His Possessive Luna

Quiet Weeks

Jane's POV

Six weeks pass, and the world somehow keeps turning despite everything that happened at the Ceremony.

The fear I saw on people's faces that night hasn't disappeared, exactly, but it's settled into something quieter — a wariness that follows me now wherever I go, pack members lowering their eyes when I pass, a respect that feels less like admiration and more like caution. I catch myself missing the version of my life where I was just the Beta's daughter who couldn't shift. That girl, at least, didn't have strangers half-bowing to her in hallways.

Dad's been different too, in a way I'm only now starting to understand. Less like a man carrying a secret, more like a man who's finally set one down. He told me, a few days after the Ceremony, that he'd suspected for months — not that I was the Rare One, exactly, but that something about the arranged engagement, the timing of everything, the strange isolated reports crossing his desk from border patrols, had all felt wrong in a way he couldn't articulate. "I kept waiting for a reason to relax," he said. "It never came."

I understand that feeling better than I'd like to.

Amelia, at least, has found something like peace. She stopped by last week, the first time since everything with Sean fell apart, and she looked more like herself than she has in months — steadier, lighter around the eyes. She's seeing someone new, a wolf from a smaller pack two territories over, nothing urgent or fated about it, just easy. "I think I needed that," she told me, turning her coffee cup slowly in her hands. "Something that doesn't feel like the end of the world if it doesn't work out."

I didn't ask about Sean. She brought him up anyway.

"I heard he's struggling," she said, careful. "The rejection took more out of him than he expected, I think." She didn't sound bitter about it. Just sad, in a distant sort of way, like she was talking about someone she used to know a long time ago.

I've heard the same, secondhand, through Xavier — Sean's been quieter, slower to recover than anyone predicted, his strength visibly diminished in training according to the others. Rejecting a bond apparently costs more than pride. I hope, for both their sakes, that whatever's left between them finds its way to something bearable, even if it's never what either of them originally wanted.

William, for his part, has been patient in exactly the way Sean warned Xavier he might be. He visits when propriety allows it, keeps his distance the rest of the time, and has never once pushed me for more than I've offered. If anything, that patience unsettles me more than persistence would. It's harder to resist someone who never gives you a reason to.

"I'm not going anywhere," he told me last week, during one of our brief, careful conversations in my family's garden. "But I'm also not going to make this harder than it already is for you. Take whatever time you need."

I wonder sometimes if he already knows how this ends. I think, somewhere underneath the calm, he might.

Xavier is different. Xavier doesn't wait so gracefully.

He's found reasons to stay on our territory far longer than any Blood Moon Alpha should reasonably need to — business meetings that run long, security consultations Dad never actually requested, until even Uncle James started asking pointed questions about why the Blood Moon delegation hadn't gone home yet. We meet in secret more often than either of us should risk, usually in the old groundskeeper's cottage at the edge of our property, long abandoned and far enough from the main house that no one thinks to look there.

Tonight is one of those nights. I slip out just after midnight, the way I've learned to do without waking anyone, and find him already waiting, leaning against the cottage doorframe like he's been there for hours.

"You're going to get caught eventually," I tell him, though I don't mean it as a real warning.

"Let them catch me," he says. "I'm getting tired of pretending I don't want this in the open."

"You promised patience."

"I did." He pulls me against him, and every argument I might have made dissolves the second his hands settle at my waist. "Doesn't mean I have to enjoy it."

We don't talk about William tonight. We don't talk about the Rare One, or the Ceremony, or the fear still lingering in people's eyes when they look at me. For an hour, in a cottage no one remembers to check, I get to just be a girl with her mate, and nothing more complicated than that.

It doesn't last, of course. Nothing does lately.

I feel it before he does — a wrongness, distant but unmistakable, like a smell carried in on wind from somewhere far off. Xavier goes still against me almost the same instant, his whole body shifting from relaxed to alert in a heartbeat.

"You felt that," he says. Not a question.

"What was that?"

He doesn't answer right away, listening to something I can't hear, his jaw tight in a way I've only seen once before — the night William arrived.

"I don't know," he finally says. "But it's the second time this week."