Alpha's Betrayal, Her Second Chance

Chapter 6 — The Argument on the Porch

I didn't creep away. I stepped out of the pines and walked straight down the gravel path, every stone loud under my boots. The white villa looked smaller up close—still neat, still secret, still built from lies. A wind chime trembled once under the porch eave and went still, as if it sensed what was about to cross its threshold.

The door opened before I touched the latch.

Taylor came out fast, sleeves rolled, collar open, the night-quiet of the valley clinging to his skin. For a heartbeat he looked unarmored—caught, almost human. Then the mask returned, calm and managerial, the voice he used on elders and patrol captains.

“Caroline," he said evenly. “You shouldn't be here."

“Then tell me where a wife is supposed to stand," I answered, my eyes on the porch where they'd just been pressed together like a practiced scene. “At home, while you rehearse summers in a house I never knew existed?"

Light formed a square behind him. Joanna hovered inside it with the stillness of a painting: hands folded, chin tucked, the practiced innocence of a girl who knows the room will rearrange itself to cushion her. Taylor's gaze flicked her way and back.

“Inside," he told her softly, without turning his head. “Please."

Her mouth parted, all tremble and breath. “Don't fight."

“We're not," he said. “We're talking."

“We are done talking," I said, and the valley gave my voice back to me clean. “I saw enough."

He stepped down one tread, meeting me on the gravel as if this were a negotiation about border markers and not a door built to divide a life. “You're upset," he said, careful and contained. “Let's not make more of this than there is."

I laughed once, a sound with edges. “More? There's a house." I lifted my hand toward the rosemary climbing the trellis, the sling chair, the careful oil on the hinges. “There's a porch swing that knows your weight. There are summers stacked like plates on a shelf. Don't tell me it's less than it is."

His jaw moved, a muscle ticking like a clock behind his cheek. “I've known Joanna since we were children." He said it like a credential. “She has no one. I look after her."

“As a brother," Joanna said quickly, stepping that delicate fraction forward into the light. “That's all. He has always—"

“Stop," I said, the word low. “Don't name what you're not. I saw you. You were not a sister in his arms."

Color lifted and fell in her cheeks like a practiced cue. “I never meant to hurt you."

“You didn't mean," I agreed. “You didn't mean the switch, either, but you wore my years like a borrowed dress and never checked the label."

Taylor's attention snapped back to me. “This isn't fair."

“No," I said. “It isn't."

He tried again, temper swept smooth the way he polishes it for the Council. “The past is complicated. Lucy's choices—"

“—were Lucy's," I cut in. “And yours are yours. You built this place. You kept it. You came."

Silence pulled tight. Owls traded sentences in the trees. Somewhere a kettle inside the house clicked as it cooled. The life he had made here breathed around us, domestic and sure.

He took the last step to the ground. Now we were standing level, two people who had promised a future and brought different maps. “Listen to me," he said. “What you think you saw—"

“I saw you holding her like a man who doesn't misplace his hands," I said. “If there's a gentler translation, I don't speak it."

He drew a careful breath. “You're hurt. You're making this larger than it is."

“Stop calling my eyesight hysteria," I said. “Stop shrinking what doesn't fit your mouth."

His voice dropped. “I'm asking you to be rational."

“I am being rational," I said. “I'm naming the furniture in the room we're in. You want me to call a bed a chair so you can keep sitting on it."

He glanced back at the doorway, then at the dark beyond my shoulder, measuring witnesses that weren't there. When he spoke again, he wrapped the words in leadership. “You are Luna. Your first duty is to the pack. We do not air private matters where they can weaken us."

“The pack is already weak," I said, quiet and tired. “Not from scandal. From rot. From a man who wants to keep two lives and call it duty."

Joanna flinched as if I had thrown the word at her. “Please, Caroline," she whispered. “He doesn't deserve—"

“You don't get to tell me what he deserves." I kept my gaze on him. “You don't get to tell me what I deserve."

He spread his hands, the gesture of a negotiator bringing terms into the light. “What do you want right now?"

“The truth," I said. “Plain. Without the words you use to wash it."

“Plain," he repeated. “All right." He squared himself as if he were about to read a verdict and wanted to keep his posture tidy. “I have known Joanna since childhood. I have always felt responsible for her."

“Responsible," I echoed. “That's the word you put on a pulse when you don't want to hear it beat."

“I see her as a younger sister," he said. “I always have."

My laugh came out small and sharp. “You don't hold your sister the way you did on that porch."

He closed his eyes a beat, then opened them on winter. “It's not what you think."

“What is it, then?" I asked. “Give it a name."

He hesitated. Not because he didn't have one; because the one he had would not pass easily through the world we had built. “It is…" He searched for a word that would let him keep both houses without paying for either. “It is complicated."

I nodded once. “There it is."

He stepped closer, low voice, the tone he uses in crisis to pull someone back from a bad edge. “Caroline. I am trying to do right by everyone."

“You can't," I said. “You pick. Otherwise you cut a woman into quarters and call it balance."

Joanna's hand tightened on the doorframe. The wind lifted her hair and set it down again, a soft rehearsal of a life without consequence. “She's angry," she told him, the line pitched to sound gentle instead of directive. “Be kind."

“I've been kind," I said. “Kindness isn't a bandage for a knife you keep using."

Taylor's eyes flashed, frost over steel. “Enough." The word wasn't loud. It held a boundary. “You will not insult her."

“And you will not insult me," I said, steady. “By expecting me to stand outside a home my marriage paid for."

We looked at each other and saw the truth we'd both been living next to: he thought promises were elastic; I had learned the hard way that spines are not. We had made a treaty and he had been trading from both sides of the table.

“Tell me what you want," he said again, softer, almost pleading now. “Tell me how to fix this."

“You can't fix it here," I said. “You can only end it here. Choose."

He went very still. Winter settled more deeply into his shoulders. In the hush I could hear the small domestic bravados of the villa—the kettle sighing, the click of a cooling stove, the long slow breath of a house that believed it was safe. He looked past me toward the trees as if the answer might be written there, then back to the woman in the doorway, then back to me.

When he spoke, he chose the door that kept the most furniture in place. “I won't abandon Joanna," he said, and made it sound like mercy. “She has no one else."

“And you," I said, “have a wife."

His mouth tightened. “I have a Luna who understands responsibility."

“I do," I said. “That's why I'm here, saying the thing you refuse to say." I stepped closer until he could not avoid my eyes. “You're lying to me and calling it duty. You're lying to yourself and calling it love."

Color rose slow along his throat, the first crack in the ice. “Enough," he said again, harsher, and now the Alpha edged into the man. “We will not do this out here."

“We won't do it in there," I said, with a small nod toward the door, “and we won't do it tomorrow at the Council with the minutes wide open. We will do it where it began—on this step, under that chime, with the truth in our mouths."

“Caroline," Joanna breathed, a soft appeal that shaped itself like a prayer, “please."

“Don't beg me with a voice you used to practice him," I said without looking at her. “You're better at winning than you are at mercy."

Taylor flinched as if I had struck him—not because he cared for my hurt, but because the line hit the edge of the story he tells himself about the man he is. He drew himself taller, the old winter ritual of a boy who learned to stand still while storms tried to move him.

“You will go home," he said, each word a stone. “You will rest. We will speak when you are calm."

I stared at him, and the ache in my chest did a small, resigned thing. “There it is again," I said quietly. “You decide my state and call it care."

“I am preventing damage," he said. “To you. To us. To the pack."

“You're preventing light," I said. “Because light shows walls where you prefer curtains."

We stood in the narrow space between a door and a path. A moth bumped itself senseless against the porch lamp, desperate for a heat that would always burn it. Somewhere a fox barked once, annoyed, as if even the wild preferred cleaner mathematics than this.

He rubbed a hand over his jaw, a gesture I knew too well. “You will not touch her," he said after a moment, tone final, the only wall he knew how to build quickly. “Whatever happens between us, Joanna is not to be harmed."

“I don't need to touch her," I said. “Your promises do all the damage here."

He took a longer breath. When he let it out, some brittle thing in it loosened. Weariness crept into his eyes. “Caroline," he said, almost gently, “what do you want from me tonight?"

“A sentence without a disguise," I said. “Say it plain so it can stop dressing as something else."

Silence again. This one felt different—the stillness that comes when two people stand at the edge of a thin lake and decide whether to skate or turn around.

At last, he gave me words I could hold, even if they cut: “I won't leave her," he said.

The moth burned itself one last time, fell, and lay still.

“Thank you," I said. “Now we both know the size of the room."

He reached out then, maybe to stop me, maybe to soften the shape of what he'd made. I stepped back and his hand closed on nothing.

“Go home," he said again, but it sounded smaller.

“I will," I said. “I won't come back here." I held his gaze until I saw him understand it. “Not ever."

I turned. The rosemary brushed my sleeve like a memory that wasn't mine. Gravel gave under my boots, the path remembering my feet. I didn't look over my shoulder. The chime found its courage at last and rang once, thin and bright, the sound of something delicate admitting it had been rattled.

At the edge of the gate, I paused—not to reconsider, but to let the night map itself clearly in my bones. A door behind me, a road before me, a man who thought winter could hold everything together if he stood still long enough. I breathed in pine and iron and coal smoke and stepped through.

The latch fell into place with a clean, quick click. It felt like a period. It felt like the first true word I'd said in years.

I did not run. I did not shake. I walked until the villa's light was one more star I did not need, and the dark belonged to me.