All Chapters of The Unwanted Plus-Size Luna: Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

The pack meeting was supposed to be nothing. Grain stores, border patrol rotations, a dispute between two families over a fence line that had dragged on for a full season longer than it deserved to. Kade sat at his father's side the way he always did, half listening, nodding in the right places, letting the Alpha's voice carry the room while his own mind wandered somewhere it had no business going.He wasn't supposed to be looking at Wren.She was near the back, arms crossed, half in shadow, exactly where she'd been standing for every meeting since the ceremony, as if she'd already decided that was her place now and stopped fighting it. Nothing about that should have caught his attention. He'd trained himself not to look for her in a crowd anymore, had gotten good at it these last few days, and yet somehow his eyes had drifted there again without asking his permission first.She looked tired. Bandages wrapped both hands, fresh enough that he could smell the salve from across the room,

Corwin caught her by the elbow before she'd made it twenty feet from where Darius had left her standing, his grip firm but not unkind, the grip of someone who'd rather stop trouble before it started than clean up after it later."A word," he said, already steering her toward the shade of the smokehouse wall, out of the open."I'm a little busy.""You're about to be busier if you don't hear me out first." He released her arm once they were clear of the main path, dropping his voice to something low and clipped. "What was that.""That was Darius asking if I'd let him train me.""In front of half the pack.""He didn't ask me to pick the audience."Corwin's jaw tightened. "Wren. You understand how this looks.""Enlighten me.""It looks like you're encouraging an outsider nobody trusts to attach himself to you in full view of the entire camp, days after your own rejection ceremony." He said it flatly, without cruelty, which somehow made it land harder than if he'd meant it as an insult. "T

The training grounds were empty at this hour, mist still clinging low to the grass, and Darius was already there when Wren arrived, waiting without looking impatient about it."You're early," he said."You said before the pack wakes up. I wasn't going to be the reason we got caught.""Good instinct." He nodded toward the center of the ring. "Come here."She crossed the packed dirt, aware of exactly how loud her own footsteps sounded in the quiet, and stopped an arm's length from him, close enough to feel the difference in the air around him, cooler somehow, like standing near a doorway cracked open to somewhere else. She'd noticed that before, at the tree line, at the well, but never this close, never with nothing else around to distract from it."You're staring," Darius said, without looking especially bothered by it."You're standing very still for someone who's supposed to be teaching me something.""I'm deciding where to start." His eyes moved over her, assessing rather than anyth

Wren was halfway through her second lesson of the week when Corwin came to fetch her, and the look on his face said this wasn't a request."The Elders want to see you," he said. "Now.""About what.""You know about what." Corwin glanced once at Darius, who hadn't stopped his approach toward them, unhurried as ever. "This isn't a conversation you get to skip."Darius fell into step beside her without being asked. Corwin opened his mouth to object."Don't," Darius said, and Corwin closed it again.They walked the rest of the way in silence, Corwin setting a pace fast enough to make clear he wasn't interested in conversation, and Wren spent the whole distance running through what she might say, what she might need to defend, and coming up with nothing that felt adequate against a room full of people who'd already decided what her answer should be before she gave it. Beside her, Darius said nothing at all, which somehow steadied her more than any reassurance would have.The lodge was full

Wren sat on the floor of her room with her back against the bed, too tired to climb into it properly, and let the day finally catch up to her all at once.The Elders. The Alpha. The words she hadn't been meant to hear on her way out the door. It all sat in her chest like something swallowed wrong, too big to cough up and too heavy to just carry quietly the way she'd carried everything else since the ceremony. Even her own bed felt too far away tonight, like reaching it would require more effort than she currently had to spend.She pressed a hand flat against her own sternum, the way she sometimes did when her pulse wouldn't settle, and tried something she'd never tried on purpose before."Are you in there," she said, quiet, feeling foolish the second the words left her mouth. "Whatever you are. Whoever you are. I don't even know what to call you."Nothing answered. She hadn't expected it to. But she kept going anyway, because the silence of her own room was worse than the silence of t