I Was Pregnant When His Real Luna Returned

Sabrina left on a Tuesday night.

She didn't say goodbye. She didn't leave an explanation, not really — just a folded note on top of her packed suitcase that said she refused to be auctioned off like livestock. The handwriting was neat and unhurried, like she'd had time to think about it. Like she'd been planning it for a while.

I found out the same way I found out most things in our house. I was summoned.

"Kitchen. Now." My mother's voice through the door, flat and clipped.

I came downstairs in my socks to find both my parents standing at the kitchen island. My father had his arms crossed. My mother had Sabrina's coat draped over one arm and a folder of documents in her other hand. The suitcase — Sabrina's suitcase, the big one with the gold zipper — sat by the back door like it had already made up its mind.

Neither of them looked at me the way you look at a person you're about to ask something of. They looked at me the way you look at a problem you've already solved.

"You leave for Ironveil in the morning," my mother said. "The car comes at seven."

I stood there for a moment. "I'm not Sabrina."

"No." She set the folder on the counter and slid it toward me. "But you'll go as her."

My father said nothing. He never did, when my mother had already decided.

I looked at the documents. Sabrina's name. Sabrina's photo — close enough to mine that no one who hadn't grown up with us would catch the difference. The mating arrangement with the Ironveil Pack, signed by both families, with Alpha Enzo Mendoza's name at the bottom in dark, deliberate ink.

I should have said no. I know that now. I should have said a lot of things.

Instead I pressed my fingertips together under the counter where they couldn't see, and I said nothing at all.

My mother lifted Sabrina's coat and settled it onto my shoulders. She smoothed the collar once, efficiently, the way you straighten a picture frame.

"Don't embarrass us," she said.

That was it. That was the whole conversation.

---

The Ironveil pack house was nothing like I'd imagined.

I'd pictured something cold. Fortress-like. The kind of place that announces its power through stone and silence. And it was those things — the building was enormous, set back from a long private drive, with the kind of quiet that meant everyone inside it knew exactly where they stood in the order of things.

But it was also alive. There were wolves everywhere, moving through the halls with the easy confidence of people who belonged somewhere. Pack members who glanced at me as I was escorted through the main entrance and looked away again, unimpressed. Every single one of them radiated rank like heat off pavement, and my Omega instincts, the ones I'd spent years learning to ignore, started screaming at me to make myself smaller.

I kept my chin up. I was wearing Sabrina's clothes. I could at least try to wear her posture.

The main hall was high-ceilinged and warm, lit by long windows that let in the late afternoon light. I was told to wait. I waited.

Then the door at the far end opened, and Alpha Enzo Mendoza walked in.

I'd seen photographs. They hadn't prepared me.

He was tall — not just tall but built the way Alphas are built, like the body itself is a statement of intent. Dark hair, dark eyes, a jaw that looked like it had never once been uncertain about anything. He moved without hurry, which somehow made him more unsettling, not less. The kind of man who doesn't need to rush because nothing leaves without his permission.

His Beta walked two steps behind him. The rest of the room seemed to exhale and step back simultaneously.

I told myself to breathe.

He crossed the hall toward me, and then he was close — close enough that I caught his scent.

Warm cedar. Rain on dry stone. Something underneath both of those things that I had no word for, something that bypassed my brain entirely and went straight to the part of me that was wolf before it was anything else.

My wolf didn't pace or whine. She went completely still, the way animals go still when they've found exactly what they've been looking for.

*Mate.*

The word moved through me like a current. I felt it in my sternum, in my fingertips, in the back of my throat.

I clamped down on it so hard my vision blurred for a second.

I extended my hand. "Sabrina Moore." My voice came out steady. I was almost proud of it.

Enzo looked at my hand for one beat before he took it. His grip was warm and unhurried, and he held it a second longer than a greeting required. When I made myself meet his eyes, something was moving behind them — patient and precise, like a man reading a document he's already memorized, checking for the details that don't match.

I told myself I imagined it.

I was very good at telling myself things.

---

Dinner was worse.

He seated me beside him, which I hadn't expected, and the questions started almost immediately — quiet, conversational, the kind that sound like small talk until you realize they're not.

Details about the arrangement negotiations. A childhood memory. A preference my parents had apparently mentioned to his Beta during the planning process.

I answered what I could. I deflected what I couldn't. I smiled at the right moments and let the noise of the table cover the gaps.

Enzo listened without expression. He didn't push. He didn't catch me out. He simply listened, and cataloged, and said nothing that revealed what he was thinking.

Across the table, an older man watched us with warm, unhurried attention. Malcolm Mendoza — I recognized him from the pack records I'd memorized on the drive over. Former Alpha. Enzo's grandfather. He had the same dark eyes as his grandson, but where Enzo's were still and measuring, Malcolm's were lit with something that looked almost like amusement.

Every time I spoke, I noticed Malcolm glance at Enzo. And every time, something in Enzo's posture shifted — barely, almost nothing — like a compass needle finding north.

I looked down at my plate and told myself I was imagining that too.

---

Malcolm found me in the corridor after dinner.

I was braced for it — a question, a test, something that would require me to be Sabrina again. Instead he pressed a warm cup of tea into my hands without ceremony and fell into step beside me like we'd been doing this for years.

"The oak tree at the eastern boundary," he said, apropos of nothing. "Enzo used to climb it when he was angry. Twelve, thirteen years old. He'd be up there for hours." A pause. "He thought no one knew. I always knew."

I didn't know what to say to that. So I said, "Why are you telling me?"

Malcolm smiled. "No reason in particular, my dear."

He left me at the door to the guest suite with the tea still warm in my hands, and something cracked open in my chest that I'd spent years keeping sealed — a small, dangerous warmth that had no business being there.

I stood in the corridor for a long moment after he was gone.

Then I went inside, closed the door, and sat on the edge of the bed with Sabrina's documents spread around me and the mate bond pulling at my ribs like a tide I had no idea how to swim against.

My wolf paced. I pressed my fingertips together until the urge to cry passed.

Then I opened my laptop, pulled up the new brief from the Briarhollow publishing company, and got to work.

It was the only thing in my life that was entirely, unambiguously mine. Tonight, that had to be enough.