Chapter Two - The Nursery

He didn't come back.

I told myself it was the border, the wounded, the thousand small emergencies an Alpha had to attend to after a battle.

I told myself a lot of things, sitting on the floor with my back against the bed, because the alternative was admitting I already knew exactly whose hand he was holding.

Footsteps passed in the hall. Servants spoke low, trying not to be heard enjoying themselves near a door they knew held someone suffering. Not one knocked or attempted to check on me.

Near midnight I got up, wrenched the door open, and found two of them frozen mid-whisper.

"If you're going to enjoy it," I said, "do it where I can see you."

They scattered. It was a small thing. It was also the first thing all night that had felt like mine.

Then I cried until there was nothing left, and slept where I sat.

A loud noise jolted me awake. For one stupid second, still half inside sleep, I thought: he's home, he's sorry.

Then it came rushing back.

I went downstairs in last night's dress, with my hair loose, and the sight in the front hall stopped me on the last step.

The nursery door was open. Men were carrying things out—the wooden mobile I'd hung with my own hands, hand-carved moons and wolves. The basket of toys. The blue-and-cream curtains I'd sewn myself. All of it going out like garbage.

Directing them, standing in the doorway of the room I'd built out of five years of hoping, was Talia.

Kade stood beside her, arms crossed, face blank, like this was a matter he'd already decided and I was simply late to hear the verdict.

"Put that down," I told the man holding the mobile. He froze. My voice shook despite everything I did to hold it steady. "What is happening to my nursery?"

"Keep going," Talia said, and he did.

She didn't fully turn around. "Our nursery. Something for a real heir."

The floor tilted a second time in two days.

Kade looked at me without a flicker of anything. "There was a complication last night. She started bleeding. We were at the healer until dawn. For the pregnancy to be stable, she needs to be close. She's moving in."

"Into my house."

"Into our house," Talia said sweetly. I wanted to claw the smile off her face.

"You don't get to touch this room." My hands were shaking and I didn't care. "I made this. Every piece of it. For my own child, in my own marriage—"

"A marriage that couldn't produce anything for five years." She finally turned, savoring how hard it landed. "Until suddenly, conveniently, the same week I announce mine."

I didn't even get a breath before she kept going.

"And frankly," she said, gesturing at the confiscated toys, "this room is an embarrassment. Dolls. Moon mobiles. You want to raise a future Alpha heir on ribbons and lullabies? He'll grow up soft. I fought rogue wolves bleeding from three places and never once cried about it. You're sobbing over throw pillows like the world's ending."

"You don't know anything about—" I started, but she cut me off.

"I know you're not fit to be Luna." She said it plainly, which made it worse. "No wolf. No warrior instinct. No child, for five years. It's pathetic."

Something in me that had been quiet for five years snapped.

"Pathetic," I repeated, low. "You slept with someone else's mate and call yourself devoted to this pack. Get out of my house."

Her mouth fell open in outrage so performed I could have laughed. "We fought together. We bled together. This was an accident, not a betrayal—you'd know that if you weren't so busy being jealous of a woman who actually contributes something. A Luna shouldn't behave this way."

"A Luna," I said, "doesn't take another woman's home and call it an accident."

"Enough."

Kade's voice finally cut between us, and for one foolish second I thought it was for me.

It wasn't for me.

He turned to Talia first. "Watch your tone. She holds the title, and the title is owed respect."

Then, to me, in a voice so flat it took me a moment to hear the order inside it: "It's just a room. I'll have another one prepared for you. The pup needs to stay close to its father right now, so she stays. And so do you, and you will not make another scene about it."

Another room. As if the problem were the size of the room.

I looked at the wreckage on the floor and understood, with a clarity that felt almost peaceful, that nothing I said in that hallway would change what happened next. But I could still choose how I walked out of it.

So I knelt down in last night's dress and gathered up my ruined curtains, my broken mobile, everything meant for a child no one in that house had bothered to ask me about. Then I stood, arms full, and made sure every servant on that staircase could hear me.

"Keep the room," I told Talia. "Burn the curtains if you like. But every one of you carried my work out of that door today, and I will remember each face."

I carried it upstairs myself, past both of them, past the servants pretending not to watch.

Behind me, Talia laughed.

I didn't look back until I reached the landing, and when I did, it wasn't grief that stopped me—it was the sound of her voice already downstairs, already giving the servants orders in my house, in my Luna's title, like she'd been rehearsing for this for months.

She hadn't been carrying my husband's mistake.

She'd been planning this.