Chapter Three - The Vow

I made it as far as the bed before my legs gave out, and I sat there with the ruined curtains still in my lap like I hadn't decided yet whether they were worth saving.

The door opened without a knock. Of course it did. This house had stopped believing I deserved any respect the moment Talia's belly started rounding.

"You need to stop this." Kade's voice reached me, flat and impatient, like my grief was an inconvenience he was waiting out.

"I come home from war," he said, "and instead of a wife glad to see me, I get accusations. Tears. A scene in front of the whole pack, and now this—sulking over a room."

I looked at him and tried to find the man who once pressed his mouth to my temple and swore, in front of the whole pack, that he would never let me be small in this house. I couldn't find him. Maybe he was never fully here to begin with. Maybe I only ever loved the promise of him.

Something in my chest went very still and very quiet.

"A room." My voice didn't even sound like mine. "You think this is about a room."

"Then tell me what it's about." He crossed his arms.

So I told him.

"You swore a vow to the Moon Goddess." My hands were shaking, but my voice wasn't, not anymore. "You swore there would be no one else. And you got her pregnant, and you gave her our nursery, and you let her move into our home like she had more right to it than I did. So tell me, what's next? Does she move into this room too? Does she take my title next, and then finally, quietly, take you? Is that the plan, Kade? Am I just waiting my turn to disappear?" I held his stare. "Because I won't. Not quietly."

He didn't flinch, and that broke something in me.

"You've been Luna for five years," he said instead, like it was some sort of answer, "and you know as well as I do what the elders think of that. No heir. Five years, and nothing. Talia is a warrior. Whatever she gives this pack will be strong. Is that not a good thing, for all of us?"

For all of us. Not for me. Never once, in five years, for me.

I kept thinking about all those family ceremonies where I'd had to sit there and smile while the older women whispered behind their hands about me not being able to have children.

And all those nights I'd tried to convince myself that my husband loving me made up for the fact that I couldn't give him an heir. I thought about how the word "strong" was always just code for what they expected her to be, and "sensible" just meant keeping your mouth shut and swallowing your pain. Not once in my life had either of those words meant I was actually wanted for who I was.

And that's when the truth I'd been carrying since yesterday morning finally forced its way out, before I could stop it.

"I'm pregnant too."

There was silence for a long time.

Then he laughed—one short, flat breath with nothing in it. "Don't lie to me, Elira. Five years. Nothing. And now, the very week Talia's pregnancy is announced, you're pregnant too?" His eyes narrowed. "Convenient."

For months, I'd imagined him being overjoyed at the news. I'd imagined the disbelief on his face when I finally told him. I'd imagined his hands finding my belly.

All I got was suspicion, which cut deeper than any laughter.

I didn't reach for the gift box hidden in my dresser. I would not beg to be believed—not by him, not today. I needed to know something first.

"If I am," I said, and my voice did not shake, "will you send her away?"

He didn't answer right away, but that was all I needed to know.

"No," he said finally. "Whatever you're carrying, hers is the heir. That doesn't change."

There it was.

Not a maybe. Not even the courtesy of pretending. Just no.

Even if I was carrying his child, even after five years of silent grief, five years of moon ceremonies and bitter tea and my own body a locked door, it changed nothing.

She stayed. She had always been going to stay, from the moment her belly started rounding in that courtyard, and nothing I carried inside me would ever be enough to undo that.

I was wolf-less. I couldn't fight beside him. I couldn't bleed for the pack the way she had. I couldn't give him the kind of heir the elders had always wanted, strong-blooded and warrior-born.

But I could still say the one word he never expected from me.

"Then divorce me."

His whole body went rigid.

"If you insist on protecting her, on keeping her, on giving her everything you've refused to take back from me, then let me go. Divorce me, Kade. Set me free."

I felt his anger before he even reacted. The room got heavy, like a storm was about to hit.

"No." He growled it. "Never. You will always be my Luna. You don't get to leave."

"I don't want to be your Luna anymore." The tears came now, finally, hot and humiliating and impossible to stop, but I didn't look away. "I want to stop being something you keep out of obligation while you give everything that matters to someone else. I have spent five years being patient. Five years being sensible. I am so tired, Kade. Let me go."

He didn't answer. He didn't have to. A knock interrupted us—the Beta had arrived.

He was insistent on speaking with him about Talia, about the pregnancy, about all the things that apparently outranked this conversation, outranked me, every single time.

Even then, even mid-collapse, this marriage bent toward whatever she needed. I could have been bleeding on that floor and the knock would still have won.

He looked at me for one long moment, the way a man looks at a tool that has stopped doing what it's for.

"Stay here until you remember your place. I'll come back once you've settled, and we are not speaking of divorce again."

Then the door closed, and I heard the click after it had closed.

I tested the handle anyway, because some part of me refused to believe it until I'd felt the door refuse to open under my own hand.

It didn't open.

I pounded on the wood until my palms burned, called out once, twice, until my voice went hoarse. A guard passed eventually, unhurried.

"Water," I said through the door. "I am your Luna, and I'm ordering you to bring me water."

He opened the small gap and looked at me like I was something slightly distasteful he'd been asked to tolerate.

"A Luna who defies her Alpha," he said, almost bored, "and can't even give the pack an heir. Why should any of us waste resources on you."

"Because the day will come," I rasped, "that you'll need me to have been kind."

He shut the gap. The door stayed shut. The hours stretched. My own mouth turned dry, my vision started to get blurry, and somewhere in the long gray hours no one came, no one answered, no one remembered that behind that locked door was a woman carrying the one thing she'd wanted for five straight years, fading slowly on the floor of a room she was no longer allowed to call safe.

The last thing I felt, before the dark finally took me, was my own hand still pressed against my stomach—stubborn, useless.

I was utterly unable to protect the one promise I had left.

My vision was blurry and foggy, and I thought I heard someone running far off, maybe yelling my name.

I wasn't sure. The floor rushed up to meet me, cold and solid. Right before everything went black, I didn't feel scared or sad.

All I felt was fury that I was stuck on that floor, and I did not want to go down without a fight.