INICIAR SESIÓNDiana's POV "Look at your hand." He nodded at it, pressed flat to my back, and I made myself take it away, too late. His eyes gleamed. "A woman doesn't stand like that over nothing. That baby is a Fletcher. My Fletcher. And a child of my blood in the belly of the woman who holds the Moon Crown is a claim, Diana. A real one. One even your courthouse tricks can't sign away.""The child is mine." Travis stepped up beside me, and his voice had gone flat and cold in a way I'd never heard from him. "Born of my marriage. Under my name. There's no claim here for you to make, Ian. Go home to the woman who's actually carrying yours."That struck. I saw it strike. Ian's jaw worked, and for half a breath the fever in his eyes guttered, and I understood Travis had aimed for the one soft place Ian had left. Then the fever came back, brighter for having flickered."Your name." Ian's eyes cut to him, and he smiled, slow and awful. "You'd claim it, wouldn't you. Of course you would. You've wanted her
Diana's POVThe knock at the gate came just past nine, and it wasn't a knock so much as a fist. Three blows, hard, spaced like a man who meant to be answered and would keep at it until he was. I knew the rhythm of it before the guard's voice ever came over the house line. I'd lived with that impatience for three years.Travis was up before I'd set my tea down. "Stay here.""It's my gate," I said, and followed him anyway, one hand pressed flat to the small of my back the way I'd caught myself doing all day, the way that meant more now than it ever had."Diana." He caught my wrist at the door, gentle. "The doctor said no strain. She said it twice.""And I said it's my gate." I met his eyes. "I have spent my whole life being moved out of rooms for my own good, Travis. My father did it. Ian did it. The council did it to me this very morning. You're the one man who promised he wouldn't. Don't start now."He held my look a beat. Then he let go of my wrist and stepped aside, and something in
Ian's POV "I know what it means to me," she said. "It means you're standing in my living room lit up like it's the best night of your life, over her, while I sit here with your actual child kicking me in the ribs." She pressed a hand flat to her belly. "This one. The real one. The one that's actually yours for certain, because I have never once lied to you about a thing in my whole life, which is more than you can say for the woman you keep driving past.""If that baby is mine—""Listen to yourself." Her voice went sharp and thin. "If. You divorced her. You called her barren in front of a hundred phones. You rejected the mate bond. You gave me your child. And the second you hear she might be carrying, you're pacing my living room asking if it's yours." She stood, one hand bracing her back. "Do you know what that makes me? Do you know what that makes this?" She gestured at her own body, at the child in it. "A backup. In case the one you actually wanted worked out after all.""That's n
Ian's POVI heard the information from a bartender, of all people.Not from the council. Not my own family. From a man wiping down glasses at the pack tavern, who leaned in like he was doing me a kindness when he said he'd heard the Luna was expecting, and wasn't that fast work for a marriage barely a month old.I laughed in his face and told him to mind his pour."Careful what you spread," I said. "That's the Luna you're gossiping about. Words like that have a way of finding the wrong ears.""Just repeating what I heard, Mr. Fletcher." He didn't stop wiping the glass. He didn't call me Alpha either, I noticed. Nobody had, in weeks. "The whole tavern's been saying it since the fires. New consort, new baby on the way. People do like a fresh start.""People like anything that isn't their own dull lives.""That they do." He set the glass down. "Another?""No." I turned the glass a slow circle on the wood. "This baby. Who told you. Give me a name and there's money in it.""No name to give
Brielle's POVI thought of the letters in the shoebox. Dear Diana. I miss you more than I let myself admit. I thought of her thin silver bracelet, wrapped in a handkerchief, kept close, kept where he could reach it whenever he wanted to hold something that used to be hers. All the small proofs I'd found and hated, that the man I ruined my name for had never once stopped loving the woman I helped him throw away."Ian doesn't know," I said."No. And you are not going to tell him." My father crossed the room and took my chin in his hand, the way he had when I was small and had done something he didn't like. "You're going to do exactly what you've always done, Brielle. Stay close to him. Smile. Wait. And when the moment comes, you'll hand me the boy who thinks he loves you, and I'll hand you the only thing you've ever truly wanted.""Which is?""To be someone your mother didn't walk out on." He said it softly, like a gift. It cut deeper than any blade he could have used. "To matter. I can
Brielle's POVMy father poured himself a drink and didn't offer me one, which told me more than anything he'd said so far."Sit down, Brielle.""I've been standing for ten minutes, and all you've told me is that two buildings burned and that it went the way it needed to." I stayed on my feet. "So no. I'll stand until you tell me what I broke every speed limit in the dark to hear."He took his time. He always did, when he wanted a person off balance. He crossed to the cold fireplace and looked into the dead ash like it held more interest than I did."You know what a Beta is," he said. "To a pack.""The second. The one who serves the Alpha.""The one who serves." He turned the words over, tasting the rot in them. "Thirty-one years, Brielle. I served her father while he lived. I served that girl while she played at ruling with a husband who couldn't keep his hands off my own daughter's friends. Thirty-one years standing one step behind a chair that was never once going to be mine, watchi







