You Will Always Be My Luna

POV: Elva

"If Pell didn't ride with the army," I said that evening, "who told you Saskia was pregnant?"

Eriq had come in without knocking again. He stopped in the middle of the room with his arms folded, and I could see him deciding whether to be patient.

"What are you talking about?"

"Ask the kitchen. Ask Marta. Doctor Pell hasn't left the Morrow estate since midsummer, so he couldn't have confirmed a thing on the road."

"You've been collecting servants' gossip."

"I've been collecting facts."

"And you want me to question a healer who's served this pack for thirty years because you're angry." He shook his head. "You've never been petty, Elva. Don't start now."

"I'm not asking you to question him because I'm angry. I'm asking you because I'm pregnant, and if your word is going to cost me my child's home, I'd like your evidence to be better than a cousin's signature."

His gaze flicked to my stomach and back to my face. "Are you sure?"

"I'm sure."

"We tried for five years, sweetheart. Is it possible you've mistaken..."

"Do I look like a woman who mistakes this?" I lifted my chin. "Send Saskia away, Eriq. Not forever, only until I've delivered. Then I'll show you the test, and you can hold it in your hands."

The quiet that followed stretched until I heard my pulse. His eyes slid toward the door and back, checking whether anyone could hear.

"No," he said at last. "Her child is my responsibility too."

I had given this man everything. My loyalty, my body, five years of smiling through council dinners while the elders counted my failures aloud, and the mornings I'd hidden my tears in bathwater so he wouldn't see how badly I wanted what I couldn't give him. Now he offered his comfort to another woman's belly and called it duty.

"Then I want a divorce."

I'd never heard my own voice sound like that, flat and level as a table. Eriq heard it too, and he went pale beneath his tan.

"No."

His eyes flashed gold, and the air in the room thickened until the floorboards hummed under my feet.

"I'll never divorce you," he said. "You're my mate. A mate doesn't leave."

"Then what am I? Property?"

"You're the woman I chose."

"You chose me when I was easy to choose." My eyes burned, and I refused to let it show. "You came to my door for five years with promises and presents, and the moment it cost you something, you spent me like a coin."

"Where would you go?" He took one step closer, and his voice dropped the way it did with frightened recruits. "You walked through my gate as an orphan in a borrowed coat. I gave you a name. I gave you a seat at my table. You don't walk away from that."

I had always suspected he thought of it this way, somewhere beneath the kindness. Hearing it said aloud felt like stepping on a stair that wasn't there.

"I'm done wearing a title like a leash, Eriq."

A knock rattled the door. "Alpha? The Beta is waiting about the child's accommodations."

For one stupid heartbeat I thought he would kiss the anger out of me, as he'd done after every fight for five years. I hated how badly I wanted him to. The small, traitorous part of me still leaned toward him like a plant toward a window.

Instead, he stepped back, and his hand went to the door.

"Stay here until you've calmed down," he said. "Don't try to leave. I'll come back after I've spoken to Corwin."

"Eriq."

"We'll talk when you're yourself."

The lock clicked behind him. I pounded on the wood until my palms stung, and no one answered. Somewhere downstairs, men laughed over wine, and the sound climbed the stairs and settled around me like a joke I wasn't in on.

I crawled to the window. Two winters ago, after my first miscarriage, Eriq had fitted it with iron bars so I wouldn't fall if I leaned out too far, and I had thanked him for it with tears in my eyes. Now I pressed my cheek to the cold metal and watched Saskia's trunks go up the east stairs, silk cushions and a painted chest I recognized from my own wedding. Nobody looked up. Nobody needed to.

Hours passed, and the light went from gold to gray to a deep bruised blue. When a guard finally came to the door, I knew his voice, and I clung to that.

"Dorran," I said. "I need water."

"Can't, my lady."

"Dorran, I healed your daughter's fever. Her fever, the one the healers wrote off. It's water."

He laughed softly through the crack under the door, and it wasn't cruel, just tired. "The Alpha says you defied him, and a Luna who defies her Alpha doesn't get pack resources. I've got a family to feed."

"You're afraid of him."

"We're all afraid of him," Dorran said, and his footsteps walked away.

My throat burned and my head grew light, so that I seemed to watch myself from somewhere far above, through a pane of water. The floor tilted gently toward me. I laid a hand over the small, brave secret inside me and promised it that none of this was its fault.

Down in the healing house a bell began to ring, loud and urgent. It was Saskia's bell, not mine, and it brought the whole house running to her side.

The last thing I heard before the dark closed over me was a key turning in my lock, and soft slippers crossing the boards toward where I lay.