Second Chance for the Discarded Luna

Chapter Two

"I am your Luna," I said, and my voice shook on the word Luna in a way I hated. "I was blessed by the Moon Goddess herself the night we bonded. Who told you she stopped caring?"

Marcus didn't even flinch. That was the part that undid me, that he could stand there in his war-stained cloak, still smelling of smoke and blood, and look at me like I was a stranger asking him for directions.

"Why are you saying it like that," I pressed, stepping closer, "when I have always been by your side? Through every hard winter, every raid, every time this pack nearly starved because the hunting grounds ran dry. When you were away I protected the weak ones. I made sure the training ran on schedule. I gathered the elders when the scouts brought bad news so we weren't caught flat-footed. I held this pack together with my own two hands, Marcus."

"You couldn't give me an heir," he said, like that erased everything else. "The Moon Goddess gave me a pack to lead. She gave me you to stand beside me while I led it. But she wants me to have an heir, Elena. That's not something you can argue your way around."

I stared at him. Three years. Three years of picturing a future that had apparently only ever existed in my head, three years of telling myself that whatever cracks were forming between us could be mended if I was patient enough, loyal enough, good enough. And now he stood in front of me discussing the end of our bond the way he might discuss reassigning a border patrol.

"So that's it," I said. "You're just going to let me go."

"What would you have me do?" He spread his hands, and for one terrible second he looked almost reasonable, almost like the man I had fallen for, which made it so much worse. "How exactly do you propose I take care of both you and her child? You want me to split myself in half? I'm not heartless, Elena. I gave you a choice."

"A choice." I laughed, and it came out uglier than I meant it to. "You call that a choice? Stay and watch another woman raise the family that should have been mine, or leave with nothing after three years of building this pack alongside you? Those aren't choices, Marcus. Those are two different ways of losing."

The door swung open before he could answer.

Lyra stepped through without so much as a knock, one hand resting on the curve of her stomach like it was a crown she was still getting used to wearing. She looked between the two of us, and there was nothing shy in her expression at all, nothing that suggested she felt even a flicker of guilt for standing in the doorway of the room I had shared with my husband for three years.

"Oh," she said, drawing the word out slow. "I didn't realize both of you were still in here."

I looked at her, and the anger that had been simmering under my ribs all night finally found somewhere to go.

"I'm sure you're perfectly willing to do whatever it takes," I said, my voice cutting sharp across the room, "especially when it comes to how you've already inserted yourself into running this pack. Giving orders to the kitchen staff. Rearranging the patrol schedules. Don't think I haven't noticed, Lyra. You didn't wait for an invitation to any of this."

Her mouth curved, unbothered. She rubbed slow circles over her belly like she was soothing herself instead of the child inside her.

"Someone has to step up," she said. "Since apparently you couldn't manage the one thing that actually mattered."

I felt something in my chest go very still and very cold, the kind of calm that comes right before a person does something they can't take back.

"You have no idea," I said quietly, "what I'm actually capable of managing."

Marcus looked between us like he was watching two strangers argue over territory that had nothing to do with him, and that, more than anything else, told me everything I needed to know about where I stood in his eyes now. He wasn't going to defend me. He wasn't going to ask her to leave the room out of respect for the wife he still, technically, had. He was just going to stand there and let it happen.

So I stopped waiting for him to do it.

I straightened my spine, the way my father taught me before I could even walk properly in ceremonial robes, and I looked at both of them, Marcus with his tired eyes and Lyra with her hand still resting smugly on her stomach, and I let the fury settle into something colder and far more dangerous than tears.

"Fine," I said. "Don't worry, Marcus. I'll go to my father's house."

His jaw tightened, just slightly, like some part of him understood what those words actually meant and didn't like the shape of it. Good. Let him wonder. Let him spend the coming weeks turning that sentence over in his head, waiting to find out exactly what it meant that the wife he'd cast aside so easily had somewhere powerful enough to run to.

I walked past both of them to the door, my ceremonial gown dragging petals across the floor with every step, and I paused just long enough to look back over my shoulder.

"And I promise you," I said, "you are going to regret this."

Then I left, and I didn't look back again.