ALPHA'S REGRET His Fated Human Luna

Chapter 4 The Softest Cage

Celeste's POV

The wedding binder sits open on Callum's desk with no warmth in it at all. Just a dare.

Ivory ribbons. Sample menus. A date circled in gold ink. Every detail soft enough to argue over has already been scratched out twice.

I stand with my hands folded, voice soft enough to sound cornered. "The elders are pushing again. Your father is pushing again. Callum—Toby needs a real mother. This pack's Luna. Not a guest who sleeps two doors down and shares your house."

Callum does not look up from the report in his hand. His scent is almost the same as the day he learned Paige was dead—rain-wet stone and bitter orange leaf, thick with grief, old and stubborn and everywhere.

"Not today."

Two words. No heat. No anger. No apology.

I let my lashes dip. "You've said that for five years."

His jaw ticks. "Toby has a father. He has a pack. He doesn't need a ceremony before he's allowed to eat."

"He needs legitimacy." I step closer—close enough for him to see the mark I've spent five years keeping at my throat. The kind of almost-seal that lets a pack believe a claim might already be finished. Only I know the truth: Callum and I never completed it. "He's a hybrid. He needs me."

Callum's eyes lift at last.

Cold. Clear.

The fog from that first wrong kiss is long gone. What remains is a man who buried a wife without a body and raised a son like a wound that never closes.

"He needs the truth," Callum says. "Not a mother who only wears the pack's Luna title. Until Soren brings me a grave I can touch, I don't put a Luna crown on anyone."

My smile holds. Barely.

"Then I'll keep waiting," I whisper. "For him. For you."

I leave before my face stops obeying me.

In the east corridor, two maids flinch when they see me.

Good. Someone in this pack—this house—still remembers I can decide things here.

Callum still will not say yes. Fine. A no today only means my claws get sharper tomorrow.

I find Toby in the training yard.

Five years old. Thin wrists. Hair Callum's color, face too much like Paige Winslow's ghost. He stands barefoot on cold stone while a few full-blood pups his age crowd him, shove him, laugh at the hybrid in him.

"Soft blood," one sings. "Can't even grow fur."

When they see me, they ease off Toby and watch me with uneasy eyes.

I only smile at them. Then I tell Toby, "Again. Shift. I know today's lesson asked for it. Toby—show them your wolf."

His shoulders hitch. "I—I tried."

"Harder."

He squeezes his eyes shut. Fur flickers along one forearm—thin, patchy, wrong—then dies. The other pups laugh. Someone shoves him. Toby hits the ground with a sound too small for an Alpha's bloodline.

Something sharp and pleased flashes through me.

Every time Callum bruises my pride, I don't swallow it. His son with that damned human gets to carry the heat for both of them. Callum sees Paige in the boy's face and freezes between care and refusal. I have Aldric. I have the rescue story. I have years in both packs. Nobody calls me cruel—and no servant dares carry tales.

But five years is long. Scrap torment isn't enough. The method needs an upgrade.

I crouch and play concern. "Are you hurt, Toby? Let me see."

My nails find the soft underside of my own forearm and drag, shallow and clean. Blood wells.

Then I scream.

"Toby!"

The yard freezes, then boils. The other children see blood and switch from spectators to panic—screaming with me, some of them crying.

Footsteps hammer from the main house. Callum first. Soren right behind him. Aldric last.

I cradle my arm against my chest and let tears fall on cue. "He clawed me. I only asked him to connect. Toby—Toby shouldn't have meant it... he just lost control."

Toby scrambles up, eyes huge. "I didn't! I never even touched—"

"Quiet." Callum's voice drops into Alpha command. The air tightens. Toby's mouth snaps shut so hard his teeth click.

Aldric snorts. He never liked this hybrid grandson. "Hybrid temper. Soft blood always shows."

Soren's gaze moves from my arm to Toby's hands. Clean. My pulse jumps. But Soren says nothing. I give him a long look. Smart man.

One full-blood pup whispers, "Hybrid," like a joke with teeth. Toby's ears go red. He looks at no one else—only Callum. The way drowning people look at shore.

Callum looks back with disappointment and a thin weariness. "Inside. Now."

I tip my face down to hide the smile fighting its way up. I've played versions of this for years in front of Callum and Aldric. Toby is five. He never wins these fights—not with me steering them. Looks like Callum is tired of him now. Good. That's the point.

I press the bandage harder and squeeze out an innocent sob for Aldric. "He's only afraid of his own strength. That's all. He's still little. We can still fix him."

Aldric's mouth curves. Approval.

I give him a shy, embarrassed smile. When he turns away, triumph flashes through my eyes.

*

Callum's POV

The study door shuts. Toby stands in the middle of the rug, shaking, small enough for this room alone to swallow him.

Celeste comes in after getting her arm wrapped and sits on the couch. Fresh red is already blooming through the gauze.

I look without making a show of it. Perfect placement. Not deep enough to scar. Deep enough to throw blood and make an accusation stick.

"Want to explain what happened?" I ask Toby.

"I asked him to shift." Celeste cuts in before he can open his mouth, sounding almost like she's defending him. "The other pups were laughing. He got angry. Callum—he didn't do anything wrong exactly. He's just getting worse."

Toby's scent hits me hard: fear, soap, and something faint that still reminds me of Paige on clinic mornings. My wolf snarls at the mismatch. A child should not smell like a crime scene.

"Did you put claws on her?" I ask him.

Toby's chin wobbles. "No."

"Look at me when you answer."

He lifts his eyes. Paige's eyes. The same quiet stubbornness that used to stop my breath.

"I didn't," he whispers. "I can't even shift right."

Celeste makes a soft wounded sound. "Toby, the other children in the yard all saw it. You can be slower than full-blood pups because you're hybrid. You cannot lie to dodge responsibility... and you cannot lie that easily."

My hand curls. I want the truth. I want Paige. I want five years of waking to an empty bed and half-solved reports to stop tasting like failure.

But Celeste lands one point: other pack kids were there. If Toby ever takes my Alpha seat, he apologizes to the woman the pack already treats as future Luna—or the hybrid gossip hardens into something worse.

"You made someone bleed," I say, and close it. "This ends here. Tonight you sleep in the old kennel wing. No dinner. No toys. Tomorrow you apologize to Celeste in front of the pups."

Toby's face goes blank—the same blank I wore the night they told me Paige burned. Something twists in my chest.

"Dad—"

"I am not finished." The words scrape out, but I force them. "If you cannot control yourself, you do not train with the others. Soft things stay where soft things belong until they learn."

The second the words land, Celeste's shoulders ease, like she's only sighing in sorrow.

Soren shifts by the door, looks at Toby with something like reluctance, and tells me, "Callum. His hands are clean. Her wound pattern—"

"Not now."

Soren's mouth flattens. He nods once and leaves, but the look he throws Toby is not condemnation.

Toby says nothing else. He turns and walks out.

Celeste rises, crosses to me, lays her uninjured hand on my sleeve. "You did the right thing. Paige would have wanted the child she left you raised with real discipline."

Hearing Paige's name in her mouth still tightens my stomach.

I step back. "Don't speak for her."

Her lashes flutter. Hurt, practiced. "I'm only trying to help the child she left behind."

Left behind.

As if Paige chose the fire.

"Wedding talk ends for this month," I say. I don't want Paige in Celeste's mouth, so I change the subject. "If you push my father again, you push me."

Something sharp flashes in her eyes, then softens into a smile.

"Of course, Alpha."

She leaves smelling like victory and antiseptic.

I shut the unfinished binder on my desk. Toby's fear still clings to the rug. I leave it there.

An Alpha who digs at every pup fight looks soft. Pack gossip dies faster when the hybrid sleeps where soft things belong.

Tonight ends here.

*

Toby's POV

The kennel wing smells like wet concrete and old rope.

They used to lock up wolves who wandered into pack land by mistake. Now it locks me.

I sit on a blanket that scratches and count the cracks in the wall until my stomach hurts. No dinner means the hurt gets loud. I press my fist to it and think Mom—no. Not Mom. Celeste says I don't have a mother. Celeste says my mother died being careless. Celeste says if I were stronger, Father would look at me like he looks at real pups.

I am five.

I can count that high.

I can also count how many times I have said "I didn't" and watched nobody believe me.

I wipe at a tear. I don't want it to fall. I don't want anyone to see it.

"I've had enough," I whisper to the empty room. "I'm changing something."

The latch on the outer door is high. For adult hands.

I am small.

Small is useful.

I drag the water bucket under the latch, climb, stretch until my shoulders burn, and push. Metal groans. Cold night air slides in.

Far off, pack patrol moves the route I've mapped from my bedroom window for months—left at the pine, long path to the creek, then back. Past the creek is the road out of pack land.

I take the blanket. Nothing else. Soft things get you caught.

The woods bite my bare feet. I do not cry. Crying makes sound. Sound brings grown-ups.

At the service gate, a human delivery van idles with its back doors half open—bread crates, milk, ordinary smells that never belong on pack land. The driver argues with a guard about a signature.

"I signed last week. Why is only this place such a pain?" the driver snaps.

"Then sign this week," the guard says.

I slip between crates and pull a tarp over my head. Cold plastic. Bread dust in my nose. My heart kicks so hard I think the van wall will hear it.

Good.

The van keeps moving.

Nobody finds me.

I bite my sleeve so my teeth don't chatter.

When the doors open again, the light is completely different. Human-city light. Neon that stings my eyes. Exhaust that makes my nose unhappy. Smells stacked so thick I can barely sort them—none of them ones I've ever known.

But nobody here says Alpha.

I drop out behind a dumpster and run until my lungs hurt.

Streets blur at both edges of my vision. Someone yells at a taxi. A woman sells roasted nuts from a cart. I don't know where I'm going. I don't really have a plan. I just know following kids my size is safer—not close enough to be noticed, close enough to borrow their direction.

Around the next corner, a yellow school bus. Kids my height in matching shirts jump down one after another. A woman with a clipboard shouts names.

"Keep together! Wristbands up!"

I do not have a matching shirt.

I have dirt, a blanket, and a face that makes pack people frown like they're remembering an ad.

The clipboard woman takes the kids who no longer fit the small lot beside the bus toward a bigger entrance where people come and go. I look up. Huge letters over the door say ZOO.

"Zoo," I mouth. Pack land doesn't have those. I can follow and look.

She's still counting heads. One boy lags, tying his shoe. I walk beside him with my chin down, blanket stuffed under my arm like a backpack.

"Hey—where's your wristband?" the shoe-boy whispers after he stands and looks at me.

"Lost it," I whisper back.

He shrugs and accepts it. Even though it's a lie.

I told my father the truth, and he didn't believe me.

Inside the zoo, the air changes again—popcorn, animals, wet fur that is not pack.

I can't stand how slow the kid line moves, so I peel off at the right moment and wander alone. I don't stop. Stopping means thinking. Thinking means the kennel comes back into my head.

A sign shows a friendly wolf. Looking into its eyes, it's obvious neither the painted wolf nor the humans know how cruel a real pack can be to a pup. I look away.

Then I see him.

Across the path, by the glass where big cats pace, a boy turns his head.

My face.

Same mouth. Same stubborn eyebrows. Same light hiding in the hair when sun hits it.

A mirror—except this one got kept.

He is clean. New sneakers. A paper wristband. He laughs at something, and the sound hits my chest like a hammer.

A woman stands beside him, one hand on his shoulder. Deep reddish-brown hair. Calm eyes—the kind of calm that doesn't need to scream to be obeyed—and a gentleness I want so badly it hurts.

She says a name I cannot hear. The crowd is too loud.

The boy answers. Easy. Bright.

He looks like what I would have been if my mother were still here and had stayed beside me.

I step forward without thinking, wanting closer, and miss what's under my bare foot—a discarded soda cup. I skid. Pain detonates up my nerves. I catch the rail hard enough not to fall.

The boy looks over.

Our eyes lock.

For one second, the whole zoo goes quiet inside my skull.

He frowns—not scared. Curious. Like he just found a mirror that breathed.

My mouth opens. No sound comes. I do not know his name. I only know the shape of him is mine.

The woman notices the shift in the boy beside her and follows his gaze across the path.

I duck behind a stroller, heart punching my ribs.

When I peek again, the boy is still watching the place where I stood.

Same face. Same age. Alive in a world that does not put him in a kennel.

I grip the rail until my knuckles go white.

If he is real, if the woman beside him is real, then somebody lied.

And if somebody lied—

I am never going back.