My Lost Luna is the Secret Heiress

(Selena's POV) The bass from the private room hits my chest before I even touch the door. I stop with my hand an inch from the handle, gift bag looped over my wrist, heavy with a die-cast F1 car I hunted three stores in Milan to find. My flight landed four hours ago. I didn't shower. I didn't unpack. I came straight here because I wanted to see his face when he opened it. "Why didn't you let Selena come back?" Jaden's voice passes through the door. Easy, curious, the way he always asks something he's curious about. My hand freezes on the handle. "It's better if she doesn't come back," Cobb says, and I know that voice too well — the flat, bored tone he uses when he's already decided something isn't worth discussing. "She'll ruin the atmosphere." The bag slides an inch down my wrist. I catch it before it hits the floor, and somehow that small, stupid save is what keeps me standing there instead of walking in. Liam laughs, but there's an edge under it. "Selena's your wife, man. She's kept your company running while you were off doing whatever. Sending her out of the country on your birthday... isn't that a little heartless?" "Don't forget," Cobb says, "I gave her that job. And for three years, she's been a substitute. Nothing more." The hallway tilts. Not much. Just enough that I put my palm flat against the wall to keep my feet under me. A substitute. Three years of fourteen-hour days. Three years of learning his coffee order, his moods, which investors need flattery and which need spreadsheets. Three years of telling myself the reason he never looked at me the way I looked at him was because he was tired, because the company was just starting out, because love like that takes time to grow. Liam makes a small sound, like a memory clicking into place. "Oh. I almost forgot. You only married her because she looks like Giselle." My wolf, Bonnie, goes still inside me. Not a whimper. Not a growl. Just — still, the way an animal goes still right before it understands it's already been shot. I don't move. I don't breathe loud enough to be heard through a door. I stand in a hallway that smells like spilled whiskey and cheap air freshener, holding a gift for a man who just told his friends I'm a placeholder for someone else's face. "Gisele's coming back in a couple of days," Cobb says, and now there's warmth in his voice, real warmth, the kind he hasn't used on me in longer than I want to count. "How could I let Selena stay here?" There it is. Europe wasn't a business trip. Europe was a leash. He sent me across an ocean, gave me a calendar full of meetings that could've been emails, so his house — our house — would be empty when she walked back into it. I think I laugh. Just once, quiet, more air than sound. Because it's almost funny, in the way a joke is funny right before you realize it's about you. I don't open the door. I turn around and walk back through the bar, past the low gold lighting and the couples leaning into each other, and nobody looks at me twice, because nobody in this city knows that the woman walking out alone just found out three years of her life were a rehearsal for someone else's homecoming. Outside, the cold hits my face like it's trying to wake me up. I look down at the gift bag still looped over my wrist. The car inside cost more than it should have, took longer to find than it should have, because I wanted it to be right. I wanted him to look at it and know I'd been thinking about him the whole trip. I open my fingers. The bag drops onto the sidewalk with a soft, ugly thud, and I don't pick it up. I don't look back at it. I just start walking, and somewhere in my chest Bonnie curls into a small, tight ball, like she's trying to make herself smaller so it hurts less. The house is dark when I let myself in. His side of the closet is half empty — already packing for wherever he thinks he's taking Gisele first, probably. I don't turn on the lights. I sit on the edge of the bed we've shared for three years and I let myself remember, because apparently tonight is the night for it. I remember standing in my father's study at nineteen, telling him I wouldn't marry a man I'd never chosen for myself. I remember the disappointment on his face, the way he said my mother would have wanted better judgment from me. I remember packing one bag and leaving before dawn, so sure, so certain, that love found on my own terms would be worth more than a marriage arranged for pack politics. I remember Cobb in those early days — hungry, ambitious, looking at me like I was the only steady thing in a world that kept trying to knock him down. I remember thinking, this is it, this is the one I chose, and it will be enough that I chose him, even if the choosing cost me everything. I was wrong. I know that now, sitting in the dark in an house that was never really mine. My phone is heavier than it should be when I pick it up. I scroll to my father's name and my thumb hovers there for a moment — long enough for old pride to fight one last round before losing out from exhaustion. He picks up on the second ring, which means he wasn't asleep, which means some part of him has been waiting for this call since the day I left. "Selena." Just my name. Careful, the way you'd say it to someone standing on a ledge. "Dad." My voice comes out smaller than I want it to. "I—" I stop. Start again. "Tell Alpha Asher I will be his Luna" Silence on the line. I can hear him breathing, and I know he's holding back a hundred questions, because that's who my father is — a man who learned patience the hard way and never stopped practicing it. "Are you sure," he says finally. Not really a question. I close my eyes. Somewhere behind that door tonight, Cobb is probably still laughing with his friends, still warm with the thought of Gisele's return, not even aware that the woman he called a substitute just chose herself for the first time in three years. "I'm sure," I say, and for the first time since I heard his voice through that door, my own voice doesn't shake. "I'm done running, Dad. I'm ready to return and reclaim my identity." He's quiet for a moment longer, and when he speaks again, there's something in his tone I haven't heard directed at me in years — pride, careful and quiet, like he's afraid too much of it might scare me back into hiding. "Then come home," he says. "We'll talk in the morning." I hang up and sit there in the dark, phone still warm in my hand, and I wait for the tears to come. They don't. Instead there's something colder settling into my chest, something steadier. Three years I spent trying to be enough for a man who never once saw me more than a substitute. That ends tonight.