The Luna He Rejected: An Alpha's Regret

CHAPTER 33

Marcus caught me in the corridor outside the children’s wing, moving at that specific brisk, purposeful walk I had learned over the past twenty-four hours meant something has happened and I have been elected to tell you about it because everyone else drew the short straw.

“She’s invoked the Sanctuary Clause,” he said, without preamble, because apparently four years hadn’t changed Marcus’s approach to small talk—which remained nonexistent. “Ancient pack law. Confines her to the east wing until the tribunal convenes. Forty-eight hours.”

“The Sanctuary Clause.” I folded my arms. “Is that the one where accused parties get a nice room and room service while everyone decides how much trouble they’re actually in, or is that just prison with better throw pillows?”

“It’s prison with better throw pillows,” Marcus confirmed. “There’s also a fireplace. It’s very insulting, honestly, how nice we’re legally required to make it for her.”

“Naturally. God forbid the woman who branded a four-year-old’s arm with a hot iron be even slightly uncomfortable while awaiting judgment. Wouldn’t want the pack’s hospitality standards to slip.” I said it lightly, the way I said most of the worst things now, because the alternative was saying them with my actual voice cracked open, and I’d already used up my quota of that particular indulgence this morning on a mountain path with Caden.

Marcus, who had apparently developed a talent over the years for hearing exactly what I wasn’t saying underneath what I was, softened by half a degree. “Caden wants a meeting. You, him, her. She’s asked for one condition before she signs anything, and she won’t state it to anyone but the two of you, together, in the room.”

Of course she won’t, I thought. Because God forbid this woman ever make anything easy. Even her surrender comes with theatrical staging notes.

“Fine,” I said out loud. “Let’s go hear the final act.”

The executive office had not changed in four years, which felt, on reflection, deeply unfair. The same dark wood. The same window looking out over the training yard. The same chair Caden had been sitting in, presumably, the exact moment the bond had severed and dropped him to the floor like a puppet with its strings cut. A detail I was doing an admirable job of not thinking about as I took the seat beside his desk instead of across from it—a small geographic decision that somehow felt enormous.

Isolde was already waiting when the guards brought her in, and the sight of her stopped my running internal commentary cold. I resented that, because sarcasm had been doing excellent load-bearing work all week and I wasn’t ready to let it fail me now.

This was not the Isolde who had stood in a school courtyard weeks ago, polished and composed and performing pleasant with surgical precision. This was not even the sharp-tongued, calculating woman from the cliff-edge confrontations I had been half-expecting. This woman looked smaller. Her hair was down, unstyled, and there were shadows under her eyes that no amount of careful lighting could have hidden. She sat in the chair the guards indicated without being asked twice, hands folded in her lap, and said nothing for a long moment, like she was gathering the last of something she needed to spend all at once.

Well, I thought. This is either the most convincing performance of her career, or the woman has actually run entirely out of moves. I genuinely cannot tell which, and I hate that I can’t tell, because not knowing means I have to actually pay attention instead of just being smug about it.

“I’m withdrawing everything,” Isolde said, before either of us could open with whatever careful opening statement we’d prepared. “All challenges. I’ll sign the succession papers voiding my claim. There won’t be a tribunal, because there’s nothing left to try me for once I’ve signed. I’m not fighting this.”

Caden’s expression didn’t change, but I felt something move through the bond—a wary, coiled this is a trick, brace that matched almost exactly what was happening in my own chest.

“Why,” he said. Not a question so much as a demand for the catch, because there was always a catch with Isolde. There had been a catch with Isolde for as long as anyone in this room had known her.

Isolde’s composure cracked, just slightly, right at the seam I had watched her maintain through council chambers and cliff edges and a genuinely deranged number of manufactured crises.

“Because of the record,” she said. “The tribunal keeps permanent records. Everything. Testimony, evidence, findings… sealed, but permanent. Accessible to anyone with legitimate pack standing who asks to see them someday.” Her hands tightened in her lap. “Evan will have pack standing someday. He’ll be old enough to ask questions, and someday he’ll be old enough that no one will be able to stop him from getting answers. And if there’s a tribunal, the official, permanent, undeniable record of what I did to him… the iron, all of it… will exist in a file with his name attached to it forever, for him to find, in exact clinical detail, whenever he goes looking.”

The room went very quiet.

There it is, I thought, and felt something in my chest do a complicated, unwelcome thing—twisting between the reflexive urge to protect and the much older, harder-won instinct not to be a fool about it twice in one lifetime. There’s the catch. Except the catch isn’t a catch. The catch is that she doesn’t want her son reading a court transcript of his own abuse someday like it’s a phone bill. That is, against every single one of my better instincts, an actual, real, human thing to want.

“You’d rather give up everything,” Caden said slowly, “than have him read the file.”

“I would rather he never have proof, in writing, with a case number, that his mother is the kind of person who…” Isolde’s voice broke, actually broke, and she pressed her lips together hard before she continued. “I’ve done unforgivable things. I know precisely how unforgivable, better than either of you, because I was awake for every single one of them while I did them. But I would like there to be one thing in this entire disaster that I did *for* him instead of *through* him. Just one.”