The Alpha's Secret Pregnant Donor

An hour after I left the clinic, the bedroom door opened without a knock.

I was sitting on the small sofa near the windows, one hand pressed to my lower abdomen. The cramps had eased to a dull ache, but Noah's warning still echoed in my head.

Celeste walked into my private quarters as if she had never left them.

She wore an ivory robe borrowed from the estate linen closet. Her blond hair was damp from a shower, and the fresh bandage at her wrist looked far more dramatic than the bruising beneath it.

"You look terrible," she said.

"Get out."

She ignored me and wandered toward the dresser. "The room changed."

"That's what happens when someone is gone for four years."

"The curtains used to be blue."

"They aren't anymore."

Celeste smiled at my reflection in the mirror. "Adrian never liked gold."

"Then he survived three years of it."

Her smile sharpened.

I should have called security. I should have ordered a guard to escort her back to the medical wing.

Instead, my attention caught on the chain around her neck.

A tarnished crescent pendant rested against her collarbone, scratched deeply along the left edge.

My stomach tightened.

I knew that necklace.

Four years ago, Adrian had searched the forest until dawn after Celeste disappeared. He returned soaked through, mud to his knees, carrying that pendant in his fist. On the night before our mating ceremony, I had finally asked why he kept it in his desk.

He had taken it outside.

He had come back ten minutes later empty-handed.

I threw it into the river, he'd told me. She is the past. You are my future.

"Where did you get that?"

Celeste touched the pendant lightly. "This?"

"Don't play games."

"Adrian gave it back to me tonight."

The ache in my abdomen became distant.

"You're lying."

"Am I?"

She unclasped the chain and held the pendant out between two fingers.

The scratch was exactly where I remembered it. So was the tiny dent at the bottom point, where Adrian once told me Celeste had dropped it on a stone floor during their first year together.

"He kept it," she said. "All this time."

I forced myself to stand.

My knees felt weak, but I refused to let her watch me fold.

"Why are you here, Celeste? You got the blood. Adrian spent the night at your bedside. What else do you want?"

Her expression lost its false sweetness.

"I wanted to see what he chose after I left."

"I'm not an object he chose."

"No?"

She glanced around the room again, taking in the framed wedding photo, the books on my nightstand, the perfume bottles on my dresser.

"You live in the suite I designed," she said. "You sleep in the bed he ordered for me. You wear his mark, but not his ring."

"You rejected him."

"I was twenty-two and terrified of becoming Luna to a warlord who thought love meant possession. I left because I wanted him to chase me."

The admission was so absurd I almost smiled.

"Four years is a long time to wait for a chase."

"He never stopped."

"Then why come back now?"

For the first time, Celeste's confidence slipped. Her fingers tightened around the pendant.

"Because I heard he had consolidated the eastern packs. I heard he had become everything people said he would become."

"So you came back for the title."

Her mouth curved. "I came back to see whether he still wanted me."

"And collapsing at the border was part of the experiment?"

She did not answer. She didn't need to.

"He married me."

"He marked you. There's a difference."

That landed because it was cruelly close to a fear I had never spoken aloud.

Adrian had given me his name, his mark, his place at the head table. But the family Luna ring remained locked in the council vault.

Every time I asked about it, there was a reason.

The setting needed repair.

The elders needed to approve the ceremony.

The old band had to be resized.

Three years of reasons.

Celeste stepped closer.

"Do you know why it was never resized for you?"

I said nothing.

"Because he couldn't bring himself to change it."

"You don't know that."

"I do. He told me."

My fingers went cold.

"When?"

"Tonight."

"Adrian barely left the trauma bay."

"Exactly."

She smiled without warmth.

"He sat beside me for almost an hour after the transfusion. He apologized for what happened four years ago. He said he should have come after me sooner."

I wanted to dismiss it as manipulation. Celeste had every reason to hurt me.

But the necklace lay between us, heavy and real.

"Why would you tell me this?"

"Because I don't want another performance at breakfast where you pretend you're secure and he pretends he doesn't look at me. It's exhausting."

"Then leave the estate."

"He asked me to stay."

The room went quiet.

I heard the faint ticking of the clock on the mantel.

"He what?"

"He said I could recover here as long as I needed."

"This is my home."

"It was mine first."

My wolf pushed restlessly beneath my skin, not with jealousy but warning. The mate mark at my neck gave a faint, unpleasant throb.

Celeste fastened the necklace again.

"There's one more thing you should know."

"I'm done listening."

"No, Elena. You really aren't."

She walked to my jewelry cabinet and tapped the empty velvet tray in the top drawer—the place I had once imagined keeping the Luna ring.

"Adrian never had the ring resized because it already fits the woman he wanted to wear it."

I stared at her, no longer sure which hurt more—the lie or the fact that I believed her.

Celeste lifted her left hand.

On her ring finger was a pale indentation, old but unmistakable, the exact width of the Blackwood Luna band.

"He brought the ring to my room tonight," she said softly. "And he asked me whether I still remembered how it felt."