Chapter 1 — The call from the Clan's Doctor.

Lara's POV

"Lucien, mark me."

I moaned the words like a prayer I had been holding back for five years, helpless and wanting as we were both soaked from the shower. I had woken up from sleep and come to him in my nightwear — the thin kind that could be pulled off with one hand — and somehow we had ended up here, under the running water, his body warm against mine while the steam curled around us both.

The water ran down my skin in sheets. And then there was the other kind of wet that had nothing to do with the shower. ‘Wet squared,’ you could call it. The kind that made thinking straight feel like a joke.

I was already turned on beyond any point of return. My back was pressed against him, one hand crossed behind me to grip the back of his head and my fingers curled into his damp hair as I tilted my neck to the side. It was more like an open invitation or better still, a silent plea.

"Please." My voice dropped lower. "Mark me and make me yours. Truly yours."

Five years of marriage and he still hadn't done it. Five years of being called his Luna in every room that mattered, introduced at every clan function, seated at his right side at every table — and yet no mark. Nothing permanent that could feel real and part of him. I was the Luna of the most powerful Alpha in the territory, and that much was true. But it was also the biggest open secret in the entire clan. Because as much as the title was mine by name, I knew exactly what I really was to him. Which was something convenient. Something to use and put down whenever it suited him to fill the position.

I felt him behind me. I mean, all of him. And there was absolutely no question about what his body wanted, even when his mouth would not say it. He was hard against me, and the heat of that alone was enough to make my knees unreliable. My mind had already jumped ahead — to the bed after this, to the possibility of a pub forming from a moment like this. That had always been the quiet dream underneath all the other dreams. A pub, just something that belonged to both of us that he couldn't deny. You know, something he would have to look at and finally see me through.

His breath was warm against the back of my neck and his hands were on my waist. Everything in me was leaning into the moment, into him, into the hope I had been foolish enough to keep alive all these years.

And then abruptly he stopped.

It wasn't gradual as it all felt like a switch in the way his hands left my waist, while his body pulled back. The warmth disappeared like it had never existed, and I felt it the way you feel a door slamming in your face even when you knew, somewhere deep down, that it had never been fully open to begin with.

I turned around.

He had already moved to the shower knob, twisting it to the right and so, the water cut off. 

The silence that replaced it was loud in a way that pressed against my ears. He reached for a towel from the hanger without looking at me, wrapped it around his waist, and by the time he turned back his face was already that straight face. The same one I had spent five years trying to soften and had failed at every single time without exception.

I stood there dripping. Still in the thin nightwear now plastered completely to my skin. Still wanting as I was still embarrassingly and exhaustingly hopeful.

"I warned you." His voice was flat and certain as if he was stating something as obvious as the weather. "I will never mark you. Don't even think about it."

The words weren't new. Even though I wish I could say they hit differently this time and that I had somehow built up a wall thick enough by now to keep them out. But the thing about words you have heard before is that your body already knows exactly how to hurt from them before your brain even has time to catch up.

I swallowed and tried to keep my voice steady. You know, I tried to sound like a woman and not like the seven-year-old girl who had first walked through these clan gates with nothing but a small bag and wide, frightened eyes. "We have been married for five years." I reached up and touched his jaw gently, the way I always did when I was trying to reach him. "I am your luna."

He looked down at my hand like it was something that had landed on him by accident.

Then he grabbed my wrist and shoved it away real hard. It was a deliberate shove, with enough force behind it that I lost my balance completely and went down to the bathroom floor, catching myself on my palms as the cold tile bit into my skin.

For a second I just stayed there with my palm flat on the floor, cheek angled down, and the wet fabric of my nightwear twisted around me. There was a part of me that wanted to stay exactly in that position and not get up. Not because I couldn't, but because getting up meant facing him again, and I was running very low on whatever it was that I had been using to do that for five years.

"So what?" He didn't raise his voice. He never needed that to pass those saucy words. "You have made me sick of you ever since you schemed with that wolf shaman 5 years ago and used my parents to trap me in this marriage."

He pulled the towel tighter around his waist and looked down at me the way you look at something you have already decided is below you.

I pressed my palm to the floor and pushed myself up slowly, sitting upright. My brown hair was dripping onto my shoulders. At this point, my hands were shaking and I hated them for it.

How? How did we go from almost cloud nine to this in the space of 60 seconds. I could still feel the ghost of his hands on my waist. I could still feel what his body had wanted — and it had wanted me. And yet here we were, on opposite sides of a bathroom that suddenly felt like the size of a stadium, the steam was still hanging in the air between us like it hadn't gotten the memo yet.

This was not new, and I reminded myself of that every time without missing out on that. But knowing something was old didn't make it stop cutting. If anything, familiarity made it worse, because it always came with the extra weight of every previous time stacked on top. Every cold look. Every dismissal in front of the clan. Every night I reached for him and found nothing. Every single morning, I had woken up and quietly talked myself into trying again.

And so, I hoped for today again that I had let myself believe that something would be different. That the man who had once genuinely cared about me, without making a single thing about it was still in there somewhere, buried deep under all that pride and bitterness, and that tonight he might finally come to the surface.

Now it all felt like that hope was going to be the end of me one day.

"Lucien, I didn't…" The words came out broken as I couldn't help stuttering and I hated that too. "I never schemed you into this. I never planned any of this, I…"

He was already moving toward the door.

"Wait." I pushed myself to sit up fully and ignored the sting in my palms. "What if we had a baby? Would you look at me differently? Even a little?"

I don't know why I asked it. Maybe because I had nothing left to throw at the wall. Maybe because some stubborn, unreasonable part of me was still hunting for the one sentence that would crack him open, and a baby felt like the last card left in my hand.

Then he stopped and for one terrible, breathless second I thought it had worked.

He turned around slowly. Walked back toward me. And instead of the softness I had been reaching for, he crouched down right in front of where I was sitting on the floor. His hand came out and gripped my jaw — not gently — his fingers pressing in at both sides, tilting my face up until I had no choice but to look directly at him.

"We will never have children." Each word came out separate and deliberate, nailed down one at a time. "And I will never let you carry my child."

His eyes did not waver and his jaw was tight. He meant every single syllable and he wanted me to feel the full weight of all of them. The grip on my jaw was firm enough that I could feel my teeth pressing together, firm enough that there would probably be a mark any moment from now. He held my gaze just long enough to make sure I understood he was not bluffing and never had been.

Then he let go as he pushed my face away as he stood. I fell back against the floor completely this time, the last of whatever composure I had been holding onto going with me, landing hard on the cold tile with zero grace and zero fight left in my body.

I heard his footsteps cross the bathroom. I heard the door open and also heard it close.

And then I just lay there for a while, staring up at the ceiling, listening to the slow drip from the shower head that hadn't fully stopped.

*****

I don't know how long I stayed down on that floor.

Maybe long enough for the tile to stop feeling cold and start feeling like just another surface. Or let's say, long enough for the shaking in my hands to slow down to something I could manage without falling apart. I pulled my knees up to my chest and sat there, and I let the thoughts come, because there was no point trying to hold them back anymore.

I never tricked him into this marriage.

The wolf shaman had spoken the truth. The moon goddess had chosen this — had chosen both of us. 

I hadn't bribed anyone. I hadn't planned a single thing or schemed any of these. I had just been a girl who loved a boy that the universe decided was supposed to be hers, and somehow that simple, honest thing had become the crime he sentenced me for every single day we had lived under the same roof.

But Lucien never believed me. He had made up his mind about who I was long before I could offer any evidence otherwise, and five years of living beside him had not shifted that verdict even slightly. To him I was the schemer. The trap and the worthless omega who had used a prophecy as a ladder to climb above her station.

Never just Lara.

My phone buzzed on the edge of the sink where I had set it before the shower.

I stared at it for a moment before getting up. Although my legs were stiff, I crossed the bathroom floor, picked the phone up, and looked at the screen.

That was Dr. Asher….The clan's doctor.

I accepted the call and pressed it to my ear. “Hello, Dr Asher.”

"Yeah! Luna Lara." His voice was careful and measured…a typical voice of a man choosing his words before saying them. "Your results suspect you may be pregnant. Come to the hospital as soon as possible."

The line went dead before I could respond.

I stood there with the phone still pressed against my ear for a few seconds after he had already hung up, staring at my own reflection in the bathroom mirror. Those damp hair and tired eyes. Also the faint red marks along my jaw from where Lucien's fingers had pressed.

"Pregnant?"

I said it out loud to the empty room. To nobody in particular though, but to my own reflection.

The word sat strange in my chest — not quite joy and not quite fear either, but something caught right between the two that I didn't have a clean name for. This was the thing I had quietly been wishing for. And at the same time, it was the very thing Lucien had told me, not ten minutes ago, with his hand on my jaw and steel in his voice, that he would never allow it.

Would it change anything? Would this finally reach the part of him that five years of trying had never managed to touch?

Or would it make everything so much worse?

I stared at my reflection a moment longer. Then I set the phone down.

Whatever Lucien felt about this was his business to figure out. But this — this was good news to me. And the earlier I decided to see it that way, the better.

Regardless of what came next.