The Luna He Rejected: An Alpha's Regret

CHAPTER 31

Marta chased us both out of the kitchen a little after eight, dish towel snapping like a whip at Caden’s retreating back. She insisted that a Luna who had just spent the night defending her family from a coup didn’t need to be hovering over a stove when there were perfectly capable hands available. Caden didn’t argue. Smart man. Nobody argued with Marta before nine in the morning and lived to tell the story with all their dignity intact.

He simply looked at me, tilted his head toward the door, and said, “Fifteen minutes. Walk with me.”

It wasn’t a command. I noted that the way I noted most things about him now—filing it away as data rather than feeling, because feelings were expensive and I was trying to budget. Four years ago it would have been phrased as one, dressed lightly enough to seem like a request but understood by everyone in the room as something else. This was smaller. An actual question, with an actual door left open for me to say no.

Congratulations, I thought. Four years and a small war later, and the man has discovered the word “please.” Somebody alert the council. Commission a plaque.

I said yes anyway. Sarcasm was free. A walk that got me out of Marta’s kitchen before I was handed a whisk and a job title was not something I was principled enough to turn down.

The morning air outside the packhouse hit me like something physical. Ironmoor sat high enough in the mountains that the cold came sharper and cleaner than anything Millhaven’s coastline ever produced—thin and bright, carrying the smell of pine and wet stone and, underneath all of it, something that had no name I could put to except home. I resented it enormously, because I had worked very hard and paid a truly unreasonable amount for a beachside cottage specifically so I would never have to think of this place that way again.

My wolf did not share the resentment. She came forward the moment we crossed the threshold, pressing up against the inside of my skin with an eagerness I hadn’t felt in four years. She sniffed at the air, catalogued the tree line, and settled into the ground under my feet like she had been waiting the entire time for permission to stop being a stranger here.

Traitor, I told her internally. We had a whole life. We had a porch. We had Dani’s terrible coffee and a job where nobody tried to have me assassinated. And you’re over here wagging your metaphorical tail like the prodigal dog.

My wolf, unbothered, kept wagging.

Caden noticed. Of course he noticed. He noticed everything about me now with the specific, slightly desperate attention of a man who had spent four years starved of the right to notice anything at all. It would have been sweet if it weren’t also, occasionally, a lot like being watched by a very devoted, very large security camera.

“You’re settling,” he said. It wasn’t a question. “Your wolf. I can feel her easing off, through the bond. She’s been coiled tight since you crossed the border last night, and she’s just…” He exhaled, like he could feel it too, like her relief moved through him as well as me. “She’s letting go.”

“She recognizes the land,” I said, keeping my voice level. I was unwilling to hand him the satisfaction outright, even though it was true, even though I could feel it happening in real time—the way my shoulders had dropped an inch without my permission. “That’s not the same as me forgiving this place. Or you. Don’t get excited. Your ego’s had enough wins this month.”

“Noted.” The corner of his mouth twitched, and—infuriatingly—I liked that he didn’t pretend not to be amused by me. “I wasn’t going to pretend otherwise.”

Good, I thought. Because I’ve been keeping a very detailed internal ledger, Caden Ashford, and it is not currently in your favor. It is, in fact, aggressively overdrawn.

We walked along the packed dirt path that skirted the eastern treeline—the one I remembered from years ago as the route pack runners used during morning patrol. Back then I used to watch them go from the kitchen window and wonder what it would feel like to run with them instead of just for them. A pair of young wolves jogged past in human form, breath fogging, and both of them slowed, dipping their heads toward *me*—not toward Caden—before continuing on. A few minutes later an older wolf tending the fence line along the training yard did the same, more deliberately, a full bow of the head that lasted a beat too long to be casual.

I stopped walking.

“They keep doing that,” I said. “I noticed it in the chamber yesterday too. I thought it was about the council ruling. About Brennan.”

“It’s not the ruling.” Caden turned to face me fully, and there was something almost reverent in the way he said it. “A pack wolf’s instincts don’t answer to paperwork, Sera. They don’t care what title the council assigns or strips. What they felt, every one of them, the second you crossed onto this land last night… that was the bond. Recognized by every wolf in this territory the instant your foot touched Ironmoor soil, because a true mate’s return isn’t administrative. It’s older than the council. It’s older than me, honestly.”

“So what you’re telling me,” I said, “is that I currently outrank you politically, spiritually, and possibly in several categories the council hasn’t invented paperwork for yet, and I did it by doing absolutely nothing except showing up and having excellent bone structure.”

“…Essentially, yes.”

“I’m going to need that in writing. Laminated. Possibly framed above the fireplace.” I kept walking, chin up, and only let myself smirk once his eyes were on the tree line instead of my face. *Four years of being spoken over in council meetings and it turns out my trump card was just existing near the border. Incredible. Truly the feminist victory I always dreamed of.*

Caden huffed something that might, in a lesser man, have been called a laugh. “They’re not bowing to a Luna,” he said, sobering. “They’re bowing to what you are to me. That’s not something four years of divorce papers can undo, and it’s not something I earned. You did, just by being exactly who you’ve always been.”

I let that sit for a moment, watching my breath cloud in front of me.

“Then let’s talk about the things you did earn,” I said, “because we’re not doing this again, Caden. Whatever this is. I need you to understand that before anything else happens between us.”

“I know.”

“You don’t get to manage my life for me and call it protection. You don’t get to make legal decisions about my children and decide afterward whether I’ve earned the right to know about them. The Thursday meetings. The paternity filings you had drawn up before I even knew Millhaven was in danger… I understand why you did it. I understand the fear underneath it. None of that changes the fact that you did it *around* me instead of *with* me. That’s the same pattern, wearing a nicer coat.”

He didn’t flinch from it, and he didn’t rush to defend himself either.

“You’re right,” he said simply. “I’ve spent four years building a version of protecting you that never once involved asking what you actually needed. I told myself if I moved fast enough and quietly enough, I could keep you and the twins safe before you even had time to be afraid. But that’s not protection, Sera. That’s control with better manners. I know that now. I knew it before you called me on it… I just didn’t have the courage to say it out loud until you made me.”

We’d stopped completely now, standing at the edge of the training yard, and I found I wasn’t in a hurry to keep moving—which I chose not to examine too closely.

“I need you to say something else too,” I said. “I need to understand what happened. When I left. Because I’ve spent four years telling myself a story about that morning, and I don’t think it’s the true one anymore.”

Caden’s jaw worked once before he answered, and when he spoke his voice had lost the careful evenness he’d been using.

“The morning you crossed the territory line with the twins, I was in my office. I felt the bond sever—not fade, sever—like something had been cut out of my chest with a blade that wasn’t sharp enough to make it quick. I went down on the floor, Sera. Not metaphorically. I collapsed. Marcus found me an hour later still on the ground because I couldn’t get my legs to hold me, and my wolf didn’t come back online for weeks. He operated out of alignment for four years. Every pack doctor I saw told me the same thing, and none of them could dress it up in terms that didn’t come back to the same root cause… that I’d let my mate walk away, and my wolf never forgave me for it, even while the rest of me kept insisting I’d done the right thing.”