CHAPTER TWO: The Nursery

Lena POV

I sit on the edge of the bed with my phone in both hands and wait for it to light up.

9:12. I type: Please come back. I need to tell you something important. I look at it, delete

important, and send it.

Delivered.

I watch the word until the screen dims. I tap it awake. Still delivered. Not read.

I call. It rings five times and goes to his voicemail, his own voice telling me to leave a

message. I hang up before the beep. I call again at 9:40. Again at 10:15. The third time it

doesn't ring at all, just goes straight through.

Downstairs, the house is loud. Doors, footsteps, a man's laugh, a woman telling someone

to mind the stairs. At eleven someone pops a bottle. A cheer follows it, short and ragged,

and then a lot of voices saying the same word. Heir. Heir. A glass breaks and they laugh at

that too.

I take off the heels I forgot I was wearing. My feet are swollen and red where the straps

were. Our door is open. Nobody closed it after he walked out with her, and I haven't gotten up

to do it. Feet pass in the hall. Marta, I think, by the slow step. A younger one, carrying

something that clinks. Two men talking low. Every one of them goes past my door at the

same speed. Nobody slows. Nobody knocks.

I count the footsteps for something to do. Eleven pairs between ten and midnight. At

11:50 a pair stops outside the door, and my heart jumps. It's a boy carrying a tray of

glasses. He sees me through the gap, goes red, looks away, and keeps walking.

I'm the Luna. I've sat at the head of the table in this house for five years. I know what

each of them takes in their coffee and whose daughter had surgery in March. I

remembered Marta's birthday this year when her own son didn't.

Nobody knocks.

I scroll my contacts. Gavin. Marta. Dr. Amari at the clinic. The pharmacy. The dry cleaner.

The woman who does the flowers for gatherings. I reach the bottom and scroll back up.

I was nine when Gavin's father found me. A wrecked car on the shoulder of Route 9, a

seatbelt that wouldn't release, nobody in the front seats who could tell anyone my name.

Gavin was eleven. He stood next to his father and held out half a sandwich in a napkin. I

took it. I hadn't said a word in two days. That was how it started, and for twenty years he

was the only person who ever told me I belonged somewhere.

I put my hand on my stomach and breathe out. It shakes coming out.

"I'm here," I say. It's a whisper. I'm not sure who I'm saying it to. "I'm here."

At one in the morning I go down the back stairs in my socks. The kitchen is dim. The

steak is on the counter in its pan with a skin of white fat across the top. The potatoes are cold. Somebody has taken the salmon and left the plate. Somebody has also taken the

good wine, the bottle I put out for him.

I stand there. Then I wrap the steak in foil, because I can't make myself throw it away,

and I put it in the fridge.

When I get back upstairs I don't climb into the bed. I sit on the floor next to it with my

back against the frame, with my knees pulled up, and I put my forehead on them. I cry

without noise. I've had a lot of practice. When you're the quiet one in a house you learn

how to do it so it doesn't carry.

At some point the ceiling light is gray instead of dark.

I wake to a bang.

It comes through the floor. Something heavy dragged across tile, then a man saying,

"Left, left, your other left." My neck is stiff. I'm still in the green dress, creased through

the middle, and my mouth is dry and sour. The clock says 7:41.

Another bang. A woman's voice, loud and certain. "Not there. By the window."

I know that voice.

I take the front stairs two at a time and stop on the landing.

The hall is full of boxes. Not mine. Black cases with metal corners, a long duffel, a folded

weight bench, a punching bag still in plastic. Two men from the house crew are carrying

a mattress in through the front door, and I watch them take it the wrong way and turn it,

and I realize where they're taking it.

The nursery is the first door on the right. I walk. My socks slide on the tile. The door is open.

The walls are still the pale yellow I picked in March after standing in the paint aisle for

an hour holding a sample in each hand. Everything else is gone. The white crib. The

glider by the window. The shelf I put up myself with a borrowed drill, crooked by a

quarter inch because I couldn't get the level to settle. The mobile of felt moons Marta

helped me stitch. There are rectangles on the floor where the furniture stood, paler than

the wood around them. It's like it was never there.

I find it all in the hall behind me. The crib is in pieces against the wall. The felt moons,

the books, the stuffed rabbit, the little blankets I washed twice, are in a black contractor

bag with the top open. Someone has tossed a shoe box on top.

"What did you do?"

Sloane turns around. She's in a gray tank top and training pants, hair in a high knot, a

tablet in one hand. She looks like she's slept eight hours. "Morning, Luna. You're up."

"What did you do to my nursery?"

"I'm setting it up." She says it like it's obvious. "It's the biggest room on this floor and it's

next to the Alpha's study. I need the space."

Gavin comes out of the study with a coffee. Clean shirt, wet hair. He sees me and stops.

"Lena."

"Where were you?" "The hospital." He sets the cup on the hall table. "Sloane had bleeding around two. Dr.

Hale kept her for observation. I stayed with her."

"I called you. I called six times."

"My phone was in my jacket. I'm sorry." He glances at the nursery. "Look. The doctor

says she has to be near me. Stress is a risk. The pup needs the Alpha close. So she's

moving in here until the birth."

"In here."

"In the house."

I look at the mattress. The two men have stopped and are looking anywhere but at me.

"This was for our child," I say.

"I know."

"I painted these walls."

"I know you did. I'll make it right." He rubs his eyes. "There's a guest room on the second

floor. We'll redo it."

"Tell them to put it back."

"Lena, not now."

"Tell them." My voice is louder than I mean it to be. I hear it hit the walls. "Tell them to

put the crib back. Put every piece of it back." Sloane lowers the tablet. "It's not a nursery for my son, Gavin."

"Sloane—"

"I'm serious." She steps into the empty room and turns slowly, looking at the yellow

walls. "Dolls. Bunnies. Pastel moons. This is a room for a doll collector." She looks at

Gavin. "He'll be the heir of this pack. You want him raised in a place that looks like a

bakery?"

"It's not—" I start.

"He's going to be a fighter. Like his father." She says it to me, finally. "Like me. I'm not

putting him to sleep under a ceiling of felt. Soft rooms make soft kids."

"Don't say 'he' like you know."

"I know."

"You don't know anything about—"

"What I know," Sloane says, "is that I fought next to your husband for six years. I took a

rogue's teeth in the thigh at the east ridge. I held my own stitches shut in the back of a

truck for forty minutes. I didn't cry once."

She steps closer. She's taller than me by a head and she uses all of it.

"And you're standing in a hallway at eight in the morning crying over wallpaper."

I realize my face is wet. I didn't feel it start. "A Luna with no wolf and no pup," she says, quietly now, just for me. "And she can't

handle a paint color. Honestly. How do you run a pack like that?"

Behind her, a man from the crew sets down his end of the mattress as gently as he can.

Everything I have kept in for five years comes up at once. All of it. Every dinner, every

wine glass, every quiet "not yet, Elder." Every time I told myself the pack was only being

cruel because they were frightened, and one day they would see I was trying.

I wipe my face with the heel of my hand.

"You're right," I say.

Sloane's mouth twitches.

"You're so strong. You're so devoted to this pack." I take a step toward her. I don't know

where it comes from. My voice is level and cold and I don't recognize it. "You love it so

much you couldn't wait for another woman's husband to come home. You got into an

Alpha's bed. Shameless bitch." I point at the open front door. "Get out."

The hall goes still.

"Wow," Sloane says, after a moment. She lets out a breath, almost a laugh, and looks at

Gavin with her eyes wide. "Okay. You heard that."

"Yes."

"Gavin and I were in the field together. We were comrades. What happened was an

accident. I didn't plan it, and I'm not the one who's making it ugly." She tilts her head at

me like she's sorry for me. "Jealousy doesn't suit you. A Luna shouldn't behave like this.

Not in front of the staff." My hands are shaking so hard I fold my arms to hold them still.

I look at Gavin. I wait. One word. I know exactly which one.

He picks up his coffee.

"Sloane," he says. It comes out low. "Remember your place. She is the Luna. You don't

speak to her that way."

Sloane's face closes. "I was only—"

"Enough." He turns to me. His voice goes soft and I feel my stomach turn over. "Lena. It's

a room. That's all it is. I'll have another one ready for you by the weekend. Any color you

want. I'll have Marta call a decorator."

"It's not a room."

"The pup has to stay close to its father. That's what the doctor said. It's only until she

gives birth." He steps toward me. "Then she moves out, and everything goes back. I

promise. Please don't turn this into a scene in front of everyone."

I look past his shoulder. The crew has gone very busy with the zip ties on the mattress.

In the doorway to the kitchen Marta stands with a dish towel in her hands and her eyes

on the floor.

He never asked what I was going to say. He didn't ask last night, and he hasn't asked this

morning.

I nod once. I don't trust my voice. I walk past him to the black bag and pull it open the rest of the way. I take out the felt

moons first, and the rabbit, and the folded blankets. I put the books in the crook of my

arm. The shoe box slides off and spills a pair of tiny white socks onto the tile. I pick those

up last and hold them in my fist.

I carry everything up the stairs. Nobody stops me. Nobody offers to carry anything.

When I reach our door, I close it behind me and slide the lock across.

Downstairs, the dragging starts again.