The Luna He Rejected: An Alpha's Regret

CHAPTER 32

Well, I thought, faintly appalled at myself for how much of me wanted to feel sorry about this, that is deeply inconvenient information to receive while trying to stay angry at someone. Universe, I would like to formally file a complaint.

“Why did you let me go, then,” I asked, my voice cracking slightly on the words. I hated it, but I asked anyway. “If it cost you that much?”

“Because I told myself a story too,” Caden said. “I convinced myself you were strong enough to survive without me—which was true, you were, you proved that a hundred times over in Millhaven without any help from me—but I used that truth as an excuse instead of a reason. I told myself that because you didn’t need rescuing, you didn’t need me at all. And that Isolde, standing in my office insisting she had nowhere else in the world to go, needed my duty more than you needed my love. I picked the version of myself that got to feel useful over the version that got to be honest. I let you drive away because staying with you would have meant admitting I didn’t know how to be anything other than useful to the people around me, and I was terrified of what would happen if you asked me to just be your husband instead of your Alpha.”

For the record,” I said once I’d found my voice again, “that is possibly the single worst reason a man has ever given a woman for letting her drive off pregnant with twins into a life of single motherhood and questionable coastal real estate. I want you to sit with that. I want you to really marinate in how bad that reason is.”

“I’m aware.”

“Good. Marinating builds character.” I wiped at my eyes with the back of one hand, annoyed at the tears, more annoyed that they’d shown up at all when I’d specifically instructed myself not to cry before ten a.m. “I’m not going to pretend that’s not enough of an answer. It is. It doesn’t mean I’ve forgiven it. I don’t know if I ever fully will, not the way people mean when they say that word. But I believe you. That’s different from forgiveness. It’s still something.”

“It’s more than I expected to get from you this morning.”

“Don’t get used to it. I have a very long memory and an even longer list.”

“I would expect nothing less from the woman who dismantled an entire succession plot from a stranger’s kitchen table.”

He’s learning, I thought, unwillingly charmed despite my best efforts to remain unimpressed. Flattery. Wielded correctly, even. Someone give this man a participation trophy… engraved, obviously. He’d probably frame it.

“You should also know,” I said instead, “that watching me stay three steps ahead of every disaster your ex-wife orchestrated over the past month should have taught you something permanent. Not just about this. About all of it, going forward.”

“It did.” No hesitation at all. “I’d be an i***t to sideline your judgment again. You out-thought Isolde’s entire legal strategy from a kitchen table with a laptop that wasn’t even yours. I’m not interested in a version of this family where I make decisions and inform you afterward. I want a version where you’re in the room before the decision exists.”

“That’s genuinely the least insane thing you’ve said to me in four years.”

“I’m setting the bar extremely low for myself. Strategically.”

“Smart. Keep it there. It’s easier for both of us if you stay slightly beneath my expectations and then occasionally, thrillingly, exceed them.”

He laughed—really laughed, the sound surprising both of us a little—and I felt my own mouth curve despite every intention of keeping this conversation appropriately solemn. This is the problem with him, I thought. He’s insufferable and also occasionally hilarious and I have never once figured out how to hold both of those facts in my head at the same time without something in my chest going soft about it.

Neither of us said anything else for a while. We stood at the edge of the training yard with the whole cold morning stretched out around us. When Caden reached for my hand—slow, giving me every opportunity to pull away—I didn’t take it so much as I let it happen. I let my fingers curl into his the way they used to before either of us had learned to be careful with each other.

My wolf pressed forward through the bond first. I felt it happen, felt the low, warm pulse of recognition, home, mate move outward from somewhere underneath my ribs—unbidden, uncensored, the way it hadn’t in four years because there had been no bond intact enough to carry it. On the other side of that pulse, I felt him. Felt his wolf meet mine halfway. Not hunger, not the desperate grasping his desire had carried since Millhaven, but something quieter and infinitely more dangerous to the walls I’d built. Relief. Pure and total. The specific relief of something broken finding, after four years, that it could still be whole.

Neither of us spoke. There was nothing to say that the bond wasn’t already saying better. We stood there for two full minutes, hands joined, wolves pressed together across whatever distance still separated the healed parts of us from the parts that weren’t. When Marta’s voice finally carried out from the kitchen door, calling that the children were asking for their mother, I felt the loss of that quiet the way I used to feel the loss of sleep—reluctantly, and with the clear understanding I’d be chasing the feeling of it again as soon as I could reasonably arrange it.

“Fifteen minutes,” Caden said, glancing at the sky, at the sun that had climbed higher than either of us had noticed. “That was closer to forty.”

“You’re the Alpha. Dock your own pay.”

“I don’t get paid. I’m the Alpha.”

“Then dock your own dignity. You’ve got plenty to spare this morning.”

He laughed again, unguarded, the kind of sound I hadn’t heard from him in this house in longer than I wanted to think about, and walked me back inside with my hand still folded into his. Neither one of us let go until the kitchen door was already swinging shut behind us.