Chapter 3 — What a Luna Should Be

My bag was still open on my lap when I looked up and found Isaac at the end of the bar, watching.

His eyes went from Rosalie's hand on my husband's sleeve to me, then back again, and he put his glass down without drinking out of it.

Finally he came over.

"Mrs. Vane."

Rosalie didn't lift her face off Darius's chest.

"I know tonight is difficult for you," Isaac said. "But you're holding on to the Alpha in front of his men, and your Luna is sitting at this table."

"I understand," Rosalie said into the shirt.

"Mrs. Vane." He waited until Marek set his bottle down, and by then most of the near end had stopped talking. "She's sitting right there."

Rosalie came off him slowly, the way you do when you want a room to see how hard it is. She wiped under both eyes with the heel of her hand.

"I'm sorry. Grief doesn't ask if it's a good time." She smoothed her skirt over her knees. "Darius is one of the only people left who knew Cyrus properly. Who knew all three of us, back then."

Then she turned to me, and her voice went gentle.

"You didn't grow up with us, Luna. I don't think you could know what the three of us were to each other."

"You're right," I said. "Nobody ever taught me that growing up beside a man gives a woman the right to handle him like he's hers."

The bottle stopped turning in Marek's hands. Hollis found something to read on his label, and two of the younger ones looked at the window again.

Colour rose along Rosalie’s throat, she reached for an empty glass, pretending not to notice. I drew breath to finish what I had started.

"Honey."

I turned around.

He'd said it maybe four times in five years, and never in front of anybody, so I was still looking for the joke in it when he smiled at me.

It was the smile from the early days, before the funeral, and I felt it go through me before I could put a hand up against it.

"Drinks are on me," he said to the room. "All of them. Nobody puts a hand in their pocket tonight."

The table went up. Somebody banged the wood, and somebody at the back shouted for the Alpha and his Luna, and the shout got taken up along the far end where they couldn't even see us.

Darius held his hand out to me.

“Ready to go home?”

My hand was in his before I had time to question it.

He drew me out of the chair and rested his palm against my back, guiding me between the tables. I let myself believe he had finally seen it—all of it. The tissue Rosalie had ignored, the hand I had held out until my arm ached, every moment I had sat beside him pretending not to break.

Now he was taking me home, where we could shut the door on everyone else.

I already had the words ready. I would tell him about the baby in the car.

But then I realised the till was behind us.

Darius hadn’t even looked at it.

He led me past the toilets and through a swing door into the back corridor, where the noise of the bar faded to a muffled hum behind the wall.

"Darius, the cashier's the other—"

He let go of my hand.

"Do you think you could try being broad-minded? Just once."

The smile had gone off his face somewhere between the door and the wall.

"She buried her husband eight months ago," he said. "And you humiliated her in front of my men over a chair."

"I offered her a tissue."

"You know what you did."

I stood there with my back to the cold plaster and made myself say it evenly.

"Have I failed as your Luna? Or was it never me you wanted in the position?"

"Don't."

"Answer me."

"If I hadn't accepted you," he said, "you would still be a wolfless orphan begging for shift work at the border, and every man in that room knows it."

The wall was cold through my coat.

"Wolfless," I said.

He stepped closer. I moved back on instinct, but my palm met cold plaster. There was nowhere left to go.

"You enjoy everything that comes with being my Luna," he said. "The house, the name, the way they stand up when you walk in. That comes with carrying yourself properly. You don't make a scene in a room full of my warriors every time you feel jealous of a widow."

He looked at me a moment longer. "Five years, Aurelia. You should know by now what a Luna is supposed to be."

Somebody laughed on the other side of the wall, then a chair went over and a lot of them laughed.

Darius straightened his cuff.

"Fix your face," he said. "We're going back in."

Darius put his hand against my back again before guiding me through the door.

“We changed our minds,” he announced as the table turned towards us. “We’ll eat before we go.”

Fen twisted around on his stool, sloshing his drink over his knuckles.

“Changed your minds?” His grin widened. “I passed that corridor on my way to take a piss. The Alpha had his Luna pinned against the wall.”

He raised his glass to the room. “They were never going home. Five years married, and our alpha still can’t wait until he gets her there.”

The table erupted around him.

I smiled and let them have it.

Darius didn’t correct him.

"Can we eat?" Rosalie said. "I'm starving, and there's been food out for an hour."

The plates came down the table and everybody reached at once.

"Darius." She pushed her plate across. "Will you do mine?"

He did it without asking her a single thing. Two of the outside cuts because she doesn't eat the pink middle, the onions scraped off onto the edge of his own plate, then the pickled beets she likes spooned on last so the juice wouldn't run into anything else.

Rosalie laughed as he set it in front of her.

"How do you always remember?"

"You've eaten the same way since you were nine."

The men at the far end were arguing about the border rota. Marek had gone back to his bottle. Nobody at that table thought anything of it at all.

I moved a potato around my plate and put my other hand flat on my bag, where the tissue paper was still folded around the little plastic stick, and I ate about four mouthfuls of a dinner I hadn't wanted.

Rosalie reached across for the salt, and her elbow caught the jug.

Rosalie jerked back as the orange juice soaked through the front of her dress. One hand flew to her neckline while the other hovered uselessly over the table.

"Oh—" She was half up off the chair. "Darius—"

I pulled a napkin from the stack and rose before he had finished setting down his knife. As I rounded the table, I caught his gaze lowered to the wet fabric clinging to her breasts, following the trail of juice to where it disappeared beneath her neckline.

He only looked away when he noticed me approaching.

I stopped beside Rosalie and held out the napkin.

“Let me.”

"Better me than another woman's husband cleaning your chest in front of his wife," I said, and I said it at ordinary volume, so the near end of the table heard every word of it.

Rosalie's hand came up over the wet patch.

"Goddess, I'm sorry. I didn't think." She looked up at me with her eyes very wide. "Darius always used to sort me out when I did this, so it honestly never crossed my mind you'd mind."

Somebody coughed into their fist.

“It always ends up there when I spill something,” Rosalie said with a small laugh, dabbing at her neckline. “One of the tiny inconveniences of having a fuller figure.”

Her gaze slipped from my collar to my chest before returning to my face.

“You’re fortunate, Luna. I suppose you’ve never had to worry about that.”

I opened my mouth to retaliate almost immediately.

A hand closed round my wrist.

Darius had come round the table behind me, and he took the hand with the napkin in it and folded my fingers shut over the cloth, from the other side of the table it would have looked like he was holding his wife's hand.

He didn't let go.

"You've gone pale," he said. "You need your bed."

"I'm fine."

"Isaac." He didn't take his eyes off me. "Take the Luna home."

Isaac was already off his stool. "Alpha—"

"Now."

His thumb passed over my knuckles once, the way it had when he stood at that table and called me his mate.

Then he released me and returned to his seat beside her.