chasing his billionaire Luna

Chapter One

My name is Wren Sinclair. I am wife to Kael Ashworth, head of the Ashworth family, and I was born without a wolf.

Every soul in this family has one waiting under their skin, ready to surface, ready to kill for him. Mine never came. I was an orphan the family found half-starved outside a warehouse on the docks, and I was never supposed to sit at the head of his table. Kael chose me anyway, in front of a boardroom full of men who told him it was bad business — too soft, too heavy, too much a liability to sit where I sit — and for five years I have tried to be enough reason for that choice.

The kitchen smells like garlic and seared meat, and I keep wiping my palms on the apron even though they're not sweating from the heat. Twenty floors below, the city glitters through floor-to-ceiling glass like it has no idea what runs it.

I check the roast one more time. I fix the napkins one more time. I smooth down the green dress one more time, the one Kael said matches my eyes, the one I chose because it's the only one in my closet that doesn't make me stand in front of the mirror longer than I can stand to. He never once made me feel like my body was something to apologize for. It's everyone else in this family who taught me that lesson, over and over, until I did it to myself without needing their help anymore.

Five years. Five years of trying, of doctors on his payroll shaking their heads, of men in tailored suits looking at me like I'm a liability on a balance sheet — too much weight to carry, not enough return on it. Five years of swallowing it every single time.

And now there's a small box on the counter, wrapped in gold paper, with a plastic stick inside that has two pink lines on it. Two lines. I've stared at it so many times today that I have the shape of it memorized in the dark.

I press my hand flat against my stomach. Nobody knows yet. Just me. Just this room.

I practiced the moment in my head all morning. Let him sit down first. Let him eat. Let the wine soften his shoulders after weeks handling the border deal himself. Then slide the box across the table and watch his face while he opens it.

None of that matters anymore. Not after this morning.

The private elevator chimes from the foyer.

I don't walk to the door. I run.

His men are already filing into the penthouse, the smell of gun oil and cold air still clinging to their coats, and I push past them until I see him. Him. Home. Alive.

Then I see her arm looped through his.

The world doesn't slow down the way it does in stories. It just stops. Like someone hit pause on my whole body and forgot to hit play again.

Her belly. Round. Small, but round in that unmistakable way.

I know that shape. I've dreamed about that shape on my own body for five years.

Freya Cole is not a stranger. That's what makes it worse. She's his underboss's daughter, an enforcer who has stood at Kael's shoulder since they were kids running the same streets. Lean, hard-muscled, built like something forged instead of born. I've sat across from her at this table and felt every soft, rounded inch of myself sitting next to her like a mistake in the room's design. I've watched her clean a weapon at his side and laugh at things he said, and every single time he told me she was like a sister to him, nothing more, and every single time I believed him because I had no reason not to.

I don't have a reason now either. I just have proof standing in front of me in the shape of a belly.

My voice comes out smaller than I want it to, thin and shaking at the edges. "Kael. What is this?"

He doesn't answer right away, and that silence is its own kind of answer. His jaw tightens. His eyes drop to the marble floor for just a second before they come back up to meet mine, and something in my chest starts caving in before he even opens his mouth.

Every part of me is still begging for a different sentence than the one I can feel coming. Tell me she's hurt. Tell me she's sick. Tell me anything except the thing your face is already telling me.

"Wren." He says my name like it costs him something. Like he's bracing for what it's about to do to me.

Then he says it anyway.

"She's carrying my child."

He says it like he's reading off a shipping manifest. Like he didn't just take a blade and put it straight through my ribs in front of every man in the room.

I can't feel my hands. I can't feel my feet on the marble. I can only hear it, the murmurs starting up around me, quiet at first and then not quiet at all.

Five years and nothing to show for it.

A wife who can't deliver an heir, and can't even keep herself small enough to be forgiven for it.

Maybe Freya really is more suited to run this house.

Someone actually says that last part loud enough for me to hear it clearly, and I want to turn and find the face it came from, but I can't move. My feet are nailed to this floor and my whole body is on fire with the kind of shame that isn't mine, that was never mine, but that everyone in this room is so eager to hand me anyway.

The older men step forward. They're beaming. Actually beaming, like a miracle just walked off that elevator on two legs. One of them claps Kael on the shoulder and calls him a father, finally, after everything, an heir for this family at last.

Nobody looks at me. Or everybody looks at me, and I can't tell which is worse.

I want my legs to move. I want to walk back into the kitchen with my chin up like none of this touches me. Instead I stand there in the green dress I chose for him, the gift box waiting on the counter behind me, while this room decides out loud that I've failed at the only job they ever gave me, and that my body was probably part of the reason why.

"Enough." His voice cuts through it. "She's still my wife."

Still. As if that word is a gift he's handing me. As if I should be grateful he hasn't thrown it away yet.

He starts crossing the room toward me, arms already lifting like he expects me to fold into them the way I always have. Like five minutes ago didn't happen. Like I didn't just watch him introduce another woman's pregnancy to this entire room with his arm around her waist.

I put both hands on his chest and shove.

He barely moves, he's twice my size and I have no wolf to give me any strength at all, but the shock on his face tells me the push landed exactly where I wanted it to.

I turn. I walk out. I don't care how it looks, I don't care what they'll say tomorrow, I just need four walls between me and every single person who just watched that happen to me.

I make it to our bedroom and I'm still shaking when the door opens behind me without a knock.

Of course Kael followed me.

Of course Freya followed him.

"What is wrong with you?" His voice fills the room before I've even turned around. "I just closed a deal that took months and nearly cost me the border. I come home and instead of a welcome, you humiliate me in front of my own men."

I humiliated him.

I laugh, and it comes out broken, nothing like a real laugh. "You brought her home pregnant and I humiliated you."

He exhales like I'm the exhausting one here, like I'm a problem he has to manage before he can rest. He steps closer, and his voice drops into that register I know too well, the soft one, the one built to make the ground stop shaking under me.

"I'm tired, sweetheart. I just want to be alone with my wife."

My chest cracks straight down the middle. Because some small, stupid, starving part of me still wants to walk into that voice like it's a warm room. I hate that part of me right now.

"Why." My voice comes out wrecked. "Why would you do this to me. To us. I'm your mate."

He doesn't flinch when he answers, which somehow makes it worse. "There was a gathering after the deal closed. Freya was there. I'd had too much wine — more than I should have, I know that. I don't remember most of the night." He says it steady, rehearsed, like he's practiced this exact wording somewhere before saying it to me. "I woke up and she was beside me. I didn't know what happened until the doctor confirmed the pregnancy weeks later."

I search his face for the part where this falls apart, because it has to. Somewhere in that explanation there has to be a crack.

"Weeks later." My voice is flat. "You didn't think to tell me the morning after? Or the week after? You waited until she was showing enough that everyone in that room could see it before I heard a single word about any of this."

"I didn't want to hurt you over something that might have been nothing."

"Might have been nothing." I almost laugh. "You woke up next to another woman with no memory of the night before, and you decided the kind thing to do was keep that from your own mate."

Freya, silent until now, finally speaks from the doorway, arms crossed loosely over the small curve of her stomach. "Maybe if you spent less time in this kitchen and more time keeping yourself in any kind of shape, you'd understand why an accident like that could happen." Her voice is almost gentle, which makes it crueler. "I'm not trying to be unkind, Wren. I'm just saying what everyone in that room downstairs was already thinking."

The words land exactly where she means them to. I've spent five years hearing versions of it whispered behind hands at family dinners. Hearing it said to my face, in my own bedroom, by the woman carrying my husband's child, is a different kind of wound entirely.

"Get out," I say, and my voice doesn't shake this time.

She shrugs, unbothered, like she's said nothing at all, and doesn't move from the doorway.

He doesn't have an answer for any of it. He just says the part that matters to him, the only part.

"I love you. Only you. You're my only wife."

And then, like it's supposed to fix everything: once the baby is born, I'll adopt it. Problem solved. No more of the old men breathing down our necks. No more pressure. He's doing this for the family. For stability. For us.

For us.

He tells me not to make a scene. He'll make it up to me. Anything I want, I can have it, later, quietly, the way he always does.

That's when it lands, the full weight of it, because I recognize this. I've lived this exact pattern for five years. The old men push, he lets them win a little, and then he comes to me in private with soft words and a promise wrapped around whatever he just handed away. A canceled trip. A seat on the board given to someone else. A name moved to the back of the ledger.

I always took the soft words. I always let the apology be enough, because the alternative was believing that the man I bonded with would let this family carve pieces off me one at a time and call it business.

Except this time what he handed away isn't a seat at a table or a line in a contract.

It's a child.

And I don't need his. I have my own.

I open my mouth to tell him, the words are right there, I'm pregnant, I finally, after everything, I'm pregnant—

Freya cries out behind him, both hands flying to her stomach, and just like that his whole body turns toward her instead of me.

"Stop." He doesn't even look back at me when he says it. "You're always the sensible one. Not now."

And he walks out that door with her, leaving mine half-formed in the air behind him, leaving me standing in the middle of our room with a gift box on the nightstand that he still hasn't opened, and two pink lines that no one in this family knows about yet except me.