst part. She sounded like she was worried about me.

"Sis, think about it. You haven't worked in six years. Michael asked you to leave the chef job you were doing at a hotel like a maid when you became Luna, remember? Everything is in his name. The accounts. The cards. The cars. Your phone is on his plan." She counted my prison bars off softly, one by one, like a lullaby. "Where would you even sleep tonight?"

"It was a restaurant and I’m proud of my cooking skills I will figure it out."

"You're thirty-two, sis." Still gentle. Still soft. "You just lost a baby. The doctors say you might never carry another. You've been crying for two days straight and it shows." She gave a small, sad shrug. "I'm not saying it to be cruel. I'm saying it because someone has to be honest with you. Michael chose me. You can't force someone to love you."

"Chloe." Michael's tone was mild. The way you hush a puppy that's being cute but loud. "Enough."

I looked at my sister and tried to find the girl who used to crawl into my bed during thunderstorms and fall asleep holding my sleeve.

She wasn't there either.

"I gave you everything," I whispered.

"I know," Chloe said. "Thank you."

I couldn't look at her anymore. I turned to Michael.

"Fine. You want six months of theater? Then I want my son's urn released from the family crypt when the burial rites finish. He goes to my family's plot, where I can visit him without your permission. That's my price. And after your deal closes, I want nothing from either of you, ever again."

"There's one more thing," Michael said, "and then this conversation is over."

He crossed the room toward me. I stepped back. He kept coming until he was close enough that I could smell her on his skin, vanilla and peaches soaked into him like a brand, and then he looked down at me with those flat gray eyes.

"I, Alpha Michael of the Silver Ridge Pack," he said, and the full weight of his Alpha voice rolled through the words like thunder, "reject you, Amara, as my mate and my Luna."

The words hit before I understood them.

Naya screamed.

Pain detonated in the center of my chest. They tell young wolves that a mate bond lives near the heart. They don't tell you what it feels like when it's torn out. It felt like a hook that had been buried in me for six years being ripped free in one pull, taking pieces of me with it.

My legs gave out. I hit the floor on my knees, gasping, clawing at the front of my funeral dress, and somewhere inside me Naya's scream cut off into a silence more terrifying than the pain.

She had never been silent before. Not once in my whole life.

Somewhere above me, Michael kept talking. Calm as a lawyer reading terms.

"The rejection is between our wolves. On paper, nothing changes. You remain my wife. You will appear beside me at pack functions, at the Costa dinners, at the summit in the fall. You will smile. You will be gracious. You will protect the image of this family until the deal closes."

"You..." I couldn't get air. The place inside me where Naya should be was hollow, and the hollowness was worse than the tearing. "You rejected me... and you still won't let me go?"

"Six months. Perhaps less, if negotiations move quickly." He crouched down to my level, and his voice softened into something almost kind, which somehow made it more monstrous. "Be reasonable, and this stays civilized. I'm not asking for your love, Amara. I'm asking for your cooperation."

"You're insane," I breathed. "You reject me. You put my sister in my bed. You skip our son's burial. And you want my cooperation."

"Yes."

I lifted my head and looked up at him from the floor of the room where my marriage had just died, my whole body shaking.

"What exactly do you call this?" My voice cracked and rose. "A wife for your cameras and my sister for your bed. What do you call that, Michael?"

He straightened up. He buttoned his cuff, first the left, then the right, and looked down at me with the patient face of a man closing a meeting.

"I want an open marriage," he said.

"A divorce will taint my reputation."