Chapter4
1137 Words
Astrid POV
The room went very still.
Damon stared at me. For a moment he looked genuinely surprised, like the word divorce had never crossed his mind as a real possibility. Like he thought I would cry, or yell, or eventually fold the way I always had before.
Then his face went smooth and cold. Alpha mode, all the way.
"You are being unreasonable, Astrid. I understand you are upset. But this decision was made for the good of the pack, and that is final."
"Final," I said. "Like the decision you made without telling me? That kind of final?"
Vera stepped forward. "Astrid, I know this feels like a betrayal. But you have to understand the position Damon is in. The Council will not wait forever. If he had waited for you to be ready, Ironwood Pack would have suffered for it. Everything he has built would have been at risk."
"Everything he has built." I looked at her. "I was a part of building this too. I gave up my whole life to come here. I learned your rules and your politics and your pack hierarchies. I smiled at people who never smiled back. I sat through dinners where half the table spoke wolf just to leave me out. And then I spent a year letting doctors put needles in me every single month trying to give your son a child."
Vera's expression did not change. "And yet here we are."
That was it. That was her full response.
Dena made a small sound that might have been a laugh.
Sable said nothing. She just stayed close to Damon, one hand still looped around his arm.
I turned back to my husband. His jaw was tight. He was not going to apologize. He was not going to ask Sable to leave. He had already made his choice and now he was simply waiting for me to accept it.
I thought about my childhood. My mother gone before I could remember her face. My father doing his best, but one night making a choice that split our family open. A half sibling I was never supposed to know about, arriving at the door like a consequence. Watching my stepmother pack her bags. Watching my father stand in the driveway looking lost.
I had grown up inside the wreckage of that kind of choice.
I had told Damon all of it. On one of our first quiet nights together, sitting on the floor of the kitchen at two in the morning with mugs of tea gone cold between us. I had told him exactly what that kind of family looked like from the inside, and exactly why I would never let a child of mine grow up in it.
He had listened. He had held my hand. He had said, "Never. Not us."
"If Sable and the baby stay, then I go," I said. "That is not a threat. That is me telling you clearly who I am. I will not raise a child inside this mess."
Damon's eyes sharpened. "Children?"
He had caught the word. I had said it without thinking and now it hung in the air between us like smoke.
I looked down. The printed report from Dr. Lena's clinic was still folded in my hand. I had been holding it this whole time without realizing.
I closed my fingers around it tightly.
He took a step toward me. "Astrid. What are you holding?"
"Nothing that concerns you right now."
"Astrid."
I stepped back. Behind him, Vera and Dena exchanged a look. Sable watched me with narrowed eyes.
I was not going to have this conversation here. Not in this room. Not with all of them watching.
I turned and walked out.
I drove home carefully, both hands on the wheel, breathing slow. My baby needed me steady. Whatever else was falling apart, that had not changed.
At home I went straight upstairs and pulled a bag from the top shelf of the closet. I did not think too hard about what I was doing. Thinking too hard would have made me stop. I packed what I needed. My documents. A few changes of clothes. The small blue journal I had kept since I first came to Ironwood Pack territory. A photo of Damon and me from our first year, standing in the garden in winter, laughing at something neither of us could probably remember now.
I put the photo in the bag anyway.
I heard the front door open downstairs.
Damon's footsteps came up fast. He appeared in the doorway of our bedroom and stopped when he saw the open bag on the bed.
"Do not do this," he said.
"I am already doing it."
He crossed the room and caught my arm, not hard, but firm. The way he did when he needed me to stay still and listen.
I pulled free.
"Astrid, listen to me. I love you. None of this changes that. But I have a duty and I cannot just ignore it because it is inconvenient. You knew what being a Luna meant when you chose this life."
"I chose you," I said. "I did not choose this."
His phone rang. He glanced at the screen, and something shifted in his face.
"I have to take this."
"Of course you do."
He held up one hand toward me like a pause button and answered. I watched his expression change as he listened. Concern. Then urgency.
"I am on my way," he said, and hung up.
"The clinic called. Sable fainted. There may be complications with the pregnancy." He was already moving toward the door. He stopped and turned back, and his voice dropped low. "Do not leave this house, Astrid. I will be back and we are going to finish this conversation."
"You cannot tell me to stay here like I am one of your pack members, Damon."
But he was already gone.
I stood in the quiet bedroom for a long moment, bag half packed on the bed.
Then I heard footsteps on the stairs. Not Damon. Someone lighter. I stepped to the doorway.
It was Marcus, one of the household staff. A big man with flat eyes who had never once spoken to me directly in two years.
"Alpha's orders," he said simply. "You are to stay in the house."
He moved to stand in the hallway between me and the stairs.
I looked at him for a long moment.
Then I went back into the bedroom and sat down on the edge of the bed. My hand found my stomach.
"It is okay," I whispered, to both of us. "We are going to be okay."
But when I looked at my phone and saw zero messages from Damon, I was not so sure I believed it.
- Writer
