002 ~Trophy Luna~

He came home at 2 a.m.

Selene heard the slow roll of tyres on gravel first, unhurried, unbothered, the sound of a car controlled by a man who had decided somewhere between the hotel and here that he had nothing to answer for.

She was sitting in the chair facing the door when he walked in.

He saw her and stopped. Then something moved across his face. Of course it wasn't guilt, she noted. Not even surprise. Just a man adjusting to an inconvenience.

“You waited up.” He said it the way you’d comment on weather.

“Close the door, Victor.”

He did without looking back at her, and his keys on the table. His jacket slid down his shoulders, slowly with a deliberate ease of someone establishing, before a single word was exchanged, that they were not afraid of this conversation which wasn't the way she wanted this to go because he should have been.

“Sit down,” she said.

“Selene—”

“Sit down.”

He looked at her for a moment... Really looked, the way he rarely bothered to anymore, and then pulled out the chair across from her and sat. His tie was loosened with his collar open. He smelled like someone else’s perfume and he hadn’t even had the decency to fix that before walking through the door.

She put her phone on the table between them with the third image face-up, her eyes fixed on his as she whispered... "Look."

He glanced at it and Looked away.

“Well?” she said.

“Well what?” except the tired and dull in his eyes, not even his brows were bothered. It was almost as though she was the exhausting part of this evening.

“That’s all you have?”

“What do you want me to say, Selene?” He leaned back and crossed his arms. “You want me to perform remorse? Write you an apology? Light the candles you already burned down waiting for me?” He nodded toward the dining room doorway, where the ruined table was still visible in the dark. “I saw.”

Nothing hurt more than the cruelty that he’d seen everything she did, every effort she had put to make this evening memorable, and still he sat down without a word. This pain landed somewhere below her chest yet she kept her face still, not wanting to seem weak or hurt by his actions.

“You embarrassed me,” she said.

“You embarrassed yourself Selene... there's no other way to say it. There you are, sitting in a dress at midnight waiting for a husband who—” He stopped, pressing his mouth together.

“Who what.”

He said nothing.

“Finish it, Victor. You’ve already started.”

He looked at her then, and she saw it, the thing he’d been carrying for years, finally tired of being carried. 

It wasn't hatred... No. This was far worse. Not even Contempt stood a chance 

“Who was never coming home to you,” he said. “Not tonight. Not any night you’ve spent waiting like this.”

The room was very quiet, a pin dropped that moment would have caused ones heart to skip a beat.

“Say what you mean,” Selene muttered underneath her breath. “Tonight you’re going to say it clearly.”

He exhaled and sat forward, putting his elbows on the table like they were negotiating a trade deal... Like she was a pack leader he was about to disappoint with terms she wouldn’t like but would ultimately accept.

“You’re my Luna in title,” he said. “That’s all you’ve been for a long time. That’s all this is.”

Finally, There it was.

She’d known it. She had always known it. She had known it in the separate bedrooms and the untouched anniversaries and the three years of sleeping in a bed wide enough that two people could lie in it without their hands ever accidentally meeting. She had known it in every public appearance where he stood close enough to look like a husband and far enough to feel like a stranger. She had known, and knowing didn’t make it smaller.

“No love,” she said.

“Selene—”

“Say it. No love.”

His jaw tightened. “No.”

“No children.”

Something flickered in his eyes but it was gone before she could name it. “No.”

“No intimacy. Not in—” She did the math without wanting to. “Three years. No. Four.”

Silence.

“Victor.”

“Four years,” he said, sharply, like she’d pushed a bruise. “Yes. Four years. Are you satisfied? Does it help, hearing me say it?”

“I want to understand something.” She kept her voice level and it cost her enormously. “Was this always the arrangement when you married me? When you stood in front of every Alpha in the territory and said the words, was I always just the title?”

He stood up at once, as though her words had struck a nerve he didn't want tampered with.

“Don’t,” she said. “Sit down and answer me.”

“You want honesty?” He pushed the chair back. Picked up his jacket from the arm of it. “You were a political solution, Selene. A disgraced Luna nobody else would touch. I gave you a home, a title, A fucking Shield! Respectability. I did you a favour.”

The word hit like an open hand on her face as she whispered the words again... "Favour.""

“Get out of this room,” she said quietly.

“This is my house.”

“Get out of this room.”

He picked up his keys and left as she heard his footsteps on the stairs. He opened the bedroom door, his bedroom, the one at the end of the hall she hadn’t entered in years, close with a firm, final click.

If only he had slammed it, she would have felt the conversation meant something to him... Felt everything that happened was just a little misunderstanding. Unfortunately... Unfortunately. She sighed.

For a long time Seline sat in the dark as a storm of thoughts lived rent free in her head. Then slowly, she put her arms on the table, lowered her head into them, and let go of the breath she’d been holding since midnight.

She did not cry. She hadn’t cried in five years and she wouldn't start now. That part of her had closed the same night everything else did, the same night she’d stood in front of a crowd of wolves who had known her since childhood and watched every single one of them decide what she was before she’d spoken a single word in her own defence.

The Blood Moon Massacre. That was what they called it now like it was something that had simply happened rather than something that had been done.

Twenty-seven wolves were killed In one ceremony all because one Blood Moon rose red and swollen over Blackwood territory.

And Selene, nineteen years old and shaking, standing at the edge of it all with blood on her hands that she could not explain.

She remembered the faces more than anything. The way they’d looked at her. These were people who had watched her grow up, who had called her by her name, who had sat at tables with her and laughed with her and told her she was going to be the finest Luna their generation had ever seen. They all looked at her like she was something they’d found in the dark and didn’t know whether to run from or destroy.

She remembered Kieran’s face most of all.

She always remembered Kieran’s face most of all. The way he’d stood at the front of the crowd and looked at her. Oh how she waited, the moon goddess help her she had waited, because he was her mate, because the bond sang even then, because whatever they were saying she had needed him to look at her and simply know.

And then he’d opened his mouth and the bond had gone silent.

Immediately she understood, in the space of one breath, that she was completely alone.

"You were a disgraced Luna nobody else would touch..." The words echoed in her head.

Victor hadn’t been wrong. He’d just neglected to mention that they were the ones who’d disgraced her.

Her phone buzzed on the table, a text from the unknown number again. This time there was no image, just four words.

"They’re coming back, Selene."

She stared at it and for the first time that night her hands were not steady.

"Who?" She typed.

The reply was immediate.

"You already know who."