The Luna He Rejected: An Alpha's Regret

CHAPTER 34

I sat with that for a moment, feeling the old, automatic urge to say something cutting rise up and, for once, deciding to let it pass without comment. There would be time later for my internal monologue to have its field day. This wasn't that moment.

"That's a real instinct," I said instead, carefully, watching Isolde's face for the flicker of manipulation I still half expected to find and, uncomfortably, didn't. "I'm not going to pretend it undoes anything. It doesn't. But it's real, and I recognize it when I see it, because I've spent every day of the last four years making decisions with exactly that math in the back of my head. What my children will someday know, and when, and how much it will cost them to find out."

"It's a meaningful choice," Caden said quietly, looking at Isolde in a way I hadn't seen since Millhaven. Not tenderness, nothing close to that, but something that looked almost like grief for the person Isolde might have been able to become, under some other set of circumstances, with some other set of choices. "For his future. For what he gets to understand about you, on his own terms, when he's old enough to ask for it instead of stumbling into it."

Isolde nodded, quick, like she needed the validation more than she wanted to admit needing anything from either of us.

"There's one more thing." Her hands twisted together, the first genuinely unguarded gesture I had seen from her in the entire acquaintance. "I want to write him a letter. Not now, not for him to have now. He's four, he wouldn't understand a word of it and I don't want him to. I mean for later. Whenever later turns out to be. I want to tell him that some fraction of what I felt for him was real, that he wasn't only ever a piece on a board, even if I treated him that way more often than I should have." She looked up, and for the first time there was no performance in it at all, just a woman asking for something she had no right to ask for and knew it. "I'm not asking you to give it to him. I'm not asking you to promise anything. I'm asking you to keep it. Somewhere safe. And if you ever decide, whenever that day comes, that he's better off having it, you'll be the one who decides that. Not me. I don't get a vote anymore. I understand that."

Well, I thought, feeling the sharpest edges of a very long week grinding slowly, unwillingly, down into something closer to exhaustion than triumph. There goes my tidy villain. I had a whole speech prepared. I'd been drafting it for days, actually, in my head, late at night, several different versions, all of them extremely satisfying and none of them requiring me to feel a single complicated thing about the woman who tried to have me killed on a cliff. And here she is, ruining it, by being human at the worst possible moment.

"I'll keep the envelope," I said finally. "I'm not promising you delivery. I'm not promising you anything except that it won't be destroyed, and that whether Evan ever reads it will be my call, made with his wellbeing in mind and nothing else. Not yours. Not what you want him to feel about you. His."

"That's more than fair." Isolde's eyes were wet, and she didn't wipe at them, like she'd decided somewhere along the way that she'd earned the right to at least be seen crying, if nothing else. "That's more than I deserve, honestly, and I know it."

"Yes," I said, not unkindly, but not gently either. "You do."

Isolde signed the papers Amara had waiting, in silence, and the guards led her back toward the east wing and its unfairly excellent throw pillows. I watched her go and felt, against every reasonable expectation I'd walked into that office with, something that wasn't quite pity and wasn't quite relief but sat somewhere uncomfortably close to both.

Caden didn't say anything for a while after the door closed. He stood at the window, looking out at the training yard where a pair of pups were tumbling over each other in the frost-hardened grass. I watched the tension leave his shoulders in slow, uneven stages, like a man setting down something he'd been carrying so long he'd forgotten it had weight.

"You surprised me," he said eventually. "In there. I expected you to tear her apart. I think I would have understood if you had."

"I wanted to." I came to stand beside him, close enough that our shoulders brushed. "I had several excellent lines ready. Genuinely devastating material. I workshopped them in the shower this morning, that's how prepared I was."

"And?"

"And it turns out watching someone try to protect their kid from a piece of paper is not actually a great backdrop for devastating one-liners. Deeply inconvenient. I'm considering filing a complaint with whoever's in charge of poetic justice, because the timing was genuinely rude." I exhaled, and let the last of the performance drop out of my voice, because I was tired of holding it up, and because he, of everyone in this house, had earned the unguarded version at least once today. "I meant what I said to her. It doesn't undo anything. I'm not suddenly her friend. But I've spent four years building a life around exactly the same math she was doing in there. What my kids get to know, and when, and how much truth costs them at four versus fourteen versus forty. I can hate her and still recognize the math."

Caden turned to look at me properly then, and whatever he saw on my face made something in his own expression settle, quiet and sure, in a way I felt echo through the bond before he'd said a single word.

"Stay," he said, not quite a question, careful the way he'd been careful all morning not to make anything sound like a demand. "Tell me you're staying. Not forever, if you're not ready to say forever. Just for now. Tell me you're staying for now."

I looked at him, at the window, the training yard, the pups tumbling in the frost, the whole cold bright morning stretched out beyond the glass, the house behind me full of my children's laughter and Marta's cooking and thirty wolves who'd bowed to something in me that had nothing to do with a title, and found, for the first time since I'd driven away from this place four years and a lifetime ago, that the answer didn't cost me anything to give.

"I'm staying," I said. "For now."

He didn't say anything. He didn't need to. I felt it land through the bond instead, warm and total, and decided that for once, I was going to let myself enjoy a win without immediately drafting a sarcastic footnote about it.

I allowed myself exactly four seconds of that. Then, because I was still myself, I added, "Don't let it go to your head, Ashford. 'For now' is not a life sentence. I expect excellent behavior."

"I'll draft a formal proposal," Caden said, and this time I was the one who laughed first.