No Negotiation

POV: Maya

I had always been the picture of a compliant mate, the dutiful Luna who never once questioned where her Alpha went or who he went there with. So tell me why, standing across from him now, did I feel like something closer to a stranger in my own home than a wife?

Nathaniel took a breath, visibly working to steady his tone into something gentler. "I'll admit, I've been distracted with pack business and Cole Industries, and I haven't given you the attention you deserve. I'll do better." He softened further, pushing the bag another inch toward me. "It's the newest design, limited run, I had it brought in specifically for you. Whatever else you want, just take it." He set a card down beside it, supplementary, tied to his own accounts, no limit attached.

This was Nathaniel's version of an apology. Where money was concerned, he'd never once been careful with me. In most people's eyes, I'd been the ideal Luna for it, quiet, undemanding, never a scene, never a complaint.

Making a fuss simply wasn't in my nature. It hadn't been, in the life before this one.

A flicker of genuine irritation crossed his face when I didn't so much as glance at either offering.

"Nathaniel, I don't think you're understanding me." I met his eyes, cold and entirely done. "I'm not here to negotiate terms. I'm telling you formally. You're out of my life. For good."

That was the last thread of his patience.

"Maya, don't push this." His voice rose, sharp enough to carry. "Elise saved my life. I'm your mate, and this is how you treat the woman who's owed that? Picking fights over every small thing, not one ounce of grace in you. Have you thought at all about what the pack will say if word of this spreads?"

He brought his palm down flat against the table, the crack of it echoing through the room. First time in six years he'd raised his voice at me like that.

I studied his fury and, to my own faint surprise, smiled. "I owe Elise nothing. Why on earth would I extend her grace? Who is she to me? You want me to worship the ground she walks on? Fine. When she dies, I'll have a memorial plaque made in her honour."

"Aren't you worried the pack will call you petty? Unfit to stand as a Luna at all?" He was barely holding his temper now.

Watching how easily he tipped into rage the second Elise's name entered the room, I felt something close to bitter amusement settle over me. So this was where his real loyalty lived. Six years I'd stood beside him as his Luna, and he'd only ever mated me because Edmund insisted, and because I was already carrying a child he'd believed, wrongly, was his. He'd arranged pack guards to see to my needs so he could bury himself entirely in expanding Cole Industries into the most dominant human-facing business in the country, and in the process, into Elise's orbit.

We'd probably exchanged more words in the last hour than in the whole of the previous six years combined.

"Word spreading?" My mouth curved into something that wasn't quite a smile. "Even if it does, I won't be the one left embarrassed by it."

"Maya. Don't push me too far." His voice boomed now, his fists clenched so tight I heard his knuckles crack.

Catching Caleb's shape at the top of the stairs from the corner of my eye, I dropped my voice deliberately low. "That's all I have to say. I've already signed my half. If you want this handled with any dignity, sign yours. If not, my Beta will be in contact with your legal counsel."

I stood. The moment I'd decided I no longer wanted him, whatever he still was to me simply stopped mattering.

Caleb was the only thing left that did.

"Maya, don't blow this out of proportion." Nathaniel's hand closed around my wrist before I'd taken a single step, his grip carrying more Alpha strength behind it than he probably realised. "A divorce, over something this small? You're being unreasonable. If you actually go through with this, do you really think you'll manage on your own out there? Don't forget what you are without this pack behind you."

He was reminding me, in the plainest way he knew how, that I was Blackstorm-born and Blackstorm-raised, that whatever I'd once been outside the title of Luna had long since been buried under it, and that stepping away from him meant stepping away from every scrap of standing that came with the mark on my skin.

My eyes dropped to his hand, to the skin already reddening beneath his grip, and something in me went very calm and very focused.

If he'd ever once been the mate I deserved, I'd have borne almost anything to stay the perfect Luna beside him. Since he wasn't, and never had been, I wasn't about to waste another breath convincing him otherwise.

I was already working out exactly how much of my own strength it would take to break his hold, strength I hadn't let myself use against him once in six years, when his phone rang, shattering the tension stretched thin between us.

His expression shifted the instant he saw the name on the screen. He let go of my wrist to answer.

"It's me. What's wrong?" The fury from a moment ago had already dissolved into something gentler, softer, a tone I'd never once heard him use for me.

Elise's voice came through clear enough that I caught every word in a room gone silent as held breath. "Nathaniel, Elathan just fainted. I can't wake him, I don't know what to do, I'm so scared."

She had a gift for timing, I'd give her that. He'd barely been home ten minutes, right in the middle of our argument, with me standing close enough to hear every carefully trembling word. She knew exactly what she was doing, and exactly when to do it.

"Nathaniel, he's completely unresponsive, he's always been so fragile, what if something's really wrong..." Her sobs grew more desperate, perfectly pitched.

"Don't panic. I'll get a healer to you now." His voice thickened with worry. "Stay with him, I'm coming."

He ended the call, glanced at me, still standing there, calmly watching every second of it play out, and said, stern, as though I were the unreasonable one in the room. "This has to wait. Something's wrong with Elathan. He's five, his wolf-heart can't take this kind of shock, and Elise is raising him alone with no one else to turn to. She needs someone right now. I have to go."

He didn't wait for a response. He turned and strode out.

On his way, he passed Caleb at the foot of the stairs without a single glance, without even the small scent-acknowledgement pack instinct usually demands between an Alpha and his pup, and kept walking straight out the door.

Caleb watched him go, then snorted, arms crossed. "Even the oldest tricks in the book still work on him. Thank the moon he's not actually my dad. What a joke."

I looked at the empty doorway a moment longer, and let out a short, cold laugh of my own.

Go, Nathaniel. Go be with your true mate. I hope the two of you are entangled for the rest of your lives.

My gaze dropped to the unsigned papers still lying on the table where he'd left them.

Any wolf with sense would have signed on the spot. I was asking for nothing that wasn't already mine.

"Go pack your things," I said softly to Caleb, already reaching for my phone. 

"It's time we left this place for good."