The Luna He Rejected: An Alpha's Regret

CHAPTER 38

Caden found me still standing at the window a few minutes after the cars had disappeared around the bend, and didn't say anything at first, just came to stand beside me, close enough that his shoulder brushed mine, patient in a way that had become, over the last few days, less rare and more simply him.

"How are you," he said finally, and it wasn't the perfunctory version of the question, the one people asked to fill silence. His voice had dropped into the register I'd started to recognize as his real one, unarmored, unhurried, the version of him that had apparently been locked in a drawer somewhere for fifteen years waiting for someone to ask if it was allowed out.

"Tired," I admitted, and found, to my mild surprise, that I didn't feel the need to dress the admission up in a joke first. "Thirty-six hours, Caden. Since the drive here. I've fought off Greymoor wolves, watched my daughter negotiate with a kidnapper's message, confronted my father, dismantled a legal conspiracy from a kitchen table, confessed to loving you after four years of very expensive denial, and said goodbye to half the people I love in the space of one single day. I would like, at some point in the near future, to simply lie down."

"Understandable." A beat. "Tonight?"

I looked at him, and something in his face was already braced for whatever answer came next, careful not to assume, careful not to push, which I registered as its own quiet miracle after everything.

"I want the east suite," I said. "Alone. Just me, tonight. Not because of anything that happened this afternoon. I meant every word of that, and I'm not taking any of it back, but because I have exactly zero capacity left for anything, even something good, that requires me to be present for it in the way it deserves. I want to sleep until my body stops vibrating. I want that without it meaning anything about us."

"Done," Caden said, immediately, no hesitation, no wounded pride hiding behind it. "I wasn't angling for anything tonight, Sera. I meant what I said on the mountain. I'm not in a hurry anymore. I've got the rest of my life. Tonight I just want one thing."

"Which is?"

"An ordinary evening. Dinner with the kids and Marta. No crisis. No council. No ex-wife signing paperwork in the next room. Just dinner. The single most boring, uneventful thing I can currently imagine, and I would like it more than almost anything else that's happened to me this week."

I felt something in my chest ease at that, more than I expected it to. "That," I said, "I can absolutely give you."

Dinner, predictably, was not entirely uneventful, because dinner with four-year-old twins and their newly acquired pack-heir status was never going to qualify as boring by any reasonable definition, but it was uneventful in the way that mattered. Nobody was kidn*pped, nobody signed anything, nobody's ex-wife made an appearance, and the worst crisis of the evening was Emery's firm and repeated insistence that Gerald the bear be granted a seat at the table with his own plate.

"He needs to eat too," Emery said, with the flat, unimpeachable logic of a four-year-old who had clearly rehearsed this argument in advance. "He's been very brave. He came all the way from Millhaven and he didn't even complain in the car."

"Bears don't eat mashed potatoes, sweetheart," Marta said, entirely unbothered, sliding an extra plate onto the table anyway with the specific weary indulgence of a woman who had negotiated with considerably more difficult small children over considerably higher stakes.

"He can watch me eat mashed potatoes. That's just as good."

Luna, from across the table, did not look up from her notebook. "Gerald doesn't have a digestive system, Emery. He's stuffed with fluff. It would be pointless."

"You don't know that. You've never asked him."

"I don't need to ask him. It's basic anatomy."

Caden, across the table, caught my eye with an expression of pure, helpless amusement, and mouthed, silently, three minutes, which took me a second to parse before I understood exactly what he meant and had to press my napkin to my mouth to keep from laughing out loud.

"What," Emery demanded, catching the exchange, immediately suspicious that some adult joke was happening at his expense, which, to be fair, it was.

"Nothing," Caden said, straight-faced, and then, the moment Emery went back to his negotiations with Gerald's dietary rights, leaned toward me and murmured, low enough that only I could hear, "Three minutes. That's how long it'll take Luna to convince Marcus that Gerald needs to sit in on his first formal training session. She's already building the argument. I can see it happening in real time."

"Three minutes is optimistic," I murmured back. "I give it ninety seconds. She'll frame it as a socialization exercise for pack cohesion. Marcus won't see it coming. He'll be halfway through agreeing before he even registers what he's agreed to."

"He's going to hate this so much."

"He's going to love every second of it and refuse to admit it, which is somehow worse for him."

We watched, in mutual, quiet delight, as Luna closed her notebook, slid off her chair with the calm purpose of a woman with a meeting to attend, and marched directly toward where Marcus stood by the doorway reviewing something on his phone, and I, glancing at the clock on the wall, noted with real satisfaction that it took Luna exactly one hundred and four seconds to return to the table looking deeply, quietly pleased with herself, Gerald's training session apparently secured.

"Ninety seconds," I said. "I told you."

"You were off by fourteen. I'm revising my estimate of your accuracy downward."

"Absolutely not. Fourteen seconds is a rounding error, and I refuse to be penalized for rounding errors on a night I've earned the right to be smug."

Later, after the kids had been put down, Evan asleep the moment his head hit the pillow, worn thin from a day that had asked more of a four-year-old than any day reasonably should, Luna reading by lamplight until Marta physically confiscated the book, Emery narrating an elaborate bedtime saga to Gerald that appeared to feature both dragons and Marcus in a supporting role, I stood in the doorway of the east suite and looked back down the hall toward the room I knew Caden had already retreated to, giving me exactly the space I'd asked for without a single complaint.

This is it, I thought, standing there in the quiet, feeling the ordinary, uneventful weight of a day that had, against every expectation the past month had trained into me, simply ended without anyone trying to destroy anything. This is the thing I actually wanted, underneath all of it. Not the grand gestures. Not the cliffhangers. Just this. A boring dinner. A ridiculous argument about a bear's digestive system. A house that's still standing in the morning, with everyone I love still in it.

I closed the door, and slept, for the first time in longer than I could remember, without dreaming of anything at all.