Chapter 2 — Her Knight

The rain got heavier the further out I drove, and I was halfway to the border before it caught up with me that Rosalie had never said which bar.

Isaac hadn't been to one of these since his wife had the baby in the spring, so he'd be home with the rota and his phone and no idea what was going on out there. I found his number at the junction and put it on speaker on my knee.

He picked up on the third ring.

"It's Aurelia. Where are the men drinking tonight?"

The line went quiet long enough that I checked the screen to see if the call had dropped.

"Luna." Isaac cleared his throat. "It's a bad road in this weather."

"That isn't what I asked you."

"Does the Alpha know you're coming out?"

The wipers couldn't keep up. I slowed for the flooded stretch past the gates and took it in second, and the water came halfway up the wheels.

"Isaac."

"It's only — let me ring him for you. I'll have him back at the house inside half an hour and you won't have to drive out there at all."

"Don't ring him."

I put my foot down again once the road came back. "He sent me a message saying something urgent had come up at the border. If it's pack business, there's no reason I can't be told where my husband is."

Rain on the roof, and nothing from him for a while.

"Duffy's," Isaac said. "Past the second mile marker, low building, red roof."

Another pause.

"All right. I won't call him." Then, quieter, "Take care going in."

He hung up before I could thank him.

If I'd had a wolf I could have followed Darius out of our own driveway and never made that call at all. I'd stopped counting the nights I'd wanted one. Tonight it was just another thing I didn't have.

The car park was mud and gravel, packed with trucks I recognised, half of them carrying the pack mark on the door. Somebody had left a tailgate down in the rain. Through the fogged-up windows the whole room looked orange.

Nobody turned when I came in. They were all facing the middle of the floor, where three tables had been shoved together and the senior wolves had taken over the far end.

Darius sat with his back half to me. Rosalie was beside him in her thin blue dress, and my husband's black wool jacket hung over the back of her chair.

She lifted a glass, made a face at it and got about a mouthful down before she started coughing.

Darius took it out of her hand without a word and finished it himself.

The table went up. Somebody banged the wood, somebody else whistled, and Rosalie laughed into her wrist while he set the empty glass down.

He hadn't asked. She hadn't offered. She'd just held it out at the height his hand was already at.

"There he goes." Marek, the oldest man at the table, leaned back until his chair creaked. "Her knight. Some habits don't die, do they. Not with marriage."

"She used to come down to the camp every day," Hollis said. "Every single day, that summer. Sat on the fence like she was watching a match."

He pointed his bottle at Darius. "And this one fought like a devil the whole time she was up there. Couldn't put him down."

My hand was on the back of an empty chair. I don't remember taking hold of it.

Darius told me Rosalie was a childhood friend. He'd said it in our kitchen with his phone in his hand, not looking up.

He said it again the night I asked why she called him after ten, and then he asked me if I really wanted to be the kind of wife who counted another woman's phone calls.

"Everybody had it settled," Marek said. "Rosalie Vane, Luna. My wife had the dress picked."

“Fate had other ideas.” Yates was further gone than the rest of them, elbows sliding on the table. “Gave him a wolfless orphan instead.”

Two or three of them laughed. It came out wrong and died fast.

The rest of them found somewhere else to put their eyes—the ceiling, their glasses, the wet patch of floor by the door.

I was eleven the first time somebody called me that, in a schoolyard, by boys whose fathers stand up now when I come into a room.

Five years I'd been their Luna. I'd sat with Gideon's widow every night for a week after we buried him. It took one drunk man and one word to put me back in that schoolyard.

Nobody at that table said anything to Yates.

"Way I heard it," Yates went on, "he only took the orphan because Rosalie picked Gideon over him, and a man's got to—"

Hollis kicked the leg of Yates’s chair.

"The hell was that for?" Yates rounded on him, still going. "I'm only saying what every man at this table—"

Hollis didn't answer him. He was looking past his shoulder, at the door.

Yates turned to see what he was looking at. It took a moment to get through the drink, and his mouth was still open on the end of the sentence when it did.

He shut it.

Chairs scraped. The quiet went along the table in pieces, one man knocking the next one's arm, until the whole room had turned around.

Darius stood up.

"Aurelia."

"Your message said something urgent had come up." I kept my voice level, because every man in that room was listening. "So I came to find you."

He looked at me and didn't say anything.

Nobody in that room said anything either.

I held his eyes and waited.

Darius didn't explain.

Instead he came round the table, took my hand and drew me down into the empty chair beside his, and to anyone watching it would have looked like a husband who was glad to see his wife.

"Since you're all so free with your opinions tonight." He said it to the table, but his hand stayed over mine. "This is your Luna. My mate. The Goddess put her in my path and I'd have taken her with or without a wolf, and I'll go on loving her long after the lot of you have drunk yourselves stupid. Anyone with a problem can bring it to me in the morning."

Yates found something interesting on the floor. Marek raised his bottle.

As he spoke, Darius’s eyes slipped past me to Rosalie, then returned.

It took less than a second. Rosalie's smile stayed where it was, but it stopped moving, and she looked down into her empty glass.

I couldn’t tell whether he wanted Rosalie to hear it.

The door opened behind me, carrying in a burst of rain and cold air.

Isaac stepped inside.

Water darkened the shoulders of his coat, and for a second he stayed near the door, searching the room. His eyes found me first.

Then Darius.

Then Rosalie.

His jaw tightened.

I stared at him.

Isaac was supposed to be home. He hadn't come to one of these nights since the baby was born, and less than half an hour ago I'd been counting on that when I called him.

Yet there he was, rain still running from his coat.

Nobody made anything of his arrival. This wasn't council or a pack ceremony, just a room full of half-drunk wolves, and most of them were still too busy watching Darius and me to notice their Beta had slipped in.

He didn't approach us. He stripped off his wet coat and remained near the end of the bar, but when I looked away, I could still feel his attention on the table.

"Well then." Hollis slapped the table, too loud, glad of anywhere else to put the conversation. "If the Alpha's that devoted, where's our heir? Five years, Alpha. Man your size."

"Give the pack a boy," somebody called from the back.

"Goddess, no." Darius sat back and looked at me, and his whole face came down out of the argument. "A girl. If she comes out with her mother's face she'll be the most beautiful thing in this territory, and she'll run every one of you ragged inside a year."

He turned my hand over on the table. "I've been waiting on that a long while."

The men laughed and it was easy laughter for the first time since I'd walked in.

My other hand was inside my bag. The tissue packet, my keys, the folded square of tissue paper with the test inside it.

Not here. Not in front of forty drunk warriors. At home, with the door shut, I'd ask him why the whole border knew something about him and Rosalie that his wife didn't, and then I'd tell him.

I took my hand out of my bag.

A glass went over at the other end of the table. Rosalie caught it before it rolled off the edge, but she left it lying there on its side.

Her other hand was pressed over her mouth, and her shoulders were shaking.

"Rosalie?" I leaned forward. "Are you all right?"

She shook her head, and the tears came properly then, in front of everyone.

"I'm sorry. I'm so sorry, it's stupid." She pressed her wrist under her eye. "It's only — hearing you all talk about babies."

She sniffled. “Gideon and I were trying, before. We thought we’d have one by now.”

The table died. Marek turned his bottle around in his hands. Two of the younger ones got very interested in the window.

I already had the tissue out. I held it across the corner of the table toward her.

Rosalie turned past my hand and put her face against Darius's shoulder.

He went still, but he didn’t move her off.

His arm came up instead, hand on her shoulder, and he lowered his head over hers.

"He's not forgotten, Ros," he said. "Nobody in this room has forgotten him."

She kept crying. So he tipped her chin up with two fingers and wiped under her eye with his thumb, the way you would for a child, and forty men watched him do it.

My hand was still out between them with the tissue in it.

Darius kept his head bent over hers. Rosalie's fingers came up and closed around his sleeve, and she held on to him there in front of the whole room.

He had stood up at that same table, in front of every one of them, and called me his mate.

I sat with my arm out until it started to ache.

Nobody took the tissue.

I lowered my hand at last and returned the tissue to my bag. My fingers struck the pregnancy test on the way in.

I left that hidden too.