After My Mate Chose A Rogue, I Took Back My Crown

I am Emory Howell, Crown Luna of the American Lycans, heiress to the Moonveil Pack. I have walked into rooms that made Alpha males instinctively lower their eyes. I have settled inter-pack disputes with a single sentence. My Luna aura is the kind that other she-wolves whisper about in reverent, slightly envious tones.

And tonight, I was standing in the Silverfang Pack's kitchen at six in the morning, covered in flour, asking an Omega named Bess whether dark chocolate ganache needed to chill for one hour or two.

'Two, Miss Howell,' Bess said quietly, not quite meeting my eyes. She knew who I was. They all did. But I had suppressed my aura so thoroughly over the past months that I barely registered as anything more than a well-dressed visitor in their territory. That was intentional. Riley didn't like it when I reminded people of what I was.

So I didn't.

I pressed the ganache into the refrigerator and told myself this was love. This was what it looked like when it was real—not the political theater of Moonveil ceremonies, not the careful choreography of Luna duties. This was flour on my hands and a cake I had made from scratch for a man who had never once asked me to, because he was my mate, and tomorrow the Silverfang Pack was celebrating his promotion to Beta, and I wanted him to smile at me the way I had decided he was capable of smiling.

I had been deciding that for a long time.

The celebration was held at dusk, the whole pack gathered in the clearing behind the pack house. Torches, laughter, the warm smell of pine and woodsmoke. Riley stood at the center of it all, and he looked—for a moment, just a moment—like the man I had convinced myself lived underneath the silence and the cold. Tall, contained, his new Beta aura sitting on his shoulders like something he had been born to carry.

He had been born to carry it. I had just been the one to build the ladder.

I carried the cake out myself. I hadn't let anyone else touch it.

The pack quieted as I crossed the clearing. I could feel their eyes—some curious, some amused in the way that had become familiar to me, the particular amusement of watching someone embarrass themselves in slow motion. I had heard what they said about me. The Crown Luna chasing a Delta. Throwing herself at a wolf who didn't want her. Pathetic.

I kept my chin up. I kept walking.

'Riley.' I said his name the way I always said it—carefully, leaving room for him to fill the space with something warm. 'Congratulations on Beta.'

He looked at the cake. Then he looked at me.

The platter hit the dirt before I understood what had happened.

The sound was sharp and final. Dark chocolate and cream and four hours of my hands scattered across the ground, and the pack's laughter rose like smoke, and Riley's expression didn't change at all. That was the worst part. Not the cruelty—the indifference. As though I were a minor inconvenience he had just cleared from his path.

'I don't need anything from you,' he said.

My wolf made a sound inside me that I immediately buried.

Then he turned, and Anna Murphy stepped out of the crowd and into the space at his side like she had been waiting there all along. Maybe she had. She was thinner than I remembered, her eyes carrying the particular sheen of someone who had recently survived something—or wanted people to believe she had. Her rogue Alpha patron had fallen two weeks ago. She had nowhere else to go.

Riley put his hand on her back.

'This is my chosen mate,' he said to the pack. He didn't look at me when he said it.

I stood in front of the ruined cake and smiled. I don't know why. Some reflex from a lifetime of performing composure in rooms that were watching for cracks.

Five days later, Anna was in the hospital.

The pack house had found her. Pills, they said. Riley's face when he got the call was the most emotion I had seen from him in months—and it was entirely for her.

'She's been struggling,' I said carefully, when he came back inside to grab his keys. 'Riley, this isn't the first time she's—'

He turned on me with his Beta tone, and I felt it land in my chest like a fist.

'Don't.' The word was quiet and absolute. 'Don't stand here and talk about her like you know anything.'

'I'm your mate—'

'She needs me.'

He left.

I stood in the empty pack house for a long time after the door closed. The torches outside had burned down to nothing. My wolf was very quiet inside me—not peaceful, but the kind of quiet that comes after something has been pressed down for too long and is starting to forget how to breathe.

I told myself I would be there when he came back.

I told myself that was love too.