A Luna's Revenge After Betrayed

The Pack House felt colder than the night outside.

I pushed the heavy oak door shut behind me and leaned against it for a moment, my heels throbbing inside silver pumps I'd worn for nine straight hours. The Harvest Gala had run long. Three speeches. Two toasts. A dance with the visiting Alpha from Crescent Ridge who'd held my waist a beat too long while his mate watched from across the room.

I just wanted Jasper.

I wanted him to unzip the back of this stupid green silk gown and tell me I'd done well. I wanted him to pour me a glass of the bourbon he kept in the study and let me put my bare feet on his lap.

That was the small, stupid prayer in my head as I climbed the curved staircase.

I was halfway to the second landing when I heard it.

A woman's voice. Breathy. Catching.

"Jasper—oh god, Jasper—"

My foot froze on the step.

For a second I thought it was the wind, or a TV left on, or one of the staff watching something they shouldn't. The Pack House had thirty-two rooms. Sound traveled. I told myself that.

Then I heard him.

His low groan. The one I knew. The one I'd only ever heard in our bed.

"That's it, baby. Just like that."

The bourbon I hadn't even drunk yet rose into my throat.

My hand locked onto the banister. The wood was cold. My fingers were colder. I couldn't feel them. I looked down at my own hand and it didn't seem to belong to me — pale knuckles, my grandmother's wedding ring catching the chandelier light, trembling against the polished oak.

The bedroom door — *our* bedroom door — was at the top of the stairs. I could see the strip of warm yellow light bleeding out from the bottom of it.

I didn't move.

The mattress was creaking. A rhythm. Their rhythm.

I clamped my hand over my mouth so hard I tasted copper where my teeth split the inside of my lip. A sound was trying to come out of me and I couldn't let it. I couldn't. If I made a sound he'd know I was here, and somehow — somehow in this moment — that felt worse than what was happening.

The ceiling tilted. Or I did.

I don't know how long I stood there. It might have been ten seconds. It might have been five minutes. The chandelier above the foyer made small tinkling sounds every time the heating vent kicked on, and I counted them. One. Two. Three. Four. Like a child counting sheep, except I was counting the seconds my marriage took to end.

I turned. I went back down the stairs.

I was crying without sound. The tears were running into my mouth and I could taste salt and the iron of my split lip and the cheap champagne from the gala all at once. My pumps slid on the marble. I gripped the rail with both hands like an old woman.

I made it to the bottom step and there was Leo.

My son. Five years old. School backpack still on his shoulders, the little blue one with the stitched moon on the front that I'd picked out for him in August.

He looked up at me.

I dropped to my knees. The silk tore at the seam. I didn't care.

"Leo, baby—"

He looked at my wet face. He looked at my shaking hands. His expression didn't change.

He nodded at me. A small, polite nod. The kind a child gives to a teacher he doesn't know well.

Then he walked past me toward the kitchen.

I stayed on my knees in my torn dress.

I should have been used to it by now. Jasper had warned me when I'd carried Leo: *Our line runs cold. Don't take it personal when the boy doesn't crawl into your lap.* And Leo never had. Not when he was teething. Not when he'd fallen off the swing and split his chin. Not on his first day of pre-K when every other mother got a hug at the door and I got that same small nod.

I had told myself it was just how Blackridge wolves were built. The Sterns ran cold. I had married into ice and I had learned to live in it.

But tonight, with my husband's voice still echoing in the upstairs hall, I felt the cold differently. It wasn't a trait. It was a verdict.

I dragged myself up by the banister.

I was going to go back up there. I was going to push that door open and look him in the eye and—

A door opened above me.

I heard footsteps. Two sets.

I froze at the bottom of the stairs and watched my husband come down.

Jasper was in gray sweatpants and a half-buttoned shirt, his dark hair still damp at the temples. He had his arm around a woman's waist. She was small. Maybe five-foot-two. Light brown hair in a long braid pulled over one shoulder. She wore one of the house robes — the cream-colored ones the staff used — and her cheeks were flushed pink.

She saw me first.

Her free hand flew to her mouth and her eyes filled instantly, which is a trick I have never been able to do.

"Oh," she said. "Oh no. Luna, I — I'm so sorry. I didn't mean for you to—"

"Yolanda." Jasper said my name like he was greeting me at a dinner party. Not even surprised. "You're back early."

I stared at him.

I waited for my voice to work. When it did, it came out smaller than I wanted.

"The gala ended at ten, Jasper. It's eleven-thirty."

He glanced at his watch like he was confirming it for himself. The watch I gave him on our fifth anniversary. The one with the inscription on the back.

The woman stepped slightly forward, half-hiding behind his arm. "Luna, my name is Juliana. I'm — I work in the kitchens. Three months now. Alpha Jasper saved my life when the rogues came through the eastern border in August. I owed him. I just — I just wanted to thank him, and it — it got—"

"It got out of hand," Jasper finished for her, and squeezed her hip.

I watched his hand on her hip.

I watched my own breath move the silk over my chest. In. Out. In. The chandelier light glinted off something on the floor — a single hairpin, pearl-tipped, that must have fallen from her braid when she came down the stairs.

"So you fucked my Alpha to say thank you," I said.

Juliana flinched like I'd hit her.

"Yolanda." Jasper's voice sharpened. "Watch your mouth. She's a guest in this house and an Omega. You're the Luna. Act like it."

I almost laughed.

The sound that came out of me wasn't quite a laugh. It was something rougher. Something with no name.

"I'm the Luna," I repeated. "Right. The Luna. Who just heard her Alpha through a door."

"She's been through enough." Jasper pulled Juliana closer, tucked her under his chin like she was something small that needed shelter. "You don't get to make her feel worse because you walked in on something you weren't supposed to see. A Luna has *composure*, Yolanda. You're embarrassing yourself."

My ears rang.

I opened my mouth to say something — anything — and that was when Leo came back from the kitchen.

He had an apple in his hand. He was peeling the sticker off it with his small careful fingers.

He walked past me again, like I was furniture, and he went straight to Juliana.

He wrapped his free arm around her thigh.

He pressed his cheek against her hip.

He looked up at her and he smiled — a real smile, the kind I had never once gotten from him in five years — and he said, clear as a bell:

"Mommy, can we make apple pie tomorrow?"

The marble floor disappeared from under me.

I heard myself say "What?" but it came out like a wheeze.

Leo turned his head to look at me. Calm. Polite. The same nod from before, but with words attached this time.

"Mommy bakes me apple pie," he said. "The kind with the lattice on top. And she sits with me while I do my letters. She's my Mommy. You're Mother."

"Leo." My voice broke in the middle of his name. "Leo, baby, what are you—when did you—"

"Mommy plays with me," he said simply. "You don't."

Juliana put her hand on top of his small dark head. She didn't look at me. She looked at Jasper, and Jasper looked back at her, and something passed between them that had been passing between them for a long time. Long enough for a five-year-old to learn a new word for the woman in his father's bed.

My knees went.

I caught myself on the newel post at the bottom of the stairs and the wood made a sound under my hand — a long, splintering crack that ran up the carved wolf's head at the top of the post.

The pearl hairpin was still on the floor between us.

Juliana bent down, slow, and picked it up. She tucked it behind her ear. Then she looked at me for the first time, really looked at me, and her wet brown eyes had gone perfectly dry.

She smiled.

It was the smallest smile I had ever seen, and it was meant only for me, and Jasper and Leo could not see it from where they stood.

Then she turned her face back into Jasper's shoulder and the tears came back, and she said, "Alpha, I'm so sorry, I should go—"

And I watched my husband stroke her hair and say, "You're not going anywhere, baby. This is your home now."

Behind them, on the wall above the staircase, our wedding portrait was still hanging — me in white, him in black, Leo not yet born, both of us smiling like we meant it.

The newel post cracked again under my hand.

This time the wolf's head broke off clean and rolled across the marble floor, and it stopped at Juliana's bare feet.