The Alpha's blind Luna: Desired by Rival Alphas

The truth he chooses

Diego's POV

The Truth He Chooses

"Sit down."

She didn't move immediately. Just stood there with her hand still flat against her thigh, her chin at that angle. Like she was deciding whether the instruction was worth following now that she'd already won the harder argument.

Then she found the chair. Fingers grazing the armrest once, and she sat.

I looked at her for a moment longer than I should have.

The report had been sitting in the left drawer of this desk for three days. Dr. Reeves had delivered it himself, which he only did when he considered the contents too sensitive for normal channels. He'd stood exactly where Lyra was sitting now, folder in hand, clearing his throat the way men do when they're about to say something the listener won't enjoy.

"The amnesia," he'd said. "We can't confirm it's permanent. Trauma-induced loss of this severity. it has a pattern. The brain protects itself first. Shuts everything out. But over time, with stability, with safety, it starts to." He'd paused. "Leak. Small things first. Flashes. Faces without names. Emotions without context attached to them. Then more."

I had looked at him for a long moment.

"How long."

"No reliable timeline. Months, possibly. Could be sooner." He'd set the folder down. "I'd prepare for it."

I hadn't touched the folder since.

Now I looked at the girl sitting across from me and I picked up my glass and drank and set it down and started talking.

"You were found in the forest," I said. "East of the border. My patrol unit came across you just before dawn." I leaned back. "You were unconscious. You'd been there a while."

She was very still.

"You nearly died." I said it plainly. "In case that context is useful to you."

"How long ago."

"Eight weeks."

Something moved through her face and disappeared. She nodded, slowly, filing it somewhere.

"The memory loss." I turned the pen once on the desk. "That's trauma. Your mind decided it had taken enough and shut certain things out." I looked at her. "It happens to people who've been through something their bodies couldn't hold." A pause. "Most of them still remember their names though."

Her jaw tightened.

Good.

"Has anyone come looking for me?"

"No."

I watched that land.

"No one," she said quietly.

"Eight weeks. No inquiry from any neighbouring pack. No missing report through any channel I have access to." I set the pen down. "You were found alone on unclaimed ground and the world has been completely unbothered since. Make of that what you will."

She looked down. Her unbandaged hand found the armrest.

"My family," she started.

"I don't know."

She looked up.

"I don't know your family," I said. Which was true. I didn't know them. I knew enough about what she'd come from to know it was dangerous. Those were different things and I was comfortable with the distance between them.

The clock on the shelf measured the silence.

Then I leaned forward slightly. Kept my voice even.

"Has anything come back to you?" I watched her carefully. "Since you've been here. Any flashes. Faces. Even something that felt more like an emotion than a memory."

She considered it. Genuinely considered it, which meant she wasn't performing the answer.

"No," she said.

Something in my chest loosened by a fraction.

"Good." I leaned back. "The doctor says the brain does that sometimes. Plays tricks. Things surface out of order, without context, and they feel real even when they're not reliable." I held her gaze, or the space just past it. "If anything does come up. anything at all. you come to me first. Before you sit with it, before you talk to anyone else in this house. You come here."

She was quiet for a moment. "Why?"

"Because I said so."

She didn't push it. But something in the set of her mouth said she'd noted the answer and found it insufficient.

"Was I important?" Her voice was careful when she said it. Like the question had been sitting in her throat for a long time and she was finally setting it down. "Before all of this."

My wolf moved. Slow and heavy. The particular way he moved when he knew what was coming and wanted no part of it.

"No one important," I said, "gets left the way you were left."

She didn't flinch.

That was what stayed with me. Not the words, I had chosen those words, turned them over, found the angle that would do the most efficient damage. It was the not flinching. She just took it. Nodded once, barely. Like some part of her had already suspected and had been hoping I'd say something different and now she knew.

Something pulled tight behind my sternum and I looked at the desk.

"Is that everything," I said.

A pause.

"Yes." She rose, found the door without difficulty, fingers settling on the handle. "Thank you for telling me."

Her voice was devoid of every emotion, her face blank. I couldn't tell if she was hurt or just completely fine. Just those six words, quiet and plain, and then she was gone and the door clicked shut and the room felt different in a way I was not going to examine.

I picked up the pen.

Read the same line four times without taking it in.

The door opened.

"If you appear in this corridor one more time tonight," I said, without looking up, "I'm having it bricked shut."

"I was passing," Klaus said.

"It's past midnight."

"I don't sleep well." He closed the door behind him. I heard him move toward the shelf near the window, stopping there with his arms crossed, the way he always stopped when he had something to say and was deciding the order of it. "What did you tell her?"

"What she asked."

"And the rest."

"There was no rest."

"Diego."

I set the pen down. Looked up. He was watching me with that expression he'd had since we were boys. The one that meant he had already reached his conclusion and was giving me the courtesy of arriving there myself.

"She needed to stop pulling at things," I said.

"She needed to know who she is."

"She can't know who she is. Not yet. Not until I know how far back her memory goes and what comes up when it does." I pushed back slightly from the desk. "You read the same report I did. If she starts remembering and she remembers the wrong things before I can manage it—"

"You'd lose the treaty."

"I'd lose a lot more than the treaty."

Klaus was quiet for a moment. "So you told her she wasn't important."

"I told her the truth."

"You told her the version of the truth that would hurt the most and dress itself up as honesty." He didn't raise his voice. He never raised his voice, which was its own particular form of aggression. "That's not the same thing."

I said nothing.

"She thanked you," he said. "After everything you handed her in this room tonight, she stood up and thanked you for answering her."

I looked at the desk.

"I'm not afraid of the bond," I said.

"I know you're not." He uncrossed his arms. "You're afraid of what honouring it would cost you. That's a different thing entirely and you know it."

"Klaus."

"She thanked you, Diego." He moved toward the door. "Sit with that for a while."

He left.

The study was quiet. The report was still in the drawer. The pen was still in my hand and I still hadn't read a single useful line of anything on the desk in front of me.

I sat there for a long time.

Just thinking about exactly that.

“Son of a bitch.”