No Longer Maid, Now the Biker's Princess

CHAPTER ONE LEIGH Today is my mate's second anniversary. I am holding his wife's crown. The great hall of Silver Ash Pack is packed from wall to wall — two hundred wolves dressed in their finest, candles lit across every surface, the scent of cedar and white sage heavy in the air. The chief priestess stands at the altar with her eyes closed and her voice carrying the old words of the binding ceremony, the ones that seal a Luna's position in the pack permanently. I turn that word over in my head while I hold the crown with both hands and keep my face perfectly still. I have been practicing that, keeping my face still. It took the better part of a year to get right. In the beginning, every time I stood near Garrick and Sola together, something showed. A tightness around my eyes. A pull at the corner of my mouth. Small things. But Sola noticed small things, she noticed everything. Now I stand here in my maid's uniform three feet behind the Luna of Silver Ash Pack, holding the crown that will make her position official and irreversible, and my face gives nothing away. The bond in my chest gives plenty. It burns low and constant, the way it always does when Garrick is close. That invisible thread the moon goddess stitched between us the moment we were born — stubborn, irrational, completely indifferent to the fact that it has ruined my entire life. I feel him from across the altar. I feel the steadiness of him, that Alpha calm he wears like armor. I feel the exact moment he exhales. I have been feeling that my whole life. He has never once looked for me in a room. Sola turned and I placed the crown on her head carefully, the way I was trained to, and she faced the pack and they erupted, cheering, howling, drums rolling through the floor and up through my feet and I stepped back and held her gown and looked at the crowd. That was when I saw Lola. She was standing at the edge of the front row between two senior pack members who were too caught up in the celebration to notice that she had worked herself free of whoever was supposed to be holding her hand. Five years old. Hair already coming loose from the style I had spent forty five minutes on this morning. Dress perfect. Eyes wide and fixed on Sola with that open, uncomplicated adoration that children have before the world teaches them to be complicated. She was beautiful. She had Garrick's eyes — dark, direct, slightly too serious for her face. She had my hands. The exact shape of them, the way she held things, the way her fingers curled when she was thinking. I had noticed it the first time I held her as a newborn and I had noticed it every day since and I had never said a word about it to anyone. She clapped when the crowd clapped. She didn't know I was watching. She didn't know I was her mother. She had grown up calling Sola mummy and tolerating me as the maid who showed up in the mornings and sometimes fixed her hair and smelled according to what she'd been carefully, deliberately told, like evil smoke. She kept her distance from me the way a child keeps distance from something they've been warned about….Politely and Instinctively. Every morning I styled her hair and every morning I did not say I made you. I breathed in through my nose and out through my mouth and I kept my face still. You will not cry. This is your life. You chose this. I didn't choose this. But that's the kind of argument you stop having with yourself after two to three years. The head maid found me before I made it out of the hall. "Head for Luna's room and prepare her meal. Move." "Yes ma'am." I went. The corridor to the Alpha's wing was quiet as everyone still in the courtyard for the celebration. I let myself breathe it in, that stolen quiet, all the way to the kitchen and through the preparation and up the stairs and into Sola's room where I arranged everything the way she liked it and tried not to look at the nightstand. There were things on it I did not need to have feelings about today. I was setting the last dish in the kitchen when I heard the giggling. Lola and Tex were sitting cross legged on the floor outside Garrick's room. Both of them disheveled. Both of them completely unbothered about it. Tex had something green smeared across his chin. Lola's left sleeve was a disaster. I stopped in the hallway. I spent an hour on that dress this morning. "Lola, don't sit on the floor. You'll ruin your dress." She looked up at me and her face did that thing — that shift, that small careful withdrawal, the one she'd been taught. "You too, Tex. Big day for your mum." Tex huffed. "She'll just tell you to clean me anyway." "That's true." Lola nodded with the gravity of a much older person. Then she looked at me directly. "You should just go. Mum says we shouldn't stay near people like you. You smell like evil smoke and it's bad for us." Tex nodded in agreement. They went back to whatever game they were playing. I stood in the hallway and looked at my daughter and felt it move through me like water through a crack — slow, inevitable, getting into everything. Her hair….Her hands and eyes that are his but her mouth that is mine. She doesn't know. She will never know if this keeps going. "Okay." I smiled at them both with every last thing I had. "I'll leave you to it." I walked into the nearest room and closed the door and stood with my back against it. I stared for over ten seconds then I moved. Sola came back from the ceremony glowing. She stopped when she saw me straightening the last pillow on the bed and the glow became something else. Something that recognized an audience even when the room was nearly empty. The slap hit before I finished turning around. The crack of it went through the room. The two maids folding linens in the corner froze. Someone's breath caught. I held my cheek and stayed on my feet. "You left me." Sola's voice climbed beautifully. "In the middle of the ceremony. I had to hold my own gown. My own gown, Leigh, at my own anniversary.." "The head maid reassigned me. She told me the room…" "I don't care what she told you." She stepped close. Close enough that I could smell the celebration still on her — champagne, perfume, the sweetness of a woman who'd just gotten everything she wanted. "You work for me. Your only job is me. Are we clear?" I said nothing. "Are we clear?" "Yes Luna." She searched my face for something. A crack or flinch but I gave her nothing. The door opened Garrick walked in. He filled the doorway the way he always did — that Alpha presence, that weight that shifted the air in a room before he said a word. The two maids looked at the floor. Every instinct in me said look down, the same automatic pull that every wolf felt near an Alpha King. I looked straight at him. His eyes landed on me first. They moved to my cheek. To the mark Sola's hand had left. Then they moved to Sola. "What happened?" "Nothing, baby." Her whole body changed — softened, opened, turned toward him like a flower toward light. She crossed the room and put her hand on his chest. "Leigh was being difficult. You know how she gets." His jaw shifted slightly. "Leigh." His voice was even. Unbothered. Which was always, always worse than anger. "Apologize to her, you don't have to be difficult." I looked at him. You saw my face, I thought. You looked right at it. "Sorry," I said. To the floor. Sola smiled. She turned to the remaining maids. "Everyone should go, all of you." They filed out and I joined them. "Not you, follow me to the room.." I went still and she looked at me with those careful, satisfied eyes and then she looked at Garrick and she said it simply, the way you say something you have been saving for exactly the right moment. They both went to the room and I followed. "Stay right there, Leigh. I want you to watch." The silence in the room was absolute. I looked at Garrick. He was looking at Sola. Something moved across his face but it was gone before I could name it. Then he looked at me, twitching his jaw and he said nothing. I stood at the wall with my hands at my sides and my face completely, perfectly still and I watched my mate choose his wife on their anniversary while the bond in my chest burned and screamed and I absorbed every single second of it the way I absorb everything — the moans, the groans, the silent pain, alone. Sola looked at me once over his shoulder. She was smiling. When it was over she told me I could go. Like I was furniture being dismissed. I walked to the door. My hand was on the frame when Garrick said my name through the link. I stopped but I didn't turn. "I'll come to your room later," he said. Quiet. Just for me. I stood there for one long moment. Then I walked out and pulled the door shut behind me.