Chapter 3

Chapter Three

Hazel’s POV

I looked at my mother.

I looked at Alpha Creed.

Then I turned around and walked back toward the lunch table without a single word.

My mother caught up with me in three quick steps, her heels clicking sharp and fast on the stone path. She grabbed my elbow and pulled me close enough that I could smell the powder she’d caked on her face.

“I will kill you, you ungrateful brat,” she whispered, a smile still plastered on for appearances. “If you ruin this for me I swear on everything I will make your life hell. Do you hear me?”

I pulled my elbow free and sat down.

“I have zero interest in being cordial your men,” I said quietly, unfolding the napkin across my lap like we were having a perfectly normal afternoon. “But don’t worry. Maximum three months and we’ll be back in the slums anyway. We always are.”

Her hand flew up.

A large hand caught her wrist before it reached my face.

Alpha Creed. He’d moved so fast and so quietly I hadn’t even heard him close the distance. He held her wrist without squeezing, without drama, just held it and looked at her with the kind of calm that was somehow more frightening than anger.

“She’s just a child,” he said. Low and even. “Leave her.”

I picked up my fork.

A child.

I stabbed a piece of food on my plate harder than necessary. I was nineteen years old. I had been working since I was fifteen.

I had survived things this man couldn’t imagine sitting in his castle with his fountains and his perfectly aligned flowers, and he was looking at me like I was something small that needed to be managed.

I ate and said nothing.

The food was extraordinary.

I didn’t want it to be. I wanted to sit there in my anger and push it around and feel righteous about it, but the first bite dissolved that plan completely.

I couldn’t identify half of what was on the plate and I didn’t care. It was the kind of food that made you realize everything you’d been eating your whole life was just fuel, just survival, and this , this was something else entirely.

I kept my face neutral and ate everything on my plate.

Across the table my mother talked. She had a gift for filling silence with nothing fashion, the things she needed, the clothes she’d require now that she was going to be living here, the items the baby would need when it arrived. I let it wash over me and stared at my food and then something she said snagged in my brain and made me look up.

“When the baby is born we’ll do the mating ceremony properly. And then I’ll be Luna. Luna of the Moonlight Pack.” She said it with her chin lifted, like she’d already been fitted for the crown.

I set my fork down.

“You’re pregnant?”

She smiled the way she smiled when she’d won something. “Alpha Creed and I are expecting.”

I looked at him. He was watching me with that same unreadable expression, one arm resting on the table, completely still.

I looked back at her.

Something didn’t sit right. Something hadn’t been sitting right since last night at the junction and it was getting louder, not quieter, the more I saw of this setup. The castle. The maids. The guards at the gate. Men like this didn’t fall into women like my mother by accident. Men like this didn’t do anything by accident.

“How did you two meet?” I asked.

My mother’s smile went thin at the edges. “Eat your food.”

“I’m just asking a question.”

“And I’m just telling you to mind your business.” She turned back to him, resetting her smile to full warmth.I looked at him again, pretty sure he had never patronized my mom…)he didn’t look familiar or like her regular sex customers.

He was still looking at me.

I stood up.

“I’ve lost my appetite.” I pushed my chair back and picked up my napkin from my lap, folded it, set it beside my plate. “Excuse me. Mother. Alpha Creed.”

I didn’t wait for a response.

One of the maids was near the back entrance, straightening a vase of flowers that didn’t need straightening. She looked up when I appeared.

“My room,” I said. “Can you show me?”

She nodded and led me inside without a word.

The room was on the ground floor at the far end of a quiet corridor, away from the main house noise. Small and a real proper bed with actual white linen, a window seat, wooden floors that didn’t creak. The maid opened a side door to show me the attached bathroom, all pale tile and clean lines, and then opened the other door.

The ocean.

Not a view of the ocean. The door opened directly onto a small private terrace and beyond it, down a short slope of wild grass, was water. Blue and wide and moving, waves coming in slow and steady like breathing.

I stood in the doorway for a long moment.

“Thank you,” I said, and she left.

I closed both doors, sat on the edge of the bed, and pressed my palms flat against my thighs.

Okay.

This is not permanent. None of this is permanent. Three months. Maybe less.

I said it to myself like a reminder, like something I needed to keep visible so I wouldn’t make the mistake of forgetting it. My mother had done this six times before.

Seven if you count the man who hadn’t technically proposed but had moved us into his apartment for eight weeks before his actual wife showed up.

Every single time she found a new situation she believed in it completely the clothes, the plans, the future she was already spending. And every single time the floor gave way.

I was not going to fall in love with this room and I was not going to fall in love with this ocean.

I got up and went to the bathroom and turned on the shower.

The water pressure hit me like a full-body exhale. Hot and steady and completely unlike the weak, temperamental trickle of our old apartment that ran cold without warning.

I stood under it and didn’t move for a long time. The tension in my shoulders started somewhere near the ceiling and came down slowly, degree by degree, until I was just standing there breathing steam and letting the water be hot.

I didn’t let myself think.

I just stood there.

An hour passed. Maybe more. I didn’t care. Nobody was waiting for the shower. Nobody was banging on the door telling me to hurry up. For the first time in as long as I could remember, the hot water didn’t run out.

When I finally got out and dried off and climbed into that bed with its clean white sheets, I was asleep before I finished the thought I’d started.

Morning came through the ocean door soft and gold.

I lay still for a second, the way I always did, waiting for the smell. The cigarettes and the sour alcohol and the particular staleness of a room that had been lived in too hard for too long.

Instead I got fresh air and clean linen.

Right.

I got up, dressed quickly, pulled my hair back, grabbed my backpack bag from the floor where I’d dropped it last night. Today was not a normal day.

The blood moon Crescent fell tonight and the reveal happened at the Academy before sunset the moment every wolf in my year had been quietly either dreading or counting down to. The moment the Goddess showed her hand.

I had been trying not to think about it.

I thought about it constantly.

I wanted a mate. I hated that I wanted one. I hated men, had very good reasons to hate men, had built an entire life around not needing them and not trusting them, and still, under all of that, some small persistent part of me hoped.

That there was someone out there made specifically for me. That the bond would feel different from everything I’d ever known. That different was even possible.

I was already at the front entrance pulling the door open when I heard the engine.

A black jeep rolled to a slow stop at the bottom of the steps.

The window came down.

“Hop in.” Alpha Creed’s voice. Unhurried. Like this wasn’t a negotiation.

I kept walking.

“I’ll give you a ride to the Academy.”

“I’m fine.”

“It’s a long walk from the estate to the main road.”

“I’m aware.” I didn’t stop. Didn’t look back.

A pause.

“You can ask the butler to arrange a car any time you need one.” His voice followed me down the driveway without raising itself. “Or a driver. You don’t have to walk.”

I stopped then.

Turned around.

He was watching me from the driver’s side, one arm resting on the open window, the morning light landing across the scar through his eyebrow.

“We won’t be here long enough for that to matter,” I said. “I don’t want to get used to things that aren’t mine. So please leave me alone.”

He looked at me for a moment.

Then he drove away.

By the time I reached the main road my feet were already complaining. The estate was deep in private territory and the walk to where public transport actually reached was longer than I’d estimated. The morning was warming up fast. My bag felt heavier than it had yesterday.

I stood at the bus stop and waited.

When I finally got to the Academy and walked through the main gates, the campus felt different. Charged. Students moved in clusters, talking too fast and too loud, the kind of energy that only came on days when something real was about to happen.

I recognized the feeling in my own chest when I noticed it that tight, breathless mix of hope and dread that I’d been sitting with all morning.

I spotted Lucas first.

He was near the main courtyard steps, tall and broad with his arms crossed, scanning the crowd. Drake was beside him, leaner, always slightly more composed, but even he was standing differently today. Too still. Too rigid.

I walked over.

“Finally,” Lucas said, but his voice was off.

I looked between them. Drake had gone slightly pale. Lucas was doing that thing he did when he didn’t want to say something jaw tight, eyes moving everywhere except directly at me.

“What?” I said.

Silence.

“Lucas. What’s going on?”

Drake exhaled. I looked at Lucas and he looked back at me.

“Hazel.” He said my name carefully, like he was setting something fragile down. “You’ve been blessed by the moon goddess as with a match “ He paused. “You have a mate.”

I stared at him.

“Okay.” I said it slowly. “That’s okay. That’s the whole point of today, Drake but why are you looking at me like that?”

Neither of them answered.

“Is this not supposed to be good news?” My voice came out steadier than I felt. “Why are you both looking at me like someone just died?”

Lucas finally looked at me directly.

His expression was the one he used when there was no version of what he was about to say that didn’t hurt.

“Because of who it is, Hazel.”

My stomach dropped.

“Who is my mate ?” I asked my heart beating fast.