All Chapters of The Luna He Chose Was My Cousin : Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

The candles were still burning when the screaming started.I had lit every single one of them myself. Twelve white pillar candles arranged down the center of the dining table, my mother's good silver beside each plate, the wildflowers I had cut from the garden standing in a crystal vase that my father always said was too pretty to actually use. I had spent three hours on that table. Three hours, because tonight was the night I was finally going to tell Jason.His child had been growing inside me for six weeks, and I had been carrying the secret like something fragile, cupped in both hands, terrified to breathe too hard.The screaming shattered every bit of that.It was not one voice. It was many, ripping through the estate all at once, and underneath the voices came a sound I had never heard before in my life. A sound like the pack bond itself was tearing. Like something ancient and deeply wrong had just walked through our gates.My wolf shot upright inside me before my body even move

He never said a word to me.Not one word. Not after the courtyard, not after Selena's hand unhooked from his arm, not after the whole pack had seen the three of us standing there with the truth sitting in the open air between us like something that had already been decided. Jason walked me to a side room off the main hall, told me there would be a full gathering tomorrow morning, that everything would be addressed then, and left.The door closed behind him.I stood there and listened to his footsteps go down the hall, and then I listened to a second set of footsteps, lighter, unhurried, following the same direction. Selena. Going wherever he was going.I pressed both hands flat over my stomach."Okay," I said quietly. To myself. To the baby. To whoever was still listening in a world that had just shown me exactly how alone I was in it. "Okay. Tomorrow."I did not sleep. I lay on the narrow bed in the east wing guest room, the one I had moved to because I could not bring myself to go b

He found me by the eastern wall.Not because he had been looking for long. I had not gone far, just to the stone bench at the edge of the old garden where my mother used to grow herbs in the summer, the one place in this entire estate that still smelled faintly like her. Lavender and something warmer underneath it. I had sat down there after walking away from the square and I had not moved, because I had nowhere else to go and my legs had simply stopped cooperating.I heard him before I saw him. His footsteps, his scent, the specific weight of his presence that my wolf had memorized so completely that she recognized him before my eyes did.She did not reach for him this time.That was new.He stopped a few feet away and looked at me, and I looked back at him, and for a moment neither of us said anything. His jaw was tight. His eyes were doing that thing they did when he was managing something, when the Alpha in him was working harder than the man."You should not have done that," he s

I walked for forty minutes before I found the motel.My wolf scented it before I saw the sign, that specific mix of old wood and damp carpets and too many strangers passing through, and under normal circumstances I would have kept walking. But my feet were aching and the cold had worked its way through my jacket in a way it never had inside pack territory, sharp and unforgiving, like the wind out here had no interest in being gentle with someone it did not know.I pushed through the door.The man at the front desk did not look up. He was writing something in a ledger, slow and unbothered, and I stood at the counter and waited and let him finish because I did not have the energy to announce myself. I was still holding my stomach from the road. Still feeling that flutter. Still hearing my own voice saying I know baby, I have got you, and not being completely sure I was telling the truth.He looked up finally. Took me in once, the bag, the red eyes, the set of my jaw, and did the quick c

I was not late.Five in the morning, I was standing outside the bakery with my hands in my pockets and my breath making clouds in the dark and my wolf already awake and paying attention the way she had been paying attention to everything lately, sharp and quiet and missing nothing.Marta opened the door, looked at me, looked at the time, and said nothing except: "Apron is on the hook. Flour is in the back."That was how it started.The first week was hard in the way new things are hard when your body is already dealing with more than it signed up for. The five o'clock starts. The lifting. The standing for hours on cold stone floors while my back reminded me in increasingly specific terms that I was six weeks pregnant and had not been treating myself gently. By the end of each shift I was exhausted down to the bone, the deep kind of exhausted that sits in you even after you sleep.But I came back every morning.And Marta, who said nothing about anything personal, who asked no questions