The Luna He Rejected: An Alpha's Regret

CHAPTER 36

I found Caden still at the kitchen table when I went back inside, the paperwork from the morning stacked neatly in front of him, not reading it, just sitting with his hands loosely folded, watching the door like he'd been waiting to see if I'd come back through it or keep walking straight past into whatever version of my life didn't include him.

I sat down across from him instead of beside him this time, which felt, absurdly, like it mattered.

"I keep waiting to feel like I've lost something," I said, before I could talk myself out of it. "Trading Millhaven for this. The cottage. The café. The version of my life where nobody bows to me and nobody needs anything from me except whether I remembered to buy milk. I keep waiting for the grief to show up, because I built that life on purpose, out of nothing, and it was mine, and I'm choosing to set it down." I looked at my hands instead of at him. "It's not showing up. My wolf is completely, disgustingly at peace here, and some part of me resents her for it, because it feels like cheating. Like I should have to grieve something this big, and instead I just feel..." I searched for the word, annoyed at how simple it turned out to be. "Right. I feel right. And I don't know what to do with that."

Caden didn't answer right away, which I'd learned, over the past several days, was usually the sign that he was choosing his next words with actual care rather than reflex, and I made myself wait for it instead of filling the silence with something safer.

Raven's in a car right now, I thought, three minutes down the mountain, no doubt feeling extremely pleased with himself for that little parting speech, completely insulated from having to watch me actually attempt it. Cowardly, really, when you think about it. Say the whole thing and then immediately leave the state. Bold strategy.

"Say it," I said out loud, mostly to myself, and watched Caden's eyebrows lift slightly at the apparent non sequitur. "Sorry. Not you. Myself. I'm talking myself into something."

"Take your time," he said. "I've got nowhere else to be. I haven't had nowhere else to be in about a decade, actually, so this is genuinely novel for me."

"I loved you," I said, and then, because that wasn't the whole thing and Raven's voice was still sitting uncomfortably in the back of my skull insisting on the whole thing, I kept going before my nerve could catch up with my mouth and shut the door on it. "The entire four years, Caden. Every single one of them. I built a house and a job and a wall around myself made of exactly the right amount of sarcasm to keep anyone from noticing, and underneath every single brick of it I loved you the whole time, furiously, uselessly, in a way I never fully managed to burn out no matter how hard I tried, and I tried very hard, I want that on the record. I hated you. I loved you. Both, constantly, at the same volume, for four years, and I am extremely tired of carrying both of those things around separately when they were clearly always the same thing wearing different coats."

Caden went very still, the way he did when something mattered too much to risk moving through carelessly.

"I have loved you since before I understood what the word cost," he said, low, unguarded in a way I'd only seen glimpses of before this week. "I loved you while I was married to you and too much of a coward to say it out loud in case saying it made me vulnerable to losing it. I loved you every single day of the four years you were gone, in a house that had your absence built into every room of it, sitting across a desk from a woman I was trying to convince myself I could love instead, failing every single day, watching my wolf refuse every single day to accept the substitution. I have spent four years telling myself the silence was safer. It wasn't safer. It was just quieter. There's a difference, and I understand it now, mostly because you've spent this entire week refusing to let me get away with pretending there isn't one."

He stood, came around the table, and I met him halfway without deciding to, the way my wolf had met his on the mountain path days before, not a choice so much as the absence of any further reason to resist one.

He kissed me slow, and certain, and entirely without the performance either of us had spent years perfecting for every other room in this house, no Alpha, no Luna, no council watching, no ledger of grievances between us for one full, unguarded minute, just four years of everything neither of us had said finally arriving somewhere it could be spent.

This, I thought, somewhere in the very small part of my brain still capable of thought, is objectively going to make my sarcasm significantly less effective as a coping mechanism going forward. I would like to file a complaint about that too. I am extremely busy filing complaints today.

The window over the sink rattled slightly as two small faces pressed against it from outside, and Luna's voice, muffled through the glass but perfectly audible, announced with the flat authority of a woman delivering a verdict: "Factor Seven. They're kissing in the kitchen. I'm adding it to the list."

Emery's face appeared beside hers, considerably less composed, practically vibrating with delight. "GROSS," he bellowed, in the exact tone that meant the precise opposite, "BUT ALSO GOOD, DO IT AGAIN..."

Caden broke the kiss laughing against my mouth, forehead dropping to mine, and I felt the sound of it land through the bond warm and whole and entirely unguarded. When I looked up at the window at my children's twin delighted faces smashed against the glass, I was laughing too, helplessly, the kind of laugh that had nowhere sharp left in it to hide behind.

"Factor Seven," I repeated, wiping my eyes, half at the kiss and half at my daughter's spreadsheet approach to her parents' reconciliation. "I can't believe I'm about to lose an argument to a four-year-old's bullet list."

"You're not losing," Caden said, still grinning, still holding me like he had no current plans to stop. "You're just finally on the same side of it as the rest of us."