The Luna He Rejected: An Alpha's Regret

CHAPTER 37

Marcus reappeared in the kitchen at two exactly, which I was beginning to suspect was less a coincidence and more a personality trait. The man seemed constitutionally incapable of delivering information at any hour that wasn't precisely on some invisible schedule only he could see.

"Confirmed," he said, and Dani, still sitting at the table with what remained of the cinnamon bread, groaned audibly.

"If you say that word one more time today I'm putting it on a T-shirt and making you wear it to the tribunal hearings. 'Confirmed.' Very inspiring. Very moving. The bards will write songs."

Marcus ignored her with the ease of a man who had clearly decided, sometime in the last week, that ignoring Dani was both easier and more entertaining than engaging with her. "Isolde's vehicle cleared the outer gates eleven minutes ago." He paused, and something in his expression shifted, careful in a way that made me brace for whatever came next. "She left the envelope with Marta. Not with me. Not with a guard. With Marta specifically, before she got in the car, and she said..." He checked something on his phone, reading it rather than trusting his memory to get the wording exactly right. "She said Marta would know the right moment better than any of us would, because Marta had raised half this pack's children through worse and knew what a boy needed to hear and when he needed to hear it."

I absorbed that in silence for a moment. Of all the people in this house to trust with something that delicate, I thought, she picked the one woman here who has never once performed anything for anyone and has zero patience for nonsense. That is, infuriatingly, the single smartest decision Isolde Crane has made this entire month.

"That's..." Dani started, and then visibly gave up trying to find a joke to attach to it, which I noted, because Dani abandoning a bit meant the thing underneath it had actually landed. "That's not nothing. Okay. Fine. She gets one point for that. One."

"Brennan's inquiry convenes in three days," Marcus continued, moving on with the specific efficiency of a man who preferred facts to feelings and had clearly reached his emotional quota for the hour. "Formal pack tribunal, full elder panel, no early withdrawal clause available to him the way there was for her. Caden's requested the maximum procedural rigor. No shortcuts."

"Good," Caden said, from where he was leaning against the counter with a coffee he'd clearly abandoned the pretense of drinking twenty minutes ago. "He manipulated an elder into treason out of sixty years of quiet resentment over a council seat he thought should've been his. I want the record to reflect exactly how thorough that was, so the next ambitious elder thinks twice before trying the same thing."

"Speaking of records," Marcus said, and something that might, on a less disciplined face, have qualified as amusement flickered at the corner of his mouth, "Rowan Greymoor called. Personally. Wanted me to pass along that he's, his word, not mine, 'deeply entertained' by the sheer, chaotic devotion currently on display in this household. Said, and again I am quoting directly, that he has not seen an Alpha this thoroughly outmaneuvered by his own family in thirty years of inter-pack relations, and he means that as a compliment."

"Tell Rowan," Caden said, "that I will accept that as a compliment provided he never repeats it at a formal council session."

"Already told him you'd say that. He laughed for a full minute. I think he's planning on bringing it up at the next council session specifically because you asked him not to."

"Wonderful. I look forward to that humiliation specifically."

The goodbyes, round two, were somehow both quicker and louder than the first round, mostly because Dani had apparently decided that leaving with dignity was overrated.

"I want it on the record," she announced to the kitchen at large, hauling her bag onto her shoulder with the theatrical weight of someone about to be exiled to a distant, unforgiving frontier rather than driving four hours down a perfectly good mountain road, "that I am losing my best friend to a four-hour drive and an entire mountain range, and nobody in this family seems to appreciate the scale of my sacrifice."

"You have my number," I said. "You've always had my number."

"That's not the same as being able to show up unannounced at seven in the morning with terrible coffee and worse gossip, and you know it." Dani hugged me fiercely, and then, in the same breath, without any visible transition, turned to Marcus. "Walk me out. I have paperwork questions."

"You don't have any paperwork," Marcus said.

"I have paperwork questions, Marcus, keep up."

I watched them go, watched specifically the length of time it took them to actually reach the front door, which was considerably longer than the distance justified, and the volume at which Dani's laugh carried back through the hallway a full four minutes later, and exchanged a look with Kevin that required no words at all.

"Don't," Kevin said. "I've been trying not to think about it since Tuesday. Let a man have his denial."

"I'm not saying anything."

"You're saying it with your whole face."

Kevin's own goodbye, when it came, was quieter, the way most things about Kevin were quieter. He hugged me once, solid, and held on a beat longer than usual before he pulled back.

"Call me," he said. "Not just when something's on fire. That's the thing I want, actually. Call me on a completely ordinary Tuesday, when nothing's happened, when you've had a boring day and the kids are fine and nobody's trying to overthrow anybody. I want to hear about the boring days too. I think I've only ever heard from you during the disasters, and I'd like to know what your life sounds like when it isn't one."

"I promise," I said, and meant it more than the simple words let on.

Raven's goodbye was the shortest and the most direct, delivered not to me this time but to Caden, standing squarely in front of him at the door with none of his usual careful patience.

"She trusted you again," Raven said. "After everything. That's not a small thing, and I don't think you fully understand yet how not-small it is, because you haven't had to watch her rebuild trust from nothing the way the rest of us have, over four years, one careful brick at a time. Don't waste it. I mean that as a warning, not a pleasantry."

Caden held his gaze, steady, no defensiveness in it. "I won't."

"Good." Raven extended a hand, and Caden shook it, and something passed between the two men that looked, from where I stood, less like rivalry finally resolving and more like two people who'd both loved the same family arriving at an understanding neither of them needed to say out loud.

Then they were gone, the sound of two cars on gravel fading, and the packhouse settling into a silence that felt, for the first time in longer than I could remember, like the good kind.