CHAPTER THREE: THE SERVANT WIFE

By the end of her first week at Ashwood, Elena had learned the shape of her new life the way she had learned every other unwanted role handed to her, quickly, quietly, and without complaint.

She was the Luna in name only. The pack staff had stopped calling her that within three days, once it became clear that Damian never used the word himself and never corrected anyone who left it out. Instead she was simply Elena, or sometimes, when the older wolves thought she was out of earshot, the human reject, a phrase that stung less each time she heard it, mostly because she'd started to believe it might be true.

She was not human. She knew that much, technically, the same way every child born in a pack family knew it, blood was blood no matter how weak the wolf inside it turned out to be. But her wolf had never once surfaced, not on her sixteenth birthday when most pack children had their first shift, not in the years since, no matter how many moons rose and fell over the Hart house. Carla had always waved it off in front of others as a delay, nothing to worry over, while behind closed doors she called Elena's missing wolf an embarrassment better left unmentioned. Eventually Elena had stopped expecting it to come at all, and stopped caring, because a wolf that never showed up couldn't be taken away from her either.

At Ashwood, that missing wolf became one more reason for the pack to look past her.

Kade Ferris, Damian's Beta, was polite in the careful way people were polite to something they didn't trust yet. He was broad shouldered and steady eyed, the kind of man who clearly ran on loyalty first and questions second, and his loyalty currently belonged entirely to Damian.

"You're settling in alright?" he asked her one morning in the kitchen, the same kitchen where she'd first learned exactly how little her husband wanted her here.

"As well as I can," Elena said honestly.

Kade studied her for a moment, the kind of look that felt like it was cataloguing her for later. "Alpha didn't have to let the ceremony finish, you know. Once the switch was discovered, plenty of Alphas would have called the whole thing off, treaty consequences or not. He chose to protect the alliance instead of his own pride. That's not nothing."

"It's not comfort either," Elena said quietly, and Kade had no answer for that, because they both knew it was true.

* * *

She kept mostly to the east wing and the gardens, staying out of the parts of the house where pack business happened, exactly as Damian had instructed that first night. It was easier that way, less chance of being stared at, less chance of overhearing whispered conversations about what a disaster the wedding had been.

Rhea remained the one bright spot in an otherwise gray week, sneaking Elena extra bread from the kitchen, teaching her the safe paths through the pack gardens where the guard patrols rarely walked, filling silences with easy chatter about pack gossip that meant nothing and everything at the same time.

"You should have seen Bianca Hale's face when she heard the wedding happened without her invitation," Rhea said one afternoon, pulling weeds beside Elena in the small garden plot the staff had let her claim as her own project. "She's practically family here. Grew up visiting Ashwood every summer. Everyone always assumed she and the Alpha would end up together, before his father arranged the whole treaty marriage business with the Harts."

Elena's hands stilled over the dirt. "Bianca."

"Alpha Hale's daughter. Their pack borders Ashwood to the west." Rhea shrugged, oblivious to the way Elena's chest had gone tight at the name. "She's been traveling for work, some kind of pack diplomacy circuit, but I heard she's due back in the territory soon. If I were you, I'd brace myself. That woman does not do quiet entrances."

Elena said nothing, only nodded, and went back to pulling weeds with hands that had gone a little unsteady. She told herself it shouldn't matter, that Damian had already told her plainly he loved someone before her, that this Bianca was simply confirmation of a fact she already knew. It shouldn't have felt like a fresh wound. It did anyway.

* * *

Some nights, lying awake in the too big guest bed, Elena let herself think about her father. She had been twelve when he died, and even now the memory of him had gone soft around the edges, more feeling than fact. She remembered the low rumble of his laugh, the way he used to carry her on his shoulders through the Hart family orchard, and one strange, sharp memory that never quite faded no matter how many years passed between then and now, the sound of his voice through a closed office door, low and urgent, saying words she'd been too young to understand at the time. Promise me you'll keep her safe. Promise me nobody ever finds out what she really is.

She had asked Carla about it once, years later, foolishly hoping grief might have softened her stepmother enough to answer honestly. Carla's face had gone the color of old ash, and she'd told Elena, in a voice that allowed no follow up questions, that her father had died confused and rambling from fever, and that dead men's fevered words meant nothing at all. Elena had believed her, mostly because believing anything else meant carrying a mystery she had no tools to solve.

She thought of that memory again now, lying in the dark at Ashwood with a ring on her finger that belonged to a man who didn't want her, and wondered, not for the first time, exactly what her father had been trying so hard to protect.

That evening, restless and unable to settle into the too quiet guest room, Elena found herself wandering into a part of the house she hadn't explored yet, a narrow hallway off the east wing that led to a small, dusty storage room full of boxes the staff clearly hadn't touched in years. She wasn't looking for anything in particular. She simply wanted somewhere Damian's ghost wouldn't follow her, somewhere that didn't smell like pine and the memory of his voice telling her not to expect love.

Near the back of the room, half buried under a stack of old curtains, she found a single wooden crate stamped with the Hart family seal, the same crest that hung faded and forgotten over the doorway of her childhood home. It made no sense for anything of her family's to be sitting in an Ashwood storage room, unless it had been sent along with the wedding arrangements and simply never unpacked.

Inside, beneath old linens, she found a small locked box that did not carry the Hart crest at all. Instead, burned faintly into the dark wood, was a symbol Elena had never seen before, a crescent moon wrapped in what looked like thin, deliberate lines of flame.

Her wrist ached, suddenly and sharply, right at the spot where she'd felt that strange burning heat during the wedding ceremony. She pressed her palm against it, breath catching, staring at the little box like it might answer questions she didn't know how to ask yet.

There was no key in sight. The lock looked old, its metal gone dark with age, nothing like the polished modern hardware on everything else in the house. Elena turned it over in her hands, tracing the burned symbol with one finger, and felt that same strange heat pulse faintly under her skin in response, like the box and her own body were speaking a language she'd never been taught.

"What are you," she whispered to it, and for one absurd moment she almost expected it to answer.

The door behind her opened without warning.

Elena spun around so fast she nearly dropped the box, heart slamming against her ribs, and found Damian standing in the doorway, tall and unreadable in the dim light, his eyes immediately dropping to the crate at her feet and then to the small locked box clutched in her hands.

"What are you doing in here," he said, and his voice had none of its usual cold control, it was sharper than that, edged with something close to alarm.

"I was just looking for somewhere quiet," Elena stammered, holding the box a little tighter without quite meaning to. "I found this crate, it has my family's seal on it, I didn't realize—"

"Put it down." He crossed the room in three long strides, close enough now that Elena could feel the tension rolling off him like heat from a fire. "That crate was supposed to have been destroyed years ago. It should not be in this house at all."

"Destroyed? Why would anyone destroy something with my family's crest on it?"

Damian's jaw worked, like he was chewing on an answer he didn't want to give. For a moment, standing so close, Elena caught the same flicker in his green eyes that she'd seen at the altar, that same unsettled uncertainty, like he was looking at a puzzle piece that fit somewhere it absolutely should not fit.

"It's pack business," he said finally, taking the crate from her hands with more care than his sharp tone suggested, "older than either of us. Leave it alone, Elena. For your own sake, leave it alone."

He left with the crate tucked under one arm, and Elena stood alone in the dusty storage room with her heart still hammering, the small locked box still clutched against her chest because in the confusion, in his rush to take the crate and go, Damian had never noticed she'd kept it hidden against her body the entire time.

Whatever secret that crest was hiding, Elena had just decided, quietly and for the first time in her life without asking anyone's permission, that she intended to find out exactly what it was, no matter how many closed doors and careful lies stood in her way.