Chapter 3

Chapter 3

Amara’s POV

I don't remember getting to the guest wing.

I remember the hallway moving past me in pieces. I remember my hand leaving a smear on the wall because I couldn't walk straight. I remember locking the door and sliding down against it, and then there's a hole in my memory where the next few hours should be.

When I came back to myself, it was dark outside, and I was lying on the guest room floor in my funeral dress, and the place inside me where Naya lived was still silent.

"Naya?" I whispered into my own mind. "Naya, please."

Nothing. Just an ache, like a bruise on my soul.

They teach you about rejection when you're young. One line in the pack school books: a severed bond takes time to heal. They don't tell you your own wolf can go so deep into grief that she stops answering. They don't tell you how loud your head becomes when the one voice that's been there your whole life goes quiet.

I lay on the floor and let myself count everything I had lost in forty-eight hours.

My son. My husband. My sister. My wolf. My marriage. My home.

And then I stopped counting, because if I kept lying on that floor, I was going to lie there forever.

So I got up.

I found my phone. One missed call from Diana and a text: *You disappeared from the burial. I'm worried sick. Call me.*

I didn't call her. Not yet. If I heard her voice I would shatter, and I couldn't afford to shatter. I had exactly one thing left in the world to do, and I needed my hands steady for it.

I was going to pack, and I was going to leave.

---

There were suitcases in the guest wing storage. I took the two smallest ones, because six years in this mansion and almost nothing in it was actually mine.

The designer clothes were his money. The jewelry was his image. The cards in my purse had his name printed under mine like a leash.

I packed the things Michael's money had never touched. My mother's old shawl. My photo albums from before the marriage. My leather knife roll, soft and dark with years of my hands, from the restaurant days. My chef's jacket with AMARA stitched over the heart, folded in a drawer for six years like a pressed flower. He'd asked me to hang up that jacket when I became Luna. A Luna hosts dinners, he'd said. She doesn't cook them.

At the bottom of the drawer was my recipe notebook. Handwritten, grease-spotted, the spine held together with tape. My grandmother's stew on the first page. And near the back, in ink I could barely look at, a page I'd started eight months ago: *First birthday cake ideas.*

I sat on the edge of the bed and held that notebook and let myself cry for exactly five minutes. Then I wiped my face, zipped the suitcase, and walked out of the guest wing with my head up.

I made it as far as the front doors.

"Going somewhere?"

Michael stood in the doorway of his study, a glass of whiskey in his hand, still in the same shirt. Behind him, curled on the leather sofa in one of my silk robes, was Chloe.

My silk robe. The blush pink one. She'd gone into my closet.

"I'm leaving," I said. "You can tell the Elders whatever you like. Tell them I'm visiting family. Tell them I'm sick. In six months, tell them the truth. I don't care anymore."

"We discussed this."

"No, Michael. You discussed it. I listened from the floor." I gripped the suitcase handles tighter. "I'm not staying in this house while you two play family over my son's grave. There's no deal on this earth worth that."

Michael didn't argue. That should have warned me.

Instead, he looked at my suitcases the way he looked at a contract with a flaw in it. Almost pleased. Like he'd been waiting for me to make exactly this move.

"You know," he said, swirling the whiskey slowly, "in every negotiation I've ever closed, there's a moment when the other side believes they can simply walk away. It's my favorite moment. Because it means they haven't yet understood what's on the table."

"There's nothing on the table, Michael. You have everything already."

"Do you know what happens to an Alpha heir after burial?"

I froze.

"The rites," he continued, in the tone of a man walking a client through standard terms. "Three nights of moon vigil at the grave. Then the remains are cremated, as tradition demands, and the urn is sealed in the crypt beneath the pack house. The crypt of my bloodline." He took a sip. "Do you know what opens that crypt, Amara?"

I couldn't speak.

"Alpha blood. Mine. Only mine. It has been that way for two hundred years."

"Michael." My voice came out very small. "Don't."

"Our son will rest in that crypt in three days." He set the glass down on the side table with a soft, precise click. "So let me lay out the terms, since you've decided to test them. Everything in this life has a price. Yours, as it turns out, is very simple. Six months of cooperation. That's the cost of kneeling beside your son's urn again. That's the cost of lighting a candle for him. That's the cost of your name remaining beside his in the pack records as his mother."

The suitcases slipped out of my hands.

"You wouldn't," I whispered. "He's your son. He's your son, Michael."

"He's my heir, and he'll be honored as one, regardless of what you choose tonight." His voice never changed temperature. That was the horror of it. He could have been quoting shipping rates. "I'm not threatening you, Amara. I'm pricing your options. Option one, you stay, you smile, you cooperate, and when the deal closes, the crypt opens for you. For life. Supervised at first, then freely. Option two, you walk out that door with two suitcases and a dead phone plan, and the crypt stays sealed to you forever. You'll never stand beside him again. You won't even appear in his bloodline documents. Records are wonderfully flexible when an Alpha holds the pen."

The room was spinning. I heard myself breathing, fast and shallow.

He would erase me. He would take my dead son's ashes hostage and erase me from my own child's story, and he would do it in the mild, patient voice of a man reading terms aloud, with a whiskey warming in his hand.

"You're a monster," I said.

"I'm a negotiator. Monsters lose their tempers." He picked the glass back up and studied me over the rim. "You came into this conversation with nothing to bargain with, so I located an asset you'd pay any price for. That isn't cruelty, Amara. That's simply knowing my counterparty. I've known you for six years. You would burn down the world for that boy. So the world stays standing, and you stay here."

"Sis." Chloe unfolded herself from the sofa and padded over, my robe whispering around her legs. "Don't look at him like that. He's actually being generous. Six months of dinners and smiling for cameras, and you get your son back. Some women give up more for less."

"Take off my robe."

Chloe glanced down at the silk, then back up at me, and smiled a little. "You won't be needing it. You're in the guest wing now."

"Chloe." Michael's voice carried a faint warning.

"I'm just being practical." She shrugged, then turned those wide brown eyes on me, and for a moment she let the mask slip, just for me, just an inch, something cold and satisfied looking out from behind my baby sister's face. "You should rest, sis. You look terrible. And tomorrow we can talk about how this house is going to work now."

"How this house is going to work," I repeated.

"Well, someone has to manage things while you're... grieving." She said the word delicately, like it was an illness. "The staff scheduling. The menus. The events calendar. Michael thinks it's best if I start learning."

The menus. She was going to plan menus in my kitchen. The one room in that entire mansion that had ever truly been mine, the room where I'd taught her to make our grandmother's stew when she was ten years old and crying over a school bully.

Learning to be Luna. In my house. In my robe. Before my son's rites were even finished.

I looked at the two of them standing together in the warm light of the study, him with his whiskey, her in my silk, and I understood something with sudden, freezing clarity.

This wasn't an affair I had walked in on.

This was a transition plan. Carefully staged, patiently built, two years in the making. The only thing that hadn't gone according to schedule was me coming home from the cemetery too early.

"Six months," I heard myself say.

Michael raised an eyebrow. "Is that an agreement?"

"It's a sentence. I'll serve it." I picked my suitcases back up, because I'd be damned if I left them at his feet. "I'll smile at your dinners. I'll wear what your image needs me to wear. And when your deal closes, you'll open that crypt, and I will take my son's urn OUT of it and away from this family forever. That's my condition. He doesn't stay in your bloodline's basement. He comes with me."

Michael considered it the way he considered everything, weighing cost against benefit, and then inclined his head slightly. "If the six months go smoothly. Agreed."

"They'll go smoothly." I turned toward the stairs. "You'll get your performance, Michael. Just remember one thing while you're enjoying it."

"And what's that?"

I stopped and looked back at him, and something must have shown in my face, because for the first time in two days, his expression flickered.

"You rejected me in front of no one," I said. "No Elders. No witnesses. Just us. Which means to your whole world, I am still the Luna of Silver Ridge for six more months. And a Luna in the room hears things, Michael. A Luna at those Costa dinners sees things. You just handed six months of your empire's secrets to a woman with nothing left to lose."

Silence.

Chloe's smile faded slightly. And Michael went very still, the glass halfway to his mouth, and for one long moment he looked at me the way I imagine he looks at rival Alphas across a negotiating table. Not with anger.

With reassessment.

He had priced me as a grieving woman with no assets. And somewhere behind those flat gray eyes, a number was quietly being revised.

I felt a small, vicious spark of satisfaction light up inside the hollow where Naya used to be.

Then, faintly, so faintly I almost missed it, something stirred in that hollow.

*There you are,* Naya whispered, hoarse and weak, like a wolf lifting her head off the ground for the first time. *There's my girl.*

I turned and started up the stairs on legs that finally felt like mine again.

"Amara."

Chloe's voice. Sweet. Almost musical.

I should have kept walking. I stopped on the third step.

"There's something you should probably hear from family," she said, "before the Elders announce it at the vigil."

I turned around.

Chloe stood in the middle of the foyer in my robe, and as I watched, she slid one hand slowly down the silk and rested it flat against her stomach.

My own hand moved before my brain understood why, pressing against my own stomach, against the soft, aching emptiness where my son had lived for thirty-eight weeks and five days. Two days ago there had been a heartbeat under my palm. Two days ago I'd sung to him in the bath. My body remembered the weight of him in my arms, so small, so light, so silent, and every cell in me understood what she was about to say one heartbeat before she said it.

"I'm pregnant," she said.