Chapter 8
1199 Words
Sera POV
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I woke up not knowing where I was, like it was a dream after all of had experienced with Henry.
That half second of blankness before the brain catches up with my body. White ceiling. Stone walls. Light coming in from a window I hadn't placed yet. A bed that was wider and softer than any bed I had slept in.
Then the memory of it all arrived.
All of it at once just dawned on me.
The wedding. The courtyard. Ralph's hand at my waist. The priest's voice. The signing of the formal bond papers in the small private room off the main hall where Ralph had pressed his seal into the wax without hesitation and slid the pen to me and waited.
I lay on my back and looked at the white ceiling for a long time.
I was somebody's wife, Alpha Ralph actual Luna not Henry's pretend Luna. Not the hidden daughter playing at being ordinary. Somebody's actual legally bonded formally witnessed wife and that somebody was the man whose name made Alphas sit up straighter.
The ceiling had nothing useful to say about this.
Ralph had given me my own room.
He showed me himself the night before after the reception wound down and the last guests were leaving and the fortress went from loud to quiet in the particular style large old buildings do. He walked me down the east corridor and opened a door and stood back.
The room was big. High ceilings. A window that looked out over the black river through the tree line. A bookshelf already partially filled and I had noticed immediately, I notice everything as soon as I walk in, that three of the titles were ones I had mentioned to my father in the last month.
Someone had paid attention and that person's Alpha Ralph.
There was a sitting room between my room and his. Shared space. A couch and a low table and two reading chairs angled toward a fireplace. The room said it all, you can have distance if you need it and company if you want it and nobody will decide for you which one tonight requires.
I had stood in the doorway of my room and turned back to him.
He was leaning against the sitting room wall with his arms folded looking at nothing in particular.
"The room is yours," he said. "Everything in it. If something is missing or wrong tell Jax in the morning and it'll be fixed before noon."
"It's good," I said honestly.
He nodded.
"Sleep my Luna," he said. Like that was the only thing left on the agenda.
I almost smiled.
"Goodnight, Ralph," I said.
He looked at me for a moment.
"Goodnight, Sera."
It was the first time he had used just my name. No title. No my Luna for the audience. Just Sera.
I went inside and closed my door and stood with my back against it for a full minute.
Morning in Nightfang fortress was nothing like morning in Alpha Henry pack.
In alpha Henry pack, the pack house woke up gradually, reluctantly, like something being dragged. People moved quietly around Henry's moods. The kitchen staff timed breakfast around his schedule. Even the noise of the place had been careful.
Nightfang woke up like it meant it.
By the time I dressed and opened my door the corridor was already moving. Pack members going about real work with the energy of people who had slept well and had things to do. Nobody scrambled when they saw me. A woman carrying linens nodded at me with a normal face and kept walking. A young wolf coming the other way stopped and said — "Morning, Luna" — with the matter-of-fact ease of someone who had already decided I belonged here.
It sat differently than I expected.
Easier.
I found the kitchen by following the smell of coffee. It was a large room, professional and warm at the same time, and a small table near the window had been set with one place setting.
On the table was a pot of tea.
I stood and looked at it for a moment.
Someone had gone to considerable effort to have that tea in this kitchen on this specific morning.
I sat down and poured a cup and wrapped my hands around it and looked out the window at the black river moving through the trees in the early light.
I thought about the year behind me.
The cake box with the red ribbon. The pale blue dress. The hallway that smelled like pine. The door I pushed open without knocking.
I thought about sitting in my car afterward with the cake in my lap and the silence around me and that deep cold clear feeling.
I had thought that feeling was the end of something.
It was the beginning.
My phone had fourteen new messages.
Twelve were from Henry.
I read the first one. It said things that were not worth repeating. The tone was the particular tone of a man who has realized he made a catastrophic error and is responding to that realization with anger because anger is easier than accountability.
I put the phone face down.
The tea was good.
Across the territory in alpha Henry funded guest suite, I knew without needing to be told that Henry was awake and loud and thoroughly miserable.
I knew because I knew Henry.
He needed things to be a certain way for his world to make sense. He needed to be the most impressive person in any room. He needed the people around him to confirm the story he told about himself. He needed I, Sera to be nothing so that he could be something.
And now I, Sera was the Queen of the most powerful pack alliance in the territory and it was eleven hours old and already irreversible.
Henry's morning was not going well.
I was sure of it as I drink my tea.
There was a knock at the kitchen door.
Quiet. Two taps. Unhurried.
Ralph leaned against the doorframe in a dark shirt, sleeves rolled to the elbow, holding his own coffee. He looked like a man who had been awake for a while already.
He looked at the tea.
Something moved in his expression. Brief and almost invisible.
"The room," he said. “Is it acceptable?"
I looked at him.
I thought about saying, you already asked me that last night.
Instead I said, "The tea was a nice touch."
He looked at his coffee cup.
"Jax organised it," he said.
"Did he," I said.
A pause.
"No," he said.
I smiled into my cup.
He pushed off the doorframe and walked to the window and stood with his coffee looking out at the river and I sat with my tea looking at the same view and the kitchen was quiet and warm and outside the black river moved through the trees like it had been doing for thr
ee hundred years and would keep doing long after all of us were gone.
It was a good morning.
The first real one in a long time for me.
- Writer
