Chapter 4: What the Pack Decides to Believe

Nobody comes to check on me.

I sit in the council room after everyone else has filed out. My father first. Then the elders, talking low among themselves. Then Damian, who stops at the door for a second and doesn't say anything. Seraphina goes last, leaning on Corwin's arm, and two of the younger elders practically fall over each other getting the door for her.

Nobody looks back at the chair where they left me.

By the time I reach the kitchen wing, two servants who've known me since I was twelve go quiet and find something urgent to do with a stack of clean linens. I catch pieces of it as I pass.

"Stole from her, can you imagine." It wasn't proven yet that I stole anything but somehow, I was already a thief to them.

Marta's still up. Marta's always up.

She slides a plate across the counter without looking at me. "Eat something."

"I'm not hungry."

"Eat it anyway."

I don't touch it. My throat's too tight. "Marta."

"Mm."

"You don't think I took it too right?"

She looks at me properly this time. "No," she says. "I don't."

It's such a small thing. It shouldn't do anything to me. I have to look at the wall for a second before I trust my own face again.

"Thank you," I say, and leave. She looked like she had more to say. But I was in no mood for it.

My father's in his office, of course.

He doesn't look up. "You shouldn't be wandering the halls tonight. Let them talk. It'll pass."

"Will it?"

"These things always do." He sets his pen down. For a second I think he's actually going to look at me. "This is a mess, Luna. A theft accusation and a pregnancy, the same night. Do you understand what this does to my position?"

"Your position."

"The Beta line. My standing on the council. This reflects on all of us."

"Father, I've been sitting in that room for three hours," I say. "Accused of stealing something I never touched. Finding out my mate got another woman pregnant while he still hadn't bothered telling me he didn't want me. And you're worried about your position."

That lands. I watch his face harden and try to cover it by picking the pen back up.

"I know it's been a difficult night."

A difficult night. Really. I stare at him in utter disbelief. It was at times like this, I wished mum was still alive.

"Get some sleep," he says. "Whatever's happening with the Alpha is his to sort out."

It isn't just his, I think, but I don't say it. I leave him with his numbers and go back to a room that's never once felt like mine.

---

I don't sleep. Near dawn, two voices outside my door, pitched low.

"—doesn't add up." Corwin. Even quiet, I'd know his voice anywhere. "A stone goes missing, turns up in her room within the hour, and then this announcement, timed exactly right. I've sat on that council thirty years. I know theater when I see it."

"You think Seraphina lied? About the theft?"

"I think a convenient truth deserves the same scrutiny as a convenient lie." A pause. "Say nothing yet. Keep your eyes open."

The voices move off before I hear anything else. I lie there with my heart going harder than it should, because for the first time tonight, someone with actual weight on that council doubts her instead of me.

It isn't much. One old elder's suspicion doesn't undo a night of false accusations and my name that was already drowning in mud. Doesn't make my father look at me like I matter more than his standing. 

But it's something.

I watch the window go from black to grey, and somewhere in that stretch I stop sulking and start thinking of what to do instead.

I'm done waiting for someone else to say what I already know.

---

I find Damian in the training yard just after sunrise, running drills with two of the pack warriors like it's a morning like any other. He sees me coming and calls a break.

"Luna." He says carefully.

"I need to talk to you." I reply almost immediately.

"Now isn't—"

"Now." I shoot back. My voice comes out steadier than I feel, and something in his face changes.

He waves the warriors off. They go, but not far.

"I heard you, you know" I say. "Last night. Through the study door. Before any of this. I heard what you thought of me

Whatever he expected me to open with, it wasn't that. I watch it hit him.

"Luna—"

"Don't. Don't explain it. Don't make it smaller than it was." I've spent three years choosing my words carefully around this man, sanding them down so they'd never cost me anything. I'm not doing that today. "You've known about the baby. You let a room full of people search mine for a stone I never touched, and you stood there and let them, knowing the whole time what you were about to drop on me the second it was done."

"It wasn't—" He stops. Starts again. "I didn't know how to tell you."

"You didn't try."

"Try?" His voice hardens, an edge in it I've rarely heard pointed at me. "Do you have any idea what it's been like, carrying this around for months? Sitting across from you at dinner, watching you smile like everything's fine, knowing the whole time I'd eventually have to take a wrecking ball to something you'd never let go of on your own?" He drags a hand through his hair. "Maybe this is better. Maybe it just needed to stop."

The audacity of this man. Something in me goes hot, then perfectly, terribly clear.

"Needed to stop." I laugh, and it doesn't sound like me. "You have the nerve to stand there and talk about what *needed to stop* like I'm the inconvenience in this." At this point, I had let go of all restraint.

"Luna—"

"No. You don't get to do that. You don't get to make this about how hard it's been for *you*." My voice is climbing and I don't especially want to bring it back down. "I'm done being stupid. I gave you three years of my time, my effort, every scrap of patience I had left after a day of being nobody in my own home and you never once looked at me the way I wanted you to. 

I'm your mate, Damian. The moon bound us together. Explain to me how you can want someone else that badly when something older than both of us said it should be me."

He doesn't answer. I don't wait for one.

"I heard you," I say, quieter now, which is somehow worse than shouting. " Every word of it. That's when I understood exactly how stupid I've been — standing in doorways, waiting for one that was never going to open. You've hurt me, Damian. More than I think you know. And I can't do it anymore. This needs to end."

For a moment he just looks at me, something moving behind his eyes I can't fully name. Not quite guilt, not quite relief, caught somewhere between the two.

"Fine," he says finally. "Fine."

It comes too easily, the way he says it, and it isn't lost on me that some part of him has been waiting just as long for someone else to say it first. 

A part of me is broken seeing how easily, he agreed to it. Whatever hope I had left, flew out the window.

There's something else in his face too, a flicker he can't smooth away fast enough — surprise, like he never actually believed the Luna who spent three years trying to earn him would be the one suggesting it.

"Finally, you've come to your senses. I too am tired of pretending." he says, steadier now, "It's time we made it official. In front of everyone. So there's no more of this. This in-between."

I just stare at him, my face totally blank and then I nod agreeing with him.

He looks at me for a long moment, like he's checking whether I mean it, and then he turns to the enforcer still hovering nearby.

"Send word," he says. "Assemble the pack. The square. Within the hour."