Chapter 2: Future Luna

I don't sleep. I lie on top of the covers in yesterday's clothes and watch the ceiling until the dark outside my window turns the color of old bruises, and then I get up, because the pack doesn't care what I heard through a study door at midnight. 

Breakfast still needs planning. The linen order still needs counting. Being unwanted, it turns out, comes with no days off.

The kitchen is already loud when I get there—Marta directing two younger wolves through the porridge pots, someone arguing about whether the coastal Alphas eat shellfish or consider it an insult, the whole ordinary machinery of feeding a hundred people grinding forward like nothing in the world has changed.. 

Well, nothing has for them. That's the thing nobody tells you about the worst night of your life.

"You're late," Marta says, not looking up from the porridge.

"Five minutes."

Five minutes is late when there's a council dinner in three days, and Seraphina wants the good silver polished by hand instead of run through the machine like a normal person." Marta finally glances at me, and whatever she sees in my face makes her soften, just slightly. "You look like you didn't sleep."

"I'm fine."

She doesn't push. 

Nobody here does, which I used to think was kindness and now understand is just distance dressed up nicely. I take the silver polish and a rag and a box of the good silver down to the far end of the table, away from the noise, and I start rubbing tarnish off forks that will hold food for people who won't remember my name by the end of the night.

I've done worse jobs than this one. That's not self-pity, it's just true. I've scrubbed floors, sorted the compost, sat through hours of etiquette drilling from a tutor Damian's mother hired specifically to fix what she called my "roughness." 

What makes this different isn't the work. It's that I used to do it thinking it was leading somewhere. Every fork polished, every dinner planned, every rule learned — I told myself it was payment on something. A future where Damian looked at me the way he looked at Seraphina last night by the fire.

There is no future like that. There never was. I just hadn't let myself hear it said out loud until now.

Seraphina finds me around midday, which I should have expected and somehow still manage to be caught off guard by.

"There you are." She's got a stack of dresses over one arm, clearly on her way somewhere more interesting than the kitchen, and she stops at the end of the table like she's doing me a favor. "I need a favor. The blue silk got a wine stain at the Ashcroft's dinner. Completely my fault, don't ask. And I need it sorted before Friday. Can you take it to whoever does the miracle work around here?"

"Of course," I say, and take the dress when she holds it out, because that's what I do.

She doesn't leave right away. She's studying me with an expression I can't quite place — not unkind, exactly, more like curiosity, the way you'd look at a piece of furniture that had unexpectedly made a noise.

"You're very good at this," she says finally.

"At laundry?"

"At all of it. The waiting. The doing what's asked." She tilts her head. "I used to wonder if it bothered you. Being the one who does the actual work of being his mate, while I get to be the fun part. But you never say anything, so I stopped wondering."

She rubs it in my face.

I could tell her, right now, that I heard everything last night. That I know exactly what I am to him, in his own words, said with relief instead of guilt. I could watch her reaction. But it wouldn't make any difference, would it?

I don't. Some instinct older than pride keeps my mouth shut. The same instinct that's been keeping it shut for three years, telling me that whatever I say next, I'll be the one who has to live with the consequences, not her.

"I don't mind," I say instead, and my voice doesn't shake at all, which surprises me more than it should.

Something flickers across her face. Not quite disappointment, more like she'd wanted a different answer, a version of me that pushed back so she could enjoy winning. When I don't give her that, she just shrugs and gathers her dresses.

"Get the stain out by Thursday," she says, already turning away. "And Luna try to eat something today. You look pale. It won't do, for the dinner."

She's gone before I can decide whether that was cruelty or the closest thing to concern she's capable of. I've stopped being able to tell the difference with her, which maybe says more about me than it does about her.

My father finds me at the office in the afternoon, and I know before he says a word that something in my face is still wrong, because he does something he almost never does anymore. He actually looks at me.

"You're quiet today."

"I'm always quiet."

"Quieter." He sets down the ledger he's been squinting at for an hour. "Did something happen?"

For one reckless second I consider telling him. All of it. The details. What the man he was pushing to, thought of me. I want, badly, for someone in this pack house to look at me and be angry on my behalf instead of disappointed in me.

"Nothing happened," I say. "I'm tired."

He accepts that, because it's easier than the alternative, and goes back to his ledger, and I understand, really understand, for the first time, all the that if my thoughts of things changing was just a fleeting dream. No one in this pack actually cared what happened to me. I had to accept that no one was going to see me as I wanted them to. My own father saw me as a tool for power.

I had been blind for long enough.

I go back to my room that night and take out the small wooden box I keep under my bed with not much in it, a few coins I've saved without knowing why, a letter from my mother written before she died that I've read so many times the folds have gone soft as cloth. I sit with it on my lap and I don't cry. For some reason, I haven't let myself do so but I do something I haven't done in three years.

I start thinking about what I would do, if I ever let myself leave.

I don't get far before there's a knock at my door. Sharp, formal, the kind that means pack business. When I open it, one of the council elders is standing there, face arranged into the careful neutral mask they wear for announcements nobody wants to make.

"Luna," he says. "The council's called an emergency session. You're required to attend. Now."

Behind him, down the hall, I can hear Damian's voice, low and urgent, talking to someone I can't see — and underneath it, unmistakable even through a closed door, Seraphina crying.