The Luna’s Revenge: Reborn as the Villainess

Wren Ashby was going to wear the blue dress. She had been saving it. Three months it had been sitting in the back of her small wardrobe in the Omega quarters, wrapped carefully in the thin paper the market vendor had packed it in, untouched. She had bought it with two months of her kitchen stipend and she had not regretted it once because she had known, the moment she saw it on the rack, that she was going to wear it the night everything changed. Tonight was the night everything changed. She shook it out carefully and held it up against herself in front of the small cracked mirror above her dresser. It was pale blue, simple, fitted through the waist and soft at the skirt, nothing extravagant. There was no extravagant in Wren's budget. But it was pretty and it was hers and she had bought it for this specific night and that made it feel like the most beautiful thing she owned. She put it on and she looked at herself. Her hair was down, dark and simple, falling past her shoulders. She had no jewelry except the small silver stud earrings she had found on the ground outside the packhouse kitchen two years ago and cleaned and kept because they were pretty and because nobody had claimed them. She had no makeup beyond the tinted balm she shared with the other Omega girls in the quarters. She was nobody. She knew that. She had always known that. Orphan, Omega, packhouse kitchen staff, no family name, no rank, no status worth mentioning. She had grown up knowing exactly what she was in the hierarchy of the Silverstone Pack and she had made her peace with it a long time ago. But tonight she was going to be his. Publicly. Finally. In front of everyone. She pressed her hand flat against her lower stomach, the way she had been doing for the past two weeks whenever she was alone. Feeling for something she could not yet feel but knew was there. The healer's confirmation sitting in her chest like a warm and terrifying secret. Pregnant. She was going to tell him tonight. After. When it was done, when the bond was complete and official and he had stood in front of the whole pack and claimed her, she was going to take his hand and put it where hers was now and tell him. She had been imagining his face when she told him. She had been imagining it for two weeks. She could not help but remember the night he first claimed her. It had been four months ago. She had been walking back from the late kitchen shift, tired and smelling like the roast she had been basting for three hours, taking the back corridor that ran behind the packhouse offices because it was faster and empty at that hour. She had rounded the corner and walked straight into Adrian Voss's chest. She had stumbled back. Started to apologise. Looked up. And the world had simply stopped. She had known about fated mates of course. Every wolf knew about fated mates, the theory of it, the biology, the way the bond announced itself. She had just never expected it to happen to her, or rather, she had never expected it to happen to her with him, with the future Alpha of Silverstone, with the most wanted unmated male in the pack, with someone so far above her in every conceivable hierarchy that the distance between them might as well have been measured in light years. But the bond did not care about hierarchies. It hit her like a wall. Like stepping off a ledge. Like every breath she had ever taken before that moment had been practice and this was the real thing, this specific inhale in this specific corridor with this specific man looking down at her with an expression she had never seen on his face before. Surprise. Just for a second. Just long enough for her to know he felt it too. Then his jaw tightened and his eyes went dark and he said, low and rough, "go back to your quarters." She had tried. She had genuinely tried to walk away, confused but too accustomed to taking orders from higher caste wolves she didn't dare question him. She had made it four steps before the heat hit. She had never gone into heat before. She was twenty one years old and she had never gone into heat because heat was triggered by proximity to a fated mate and she had never been near hers before that corridor, that night, that one unplanned collision. It dropped her to her knees right there in the hallway. She heard him make a sound behind her. Something that was not quite human. She heard his footsteps, fast, and then his hands were on her and she was being lifted and she remembered very little of the next few minutes with any clarity, just heat and his voice saying her name, how did he know her name, and a door, and darkness, and his hands, and the specific overwhelming relief of a bond finally, finally finding its other half. It had hurt. She would not pretend it hadn't hurt. She had been untouched before that night and he had not been gentle, not because he was cruel, she had not thought he was cruel, but because the bond had him too and he was not entirely in control of himself either. She had pressed her face into his shoulder and breathed through it and by the time it stopped hurting it had become something else entirely, something she had no previous reference point for, and she had understood, in the boneless exhausted aftermath, why people wrote songs about this. "You're alright," he had said, after. He wasn't really asking her. Wasn't even looking at her. "Yes," she had said anyway. "This doesn't change anything," he said after a pause. She had not known what to say to that so she had said nothing. He had gotten up and dressed and looked at her on his bed and something had moved through his face, quick and complicated, and then he had said "shower before you leave. Use the one in there." He had nodded toward the bathroom. "I don't want my scent on you yet." She had showered. She had told herself it was practical. Discreet. He was the future Alpha and she was a kitchen Omega and discretion made sense, she understood that, she was not foolish. She had told herself a lot of things in the eight months that followed. Because he had come back. That was the thing. He had come back the next night and the night after that and the night after that, and she had let him in every time because she was in love with him in the complete and helpless way of someone who had never been loved by anyone and had been waiting her whole life to love something back. He was different at night. That was what she held onto. During the day he looked through her, or past her, or simply did not register her presence at all in the way that powerful people did not register the presence of Omega kitchen staff. She had learned not to flinch at it. She had learned to keep her face neutral and her eyes down and her heart tucked away somewhere he could not accidentally step on it during daylight hours. But at night. At night he was warm. At night his hands were careful and his voice was low and he said things into her hair that she was almost certain he did not mean to say out loud, things that sounded like the truth escaping from somewhere he kept it locked. He said she was beautiful. He said she was his. He said her name like it meant something. She had believed him. Goddess help her, she had believed every single word. She had asked him once, three months in, pressed against his chest in the dark, his heartbeat under her ear, whether he was going to acknowledge the bond. Whether the mating ceremony would— "When the time is right," he had said. "When is the right time, my alpha?" "Soon, omega." His hand had moved in her hair. "Don't push it, Wren." She had not pushed it. She had waited. She had been so patient. She had been so stupidly, faithfully, completely patient. And now it was the night of the Mating Ceremony and she was standing in front of her cracked mirror in her blue dress with her hand on her stomach and her heart in her throat and she was done waiting. Tonight. Tonight everything changed. ••••• The ceremony clearing was strung with lanterns. Someone had woven wildflowers through the branches of the oak trees that bordered the space, white and yellow, catching the firelight. The bonfire at the centre was enormous, crackling and orange, throwing warm gold light across the faces of every wolf in the Silverstone Pack who had gathered to witness the mating announcements. They were dressed well. They were drinking. They were happy in the uncomplicated way of people attending a celebration. Wren stood at the edge of the crowd and looked for him. She spotted him almost immediately. He was near the front, tall and golden and devastating the way he always was, dressed in the dark ceremonial shirt that all the unmated males wore for the occasion. He was talking to someone. He was not looking at her. She had not expected him to look at her. Not yet. Not here, in public, where the rules they had built their months together on still applied. She understood. She was patient. She would catch his eye later. After. When it was time. She found a spot near the middle of the crowd and stood and waited and tried to breathe normally. Elder Marcy opened the ceremony. The words were old and formal and Wren had heard them before at the two previous ceremonies she had attended as part of the kitchen staff, serving drinks on the perimeter, watching from the outside. Tonight she was not serving drinks. Tonight she was in the crowd. Tonight she was wearing the blue dress. The first few pairs came forward. Young wolves, nervous and glowing, saying the words, receiving the blessing, the crowd cheering with the particular warmth of a community celebrating its own continuation. Wren watched and smiled and waited. And then it was finally his turn next. "Adrian Voss. Step forward and declare your mate before the Moon Goddess and your pack." The crowd shifted. It went a particular quality of attentive that it had not been for the others. He was the future Alpha. His mating announcement was the one everyone had come to see. Wren straightened, her heart in her throat. She smoothed the front of her blue dress. This was it. Adrian stepped forward from the crowd. Tall and certain and composed, the way he always was in public, carrying his authority like he had been born in it, which he had. He turned to face the crowd and Elder Marcy smiled with pride. Wren watched it all, her legs shaking with excitement, she pressed her hand to her stomach one more time. Us, she thought. Tell them about us. Adrian looked out at the crowd, searchingly. His eyes immediately found hers. For one single suspended second they looked at each other across the clearing and Wren felt the bond pull between them, warm and certain, and she thought, she actually thought, she saw something move in his face. Then he looked away. "I claim Leah," he said. "Leah Monroe. As my chosen mate and future Luna of the Silverstone Pack."