The Luna He Rejected: An Alpha's Regret

CHAPTER 39

I found Luna standing sentry at the mouth of the east wing corridor the next morning, feet planted shoulder-width apart, wolf pressed forward so visibly that even I, whose own wolf communication with my daughter still occasionally required an interpreter, could read the posture from ten feet away.

"What are we guarding against," I asked, coming to stand beside her, "given that the actual threat left in a car yesterday at eleven fifty-two, according to Marcus, who I believe has that timestamp tattooed somewhere on his person by now."

"I'm not guarding against anything." Luna didn't look away from the corridor, chin lifted, entirely serious. "I'm making sure the hallway knows she's gone. Wolves remember scent longer than they remember facts. If I stand here long enough with my wolf forward, it registers properly. Permanently. So nobody who walks through here ever has to wonder again."

Well, I thought, looking down at my four-year-old daughter conducting what amounted to a one-child exorcism via sheer force of will, I've read parenting books. None of them covered this specific scenario. I would like a refund.

"That's very thorough of you," I said instead, gently. "How are you feeling about all of it? Not the hallway. The rest of it."

Luna considered the question with the same unhurried seriousness she brought to everything, finally letting her wolf ease back enough that her shoulders dropped an inch. "I think she tried to steal something she didn't know how to build," she said. "A family. A real one. She watched Daddy have one with you a long time ago, before I existed, and she wanted it, and instead of learning how people actually build that, slowly, with mistakes, the way you and Daddy are doing it now, she just tried to take it. Like a costume. That doesn't work. You can't wear a family like a costume." She paused, and something in her small face softened into an expression far too old for it. "I feel sad for Evan, mostly. He didn't get a say in any of it. He just got born into someone else's costume and had to live inside it until it fell apart."

I crouched down properly then, meeting my daughter at eye level, and did not, for once, try to soften the enormity of what a four-year-old had just articulated with more clarity than most adults managed in a lifetime of therapy. "That's exactly right," I said simply. "That's exactly what happened to him."

"He's going to need a lot of us," Luna said. "For a long time. Longer than he thinks he will."

"Yes."

"Good. I already told Emery we're sharing our room with him whenever he wants, no negotiating." Luna delivered this with the flat finality of a policy decision already ratified and filed, and turned to walk back down the hall, mission apparently complete, leaving me crouched in the corridor with my chest doing something complicated and enormous.

Caden found me still there a minute later, having clearly caught the tail end of the conversation from somewhere out of sight, because he came to stand beside me with an expression that had abandoned any pretense of Alpha composure entirely.

"You let her do that," he said. "Stand guard. Work through it in her own words, at her own pace, without stepping in to make it easier or faster or tidier for her."

"I let all of them do that," I said. "It's the only thing that's ever worked. If I hand them a neat, adult version of the feeling before they've built their own version of it, they don't actually process anything. They just memorize my words and repeat them back to me, and it looks like healing but it isn't. It's mimicry." I straightened, brushing off my knees. "It's slower. It's harder to watch, some days. But it's theirs, when they get there."

Caden looked at me for a long moment, something raw and unguarded moving behind his eyes. "I don't think I understood, until this week, exactly how much of who they are is because of choices you made when nobody was watching and nobody was going to thank you for them."

"Nobody needed to thank me. I just needed them to be okay." I caught the look on his face and softened it with a small, tired smile. "Don't go getting misty about parenting philosophy on me before nine in the morning, Ashford. I haven't had coffee."

"Duly noted." He almost smiled, then sobered. "Evan asked for you. He's in the east garden. Said he wanted to talk to you alone, specifically. Marta tried to sit with him and he was very polite about asking her to leave, apparently."

"Polite," I repeated. "Even now. God, that kid."

"I know." Something moved through Caden's expression, guilt and tenderness tangled together in a way I suspected he was still learning how to hold at the same time without one collapsing into the other. "Go. I'll keep the twins occupied."

Evan was sitting on the stone bench at the far edge of the east garden when I found him, small and still, watching a pair of sparrows argue over a scattering of crumbs someone had left on the path. He didn't look up when I sat down beside him, but he shifted, almost imperceptibly, closer to my side, which I'd learned over the past few days was the closest thing to stay that he currently had the words for.

"Marcus told me she's really gone," he said, after a while, still watching the sparrows. "Not just gone for the tribunal. Gone-gone. Not coming back to Ironmoor."

"That's right."

He was quiet for a long moment, his small hands folded in his lap, and when he spoke again his voice had the careful, over-precise quality of a child trying very hard to describe something he didn't have adequate language for yet. "My wolf feels weird about it. Not one feeling. Two feelings, at the same time, and they don't match, and I don't know what to do with both of them being there together."

"Tell me about both of them," I said. "You don't have to make them match. They don't have to."

"One of them is sad." He picked at a loose thread on his sleeve, not looking at me. "Really sad. Because she's my mom, and I don't think I'm supposed to feel happy that my mom is gone forever, even if she—" He stopped, swallowed, and I felt my chest tighten in anticipation of what was coming. "Even if she hurt me. On purpose. I know it was on purpose now. Marcus explained it, kind of, and Luna explained it more, in the way she explains things, which is very direct but also helps."

"That sounds like Luna."

"The other feeling is lighter," Evan continued. "Like something heavy that used to sit on my chest at night isn't there anymore. I didn't know it was heavy until it wasn't there. Is it bad that I feel lighter? Because she's my mom, and I'm supposed to miss her, and instead part of me feels like I can finally breathe all the way in for the first time."

I reached over and took his small hand in mine, careful, giving him every chance to pull away if he needed to, the way Caden had given me on the mountain path days ago.

"It's not bad," I said. "It's not even unusual. You can be sad and relieved at the exact same time, about the exact same person. That's not a contradiction, Evan. That's just what it feels like to have loved someone who also hurt you. Both things are true. You don't have to pick one."

He nodded slowly, some of the tension easing out of his small shoulders, though not all of it. "I know about the letter," he said, after another quiet moment. "Marta didn't tell me exactly what it says. But I heard her talking to Marcus. She said my mom left something for me, and Marta's supposed to decide when."

Of course you know, I thought. You're the most watchful child I have ever met, and you have spent your entire life learning to hear the things adults think they're keeping from you. That instinct kept you safe once. I hate that it had to.