The Luna They Didn't Want

Chapter 4

CHAPTER 4: THE COUNCIL NOTICES

MAREN

The Regional Council doesn't visit Shadowhollow often, which is exactly why their arrival sends half the pack into a quiet, controlled panic three days after I leave that sketch of wolf prints sitting untouched on my husband's desk.

I'm the one who gets the message first. Of course I am. A runner catches me coming out of the healer's quarters, where I've spent the morning approving the omega heating request I signed off on weeks ago and following up on why it still hasn't been installed — a question that turns out to have an irritating answer involving a budget line Caspian froze without telling me — and the runner is breathless in a way that tells me this is bigger than a trade dispute.

"Councilor Ren," he says. "And two enforcers. They're already past the southern gate."

Councilor Ren is not someone who shows up without reason. The Regional Council oversees seven packs in this territory, settles border disputes before they become wars, and reviews leadership when something's gone wrong enough to reach them. Nobody requested a review. Which means somebody talked, or somebody noticed, or both.

I find Caspian before the council does, mostly so the first thing Ren sees isn't an Alpha caught flat-footed in his own territory.

"Councilor Ren's arrived early," I say. "We have maybe twenty minutes."

He looks up from whatever he's doing — which, I notice, is nothing, papers pushed to one side of his desk, untouched — and for once doesn't ask Selene's whereabouts before responding to me. "Early for what? There's no review scheduled."

"There is now." I don't bother softening it. "Get dressed. Be in the main hall. And for once, sit in your actual chair."

He goes still at that last part, like the sentence cost me something to say out loud, which it did, a little. I don't wait to see his reaction. I have twenty minutes and an entire pack's reputation riding on whether I can make the next conversation look like competence instead of the mess it's actually been for the past three years.

Councilor Ren is older than I expected from the reports, he had silver -streaked hair, his eyes were still sharp-eyed and seemed to miss nothing. The two enforcers flanking her don't speak. They don't need to. Their presence alone says *we are here to observe, not to be charmed.*

The council meeting that followed after the initial welcome is tense.

Ren goes through it one by one, like ticking off numbers in a to-do list: border security, trade standing, internal pack health, dispute resolution records. Caspian answers what he can, vaguely, the way someone answers questions about a test they didn't study for. I watch him reach for details he doesn't have — the trade terms with Ashford, the patrol rotation changes from this week — and I watch him come up empty, again and again, because none of that information has ever made it past me to him.

So I answer instead. Specifics. Numbers. The actual shape of how this pack runs, in a vice that doesn't shake or crac under pressure although I could feel her gaze on me, like she was observing something else entirely.

"And the border incident from three days ago," Ren says eventually, flipping to a page in her notes I'd bet money came from one of my own scouts, quietly passed up the regional chain the way scouts sometimes do when they don't trust their own Alpha to act. "Surveying prints, unidentified pack origin. Who handled the response?"

The room goes quiet in the specific way it went quiet three years ago at my mating ceremony — everyone waiting to see who absorbs the moment.

"I did," I say. "Doubled the eastern patrols, brought in our best tracker, kept the response quiet so whoever mapped us wouldn't know we'd noticed."

"And the Alpha's involvement?"

I could lie. I could soften it, the way I had always done, or I could tell REn the truth, expose his incompetence and make them call him to order.

I look at Caspian. He's not looking at me. He's looking at the table, jaw tight, already knowing what I'm about to say and unable to argue with the truth of it.

"I briefed him personally," I say. "He authorized the increased patrols."

It's not quite a lie. It's not quite the whole truth either. Five words — *I trust your judgment* — stretched to cover an Alpha who hadn't picked up that sketch since I set it down. I give him that much, even now. I'm still not sure why.

Ren's eyes move between the two of us, slow, assessing, and I get the distinct, uncomfortable sense that she's not fooled for a second. She doesn't say so. She just makes a note, closes her ledger, and tells us the formal review will conclude with a private conversation — Caspian first, then me.

The enforcers escort her out. I stay behind, alone in the hall, watching as she left and wondered if I should have protected Caspian when he had done nothing to deserve it.

Caspian finds me afterward in the corridor outside the council chambers, and I know before he says a word that whatever Ren told him in that private conversation didn't sit well.

"You made me look incompetent in there," he says.

I almost laugh. I don't, because I'm too tired, and because some small, stubborn part of me still doesn't want to be cruel to him even now. "I answered the questions you couldn't. That's not the same thing."

"You think I didn't notice? Every answer, every number — you had all of it ready, like you'd been preparing to embarrass me."

"I had all of it ready because I'm the one who built it." My voice doesn't rise. I've spent three years learning not to give this pack the satisfaction of watching me raise my voice. "The trade terms, the patrol rotations, the apothecary arrangement, the eastern scout network — none of that exists because of anything you did, Caspian. It exists because I did the work nobody assigned me and you let me, because it was easier than doing it yourself."

"That's not — " He stops. Starts again. "That's not what a Luna is supposed to —"

"What is a Luna supposed to do, then?" I step closer, close enough that he can't look past me to find someone else to redirect this conversation toward. "Because for three years I've been told I'm not what a Luna is supposed to look like. I've sat through dinners where your mistress jokes about my body in front of the whole pack while you stare at your plate. I've run this pack's council meetings to an empty chair. I've built every system that kept us standing through a threat you didn't even read the report on. So tell me, Caspian. What exactly was I supposed to do instead?"

He doesn't answer. For the first time in three years, I watch something c***k open behind his eyes — not love, not yet, I'm not naive enough to call it that. Something closer to the first real look he's given me since the night he married me and told the front three rows he didn't ask for it.

"Maren—" he starts.

I don't wait to hear the rest. I've waited three years for him to finish a sentence that started with my name and actually meant something. I'm done waiting for it any longer.

"Councilor Ren wants to speak with me," I say, and walk past him toward the chambers, leaving him standing there alone, for the first time in 3 years, I was the one leaving him speechless and behind.