The Luna He Rejected: An Alpha's Regret

CHAPTER 41

"I'm going back to Millhaven."

I said it at breakfast, over Marta's pancakes, with the same tone I might have used to announce I was popping out for milk, and watched the entire table pause mid-chew.

"Term starts back up Monday," I continued, before anyone could object. "I have a classroom full of students who deserve a teacher who shows up, and two children who have exactly one more week of a school routine that isn't currently being held hostage by pack politics. The tribunal is going to take weeks to sort through properly. I'm not putting my life on hold for a legal process that doesn't actually need me standing in the room for it."

Caden set down his coffee with the careful, deliberate calm of a man choosing not to react the way his instincts wanted him to. "You've decided this already."

"I have."

Here it comes, I thought, bracing for the version of him from four years ago, the one who would have had six reasons ready, all logical, all delivered as though they were my own conclusions rather than his. Watch him try to manage this. Watch him fail to manage this. I have popcorn-level anticipation for this exact moment.

"Okay," Caden said instead, and that was it. No argument. No six reasons. Just the word, plain, followed by, "I have two weeks of pack business I need to close out anyway. Rowan's border negotiation, the transition paperwork with Amara, a dozen things Marcus can technically handle without me but shouldn't have to. Millhaven's central enough to the Ironmoor-Greymoor corridor that I could conduct most of it from there instead of here."

I looked at him for a long moment, watching him watch me, waiting to see if I'd call the maneuver for what it was.

"That is," I said slowly, "the single most transparent piece of bureaucratic justification I have ever heard in my life, and I have personally dismantled an actual legal conspiracy this month. You want to come to Millhaven with us."

"I want to come to Millhaven with you," Caden agreed, without a shred of shame about it. "I'm simply also choosing to do it in a way that doesn't require either of us to have an argument about whether I'm allowed to."

"That's not less transparent. That's just transparent with a lawyer's polish on it."

"I learned from the best. She dismantled an entire succession plot from a kitchen table."

Luna, without looking up from her notebook, said, "Add it to the list. Factor Eight: Daddy invents paperwork to be near us." Emery laughed so hard he nearly choked on a pancake, and Marta had to intervene with a glass of water and a stern look that fooled absolutely no one, least of all herself.

Millhaven, when we arrived, had the specific unbothered quality of a place that had absolutely no idea a war had nearly started on its harbor a week prior. The gulls were exactly as loud and exactly as rude as I remembered. The salt air hit me the moment I stepped out of the car, and I watched something in Evan's small shoulders ease at the smell of it, the same way my wolf had eased at the pine and stone of Ironmoor days before.

"It's the same," Evan said, standing at the edge of the harbor road, looking out at the water like he'd half-expected it to have changed in his absence. "Everything's the same."

"Did you want it to be different?" I asked.

He considered this with his usual careful seriousness. "No. I like that it's the same. I think I like both now. The mountains smell like pine and quiet. Here smells like the sea and Dani's café and Kevin's boat. I don't think I have to pick just one to like." He said it like he was surprised by the conclusion, like some part of him had assumed loving one place meant betraying the other, and had only just now worked out that the math didn't actually require that trade.

Smart kid, I thought, watching him. Smarter than most adults I've met, who spend entire lifetimes convinced that loving two things at once is some kind of moral failure. He worked that out in a car ride. I should introduce him to several ex-boyfriends.

The classroom, the next morning, felt smaller than I remembered, in the specific way that places always shrink slightly once you've stood in a council chamber deciding the fate of an entire pack. But it also felt, immediately and completely, like mine. The chalk dust, the crooked bulletin board I'd never quite managed to level, the particular chaos of thirty children who cared far more about recess than international pack law.

I watched Emery and Luna slot back into the rhythm of it with an ease that made something in my chest loosen. Evan, too, though his was quieter, watchful, still cataloguing exits out of habit, but noticeably less braced than he'd been a week ago.

Raven found me at the school gate at the end of the day, arms crossed, wearing the particular expression of a man who had clearly been enjoying himself immensely from a safe distance.

"He's been here every morning since Tuesday," he said, tilting his head toward the far side of the gate, where Caden was currently standing in a suit that was doing absolutely nothing to disguise the fact that he was an Alpha wolf loitering at a primary school pickup line. "Walked them the whole way. Twice."

"He has pack business."

"He has pack business the way I have a sudden, urgent need to reorganize the supply closet every time you're in the building," Raven said, deadpan. "Sera. The man has personally overseen the resolution of two inter-pack legal conflicts from a beachside café's back table this week, and yesterday I watched him spend forty-five minutes discussing curriculum standards with your daughter as though she were a visiting dignitary from a foreign government."

"She kind of is one, honestly."

"He treated every single one of her opinions like council testimony. It was genuinely alarming to watch. I've never seen a grown man take a four-year-old's thoughts on the Ironmoor pack school syllabus that seriously."

He's not wrong, I thought, watching Caden across the yard, crouched down at Luna's eye level, nodding along to whatever detailed policy critique she was currently delivering with the gravity of a woman twenty times her age. I built a wall around this exact scenario for four years. Man shows genuine interest in my children's opinions, treats them like people instead of accessories, walks them to school unprompted. It is deeply unfair how effective sincerity turns out to be, after everything.