After My Alpha’s Mistress Took My Luna Seat

My legs stopped shaking eventually.

I stood up from the edge of the tub and washed my hands twice, slowly, the way you do when you're trying to remember what order things go in. Soap. Water. Towel. The mirror above the sink showed me a woman I half-recognized — paler than yesterday, mouth held carefully neutral, a faint smudge under each eye that no amount of cold water was going to fix. I didn't try.

I went into the bedroom.

Damien was on his side, one arm thrown across the pillow where I usually slept. His breathing was slow and even. A man at rest. I stood in the doorway for a moment and watched him, and I felt nothing in particular — not anger, not grief, not the soft helpless love I'd carried in my chest for years. Just a quiet, level recognition. Like looking at a room you used to live in.

I moved carefully.

The closet first. I didn't have much — Mrs. Hughes had remarked on it enough times that I'd stopped buying new things just to avoid hearing the remark again. Three dresses. Two pairs of jeans. A handful of soft sweaters I liked because they didn't itch against the IV bruises. I folded each piece the way I always folded things, small and square, and laid them in the suitcase I'd kept under the bed since the day I moved in. I'd never unpacked it completely. I didn't examine what that meant.

From the bedside drawer I took the notebook. The cover was soft at the corners from being opened and closed too many times. I flipped through it once — pages of sentences I'd never said out loud, written in handwriting that got smaller as the years went on — and then I closed it and slid it between two sweaters where it wouldn't get bent.

The pendant was the last thing.

It was a small silver moon on a thin chain. Damien had given it to me the night he asked me to be his Luna, fastening it at the back of my neck while I held my hair up and tried not to cry from happiness. I'd worn it every day since. I reached up and undid the clasp, and the chain pooled in my palm like water.

I looked at him.

Then I walked to his side of the bed and placed the pendant on his pillow, exactly in the center of the empty space beside his head. I smoothed it once with my fingertip so the chain would lay flat. He didn't stir.

I didn't leave a note. There was nothing I could write that he would read the way I meant it. He'd already decided what kind of conversation we were having. A note would just be more evidence of how hormonal I'd become.

I lifted the suitcase off the bed before its weight could press a dent into the mattress, and I carried it out of the room.

---

The car was already waiting at the gate when I came down. I'd called it from the kitchen, voice low, while the kettle was still cooling on the stove. The driver didn't ask questions. He took the suitcase and put it in the trunk and held the door open for me, and I sat in the back seat and watched the pack house get smaller in the side mirror until the road curved and it was gone.

I pressed my fingertips against the inside of my wrist.

Still there. Still moving.

Okay.

---

The clinic was quiet at that hour. The night nurse looked up from her desk when I walked in, took in my face and the suitcase, and didn't say anything beyond, "Luna," softly, like she was confirming something for herself. She walked me back to the inpatient wing without asking me to fill out a form. I think she would have carried me if I'd asked.

The treatment chair was the kind that reclined. Pale green vinyl, cracked along one armrest. A pole for the IV. A blanket folded at the foot, the cheap kind that pills under your fingers. I sat down and let her cover my legs and roll up my sleeve, and I closed my eyes for a minute because the fluorescent lights were the same lights from yesterday and I couldn't tell anymore which day I was in.

I must have drifted, because the next thing I knew, the door opened.

Stephen.

He stopped in the doorway with the chart already in his hand and a travel mug in the other, his coat still on. He looked at me. He looked at the suitcase by my feet. He looked at the IV pole the nurse had wheeled in beside me.

He went very still.

I watched his face do the thing it does when he's putting numbers together — the small tightening around his eyes, the way his mouth flattened for half a second. He didn't ask. He didn't say anything stupid like are you sure or does he know. He set the travel mug down on the counter very carefully, the way you set down something you don't trust your hands with, and he closed the door behind him.

"Luna," he said.

Not Zora. Not today.

"I want to start," I said. My voice came out thinner than I wanted. I cleared it. "The protocol. The transfusion. Whatever you said yesterday — I want to start it today. Now."

He came over and crouched down beside the chair so we were at the same height. He looked at the bruise on the inside of my elbow, then at my face. His hand hovered for a second like he might touch my wrist to check my pulse, and then he didn't, because he understood it was the one place I touched myself when I needed to stay steady.

"There was bleeding," he said. Not a question.

I nodded once.

He was quiet for a beat. Then he stood up and reached for the chart, and his voice came back the way I needed it — clinical, precise, every word doing exactly what it was supposed to do.

"I'm going to run a full panel before we start. I want to see where you are this morning, not yesterday. The first cycle is going to be hard, Luna. I'm not going to pretend otherwise."

"I know."

"I'll be here for all of it."

I looked at him. He held my eyes without flinching, the way he always did, and something in my chest unfolded by half a degree.

"Thank you," I said.

He nodded once and turned to the cabinet to pull what he needed.

---

Somewhere across town, in a house I no longer lived in, a man was waking up to a pillow with a silver moon on it.

I imagined him standing in the bedroom doorway. The closet half-empty. The pendant where my head should have been. I imagined his jaw tightening, his eyes flicking slightly to the left the way they did when he was working something out he didn't want to work out.

I imagined him reaching for his phone.

Not to call me.

To call Caleb. To say something short and clipped about handling the morning run, about pack business, about whatever phrase he used when he didn't want to explain himself to his own Beta.

The needle slid into my arm. I didn't flinch.

Stephen taped it down and started the line, and I closed my eyes and listened to the slow tick of the IV pump beginning its work, and I thought: okay.

Okay.

I had things to do.

I was already doing them.