Chapter Five

"Marcus, please, help our baby," Lyra sobbed, curling tighter around her stomach on the kitchen floor.

"What did you do to her?" Marcus turned on me before I had even set the kettle down.

"I swear I didn't do anything." My hands were shaking now, and I hated that they were, hated that fear had crept into my voice when I had done nothing wrong.

He crossed to her side, knelt, checked her over with a gentleness that made my chest ache, then rose and came back to stand directly in front of me. For one breath I thought he might actually listen.

"How would she hurt herself," he said instead, "just to make herself look wicked and frame you?"

"Smell me, Marcus." I lifted my wrists toward him, voice cracking on the words. "Do you scent any wolf on my body? Any struggle? I never touched her."

He didn't answer that either. He simply turned and called for two guards, and they lifted Lyra between them and carried her toward the healer's chambers. I followed, because whatever I had or hadn't done, I refused to be the woman who ran from the accusation instead of standing in the middle of it.

Lyra woke within the hour, blinking slowly against the candlelight, one hand still pressed protectively over her stomach. I braced myself for the question I was certain Marcus would finally ask her, the one that mattered most. What happened. Who touched you.

He didn't ask it.

"If anything happens to that baby," he said, voice low and dangerous, "I will end you."

I stood frozen near the doorway, watching him say those words to me without once turning to look at me, his eyes fixed entirely on her.

"She pushed me," Lyra whispered, letting her voice tremble beautifully. "She wanted to hurt our baby. The next Alpha." A pause, timed too perfectly to be accidental. "She wanted to hurt your Luna."

The word landed in the room like a stone dropped into still water. Luna.

I looked at Marcus, waiting for him to correct her, to say there is only one Luna in this pack and she is standing by that door, but he said nothing. He didn't even flinch. He let the title sit there in the air between us, unclaimed by him and unchallenged, and something inside me went cold in a way that had nothing to do with fear anymore.

The door opened before I could find my voice.

Nessa stepped through, and I felt a flicker of relief so sharp it nearly buckled my knees, because Nessa had been in the garden, Nessa knew exactly what kind of woman Lyra was, Nessa would tell them the truth.

"I saw it," she said instead, eyes fixed somewhere just past my shoulder, refusing to meet mine. "I saw the Luna strike her. Hard. In the kitchen."

I stared at her, waiting for the lie to crack, waiting for some flicker of the maid who had braided my hair the night before my bonding ceremony and told me one day this all ends. It didn't come. Her hands were folded tightly in front of her, knuckles pale, and I understood in that instant that someone had gotten to her first, that whatever threat had been made against her was worse than whatever loyalty she still carried for me. Three years of standing beside me, and in the end it hadn't been enough to survive whatever fear had been put in her path.

Marcus's fury doubled in front of my eyes. "There's a witness," he said. "Throw her in the dungeon."

"Wait." Lyra's voice went soft, almost merciful, and that was somehow worse than any anger could have been. "Spare her, Marcus. At least she can take care of our baby. And feed me."

The room tilted slightly around me. I actually laughed, a short, disbelieving sound, because it was that or scream. She wanted me chained to her service, cooking her meals and tending her while she carried the child that had unraveled my entire life, and Marcus was standing there considering it like it was a reasonable mercy.

"No," I said.

Both of them turned to look at me.

"I decline," I said, and my voice came out steadier than I felt, steady the way my father's voice went steady right before he ended a negotiation for good. "From this moment forward, I decline you, Marcus, as my Alpha. And as my mate."

Something flickered across his face, there and gone too fast to name, and then two guards were moving to take hold of my arms, and I let them, because there was nothing left in that room worth fighting for with my fists.

They released me at the edge of the guest house instead of the dungeon, some final scrap of mercy or maybe just an unwillingness to be seen dragging a King's daughter through the front gates without proof. I didn't wait to find out which. I walked the rest of the way alone, and the moment the door shut behind me, I let the tears finally come.

I sank down against the wall, arms wrapped around my knees, and cried the way I hadn't let myself cry since the courtyard two nights ago, ugly and full-bodied, three years of swallowed pride breaking loose all at once. I need to go back. The thought rose up clear and sharp through the noise in my head. We need to leave here.

My hand found the old, faded thread of the mind link tucked in the back of my consciousness, the one connecting me to my brother, the one I hadn't reached for since the day I left my father's kingdom to marry a man who never deserved the sacrifice.

Kellan, I called, my mental voice raw and cracking even inside my own skull. I need to come home.

There was a pause, brief and startled, the kind of silence that meant he hadn't expected to hear from me after three years of nothing.

Then his voice came rushing back, sharp with alarm.

Elena? Where are you?