The Luna He Rejected: An Alpha's Regret

CHAPTER 40

I reached into my cardigan pocket and pulled out the envelope. Marta had given it to me that morning, quietly, saying only that she trusted my judgment more than her own on this one, since she wasn't his mother and I, in every way that had ever mattered, currently was. I held it out to him.

"It's yours," I said. "Whatever's in it. It's not mine to decide, and it's not Marta's either, not really, even though she's the one holding onto it for now. It belongs to you. Which means you get to decide what happens to it, and when, and whether at all."

Evan looked at the envelope for a long time without taking it, his small face working through something I couldn't fully read.

"I don't want it yet," he said finally, and pushed it gently back toward my hand rather than taking it. "I know that's probably okay to say. I want you to keep it safe. Somewhere I know I could ask for it, if I ever wanted it. But not now. Right now it just makes my head loud. Loving me and hurting me on purpose, those don't fit in my head together yet. Maybe when I'm older they'll fit better. I don't know."

"That's more than okay," I said, tucking the envelope carefully back into my pocket. "That's exactly the right amount of ready. You don't owe anyone a timeline on this, Evan. Not me, not her, not even yourself."

He nodded, and some of the rigidity went out of his small frame, like he'd been braced for me to push and was still recalibrating that I hadn't.

"Will it stay loud?" he asked, quiet. "The confusing part. Forever?"

"No," I said, with the certainty of someone who had lived through my own version of exactly this. "It gets quieter. Not because you stop feeling it. You'll probably feel some version of it your whole life, if I'm honest with you, because that's just what it's like to love someone complicated. But it gets quieter, because we're going to surround you with so many good, loud, ordinary things, dinners, and bad jokes, and Luna reorganizing your bookshelf without asking, and Emery insisting his bear needs a seat at the table, that the confusing part stops being the loudest thing in the room. It becomes one voice in a very crowded, very warm house, instead of the only voice you can hear."

"Will the pack ever really want me?" His voice dropped smaller on that one, the real question underneath everything else he'd said, and I felt it land somewhere close to the center of my chest. "I'm not really Caden's. Everyone knows that now. I'm just here. Because nobody had anywhere else to put me."

"Evan." I waited until he looked at me properly. "Two nights ago you stood between Greymoor wolves twice your size and the people you love, and you didn't move, and you didn't let them past you, because your wolf told you they were going toward the others and you decided, at four years old, that you were going to stop them. That is not a small thing that nobody had anywhere else to put. That is one of the bravest things I have ever watched anyone do, wolf or human, adult or child. This pack saw that. I saw that. You are not here because nobody wanted you somewhere else. You are here because every single person in that house watched what you did in that corridor and decided, immediately and completely, that you belong to us now. You are going to be so deeply loved, Evan. I promise you that. Not someday. Starting now."

He didn't say anything, but he leaned into my side properly this time, small and solid and finally, visibly, a little lighter, and I wrapped an arm around him and let him sit there for as long as he needed, watching the sparrows finish off their crumbs in the thin morning light.

Caden was standing in the garden doorway when I finally looked up, and had clearly been there for some time, judging by the state of his face, undone in a way I had genuinely never seen from him, not once, not even in the worst hours of the past month. He didn't try to hide it, didn't reach for composure the way the old version of him would have on reflex.

"I heard some of that," he said quietly, once Evan had wandered off to find Luna and Emery, the envelope still safe in my pocket, his small shoulders noticeably lighter than they'd been an hour before. "Most of it, actually. I wasn't trying to eavesdrop. I just couldn't make myself walk away."

"I know."

"You told him he belongs to us. Not to me. To us." Something in his voice cracked slightly on the word. "You didn't have to say it that way. You could have said 'the pack' and left yourself out of it, and it still would have been true."

"It wouldn't have been the whole truth, though." I looked at him steadily. "He's mine too now, Caden. However this all shakes out between us, long-term, that part isn't up for negotiation. He doesn't get to wonder whether he's wanted. Not in this house. Not ever again."

Caden crossed the garden and pulled me into him, not with the desperate, grasping quality his desire for me had carried since Millhaven, but with something quieter, steadier, gratitude moving through the bond so completely I felt it settle into my own chest like something warm poured slow.

"We're going to be okay at this," he said into my hair, half wonder, half disbelief, like he was still catching up to the fact that it was true. "All of us. Even the parts that shouldn't work, on paper. Even him."

"We're going to be more than okay," I said. "Because we're not trying to erase what happened to any of them. We're just making sure it stops being the only thing they remember. There's a difference between forgetting the before and simply making sure the after is loud enough to matter more."

"That's the whole thing, isn't it," Caden murmured. "That's the entire job, from here."

"That's the entire job," I agreed. "Starting now. Every ordinary day, stacked up against the bad ones, until the good days simply win by volume."