The Luna he threw away

CELESTE

Seraphina POV

I didn't sleep that night.

I lay in my hotel suite on the forty-eighth floor of the Silverpeak Grand, the same hotel where I'd once made an anniversary reservation that was never used and stared at the ceiling while my mind turned that phone call over and over like a stone I couldn't put down.

I know more about you than he does. For now.

It was a threat dressed as a warning. Whoever it was wanted me rattled. Wanted me to reach out, scramble, show my hand before I was ready.

I didn't reach out.

I pulled up Marcus on my laptop at midnight.

"Run a voice trace on this number." I sent it while we talked. "And I need a full list of everyone with consistent access to Damien's inner circle over the past three years. Pack officials, business partners, personal contacts. Everyone."

"That's a long list," Marcus said.

"Narrow it to women."

A beat of quiet. "That narrows it considerably."

"I know exactly who it narrows it to," I said. "I just need confirmation."

I already knew. I'd known the moment I heard that voice. I'd spent a year listening to it across dinner tables and pack functions, always poised, always positioned slightly too close to Damien, always watching me with that particular smile that said you don't belong here and we both know it.

Celeste Mourne.

She had been Damien's girlfriend before our marriage. Their relationship had ended or so the pack story went, when the alliance between our families was arranged. She had stepped back gracefully, publicly, in the way that beautiful political women do when they're not actually stepping back at all.

She had never left his side. Pack strategist. Advisor. The woman who sat at his right hand at every function I attended alone.

And she was the one who had turned him against me.

I hadn't known it fully then. I had suspected the way you suspect a slow leak before the wall gives, but it wasn't until six months after the divorce that Marcus found the threads.

Messages she'd sent Damien in the early months of our marriage. Fabricated evidence, carefully assembled, suggesting I was feeding pack intelligence to a rival.

She had told him I was a spy.

And he had believed her without asking me a single question.

I had cried for three days when Marcus showed me the files. Not because Damien had believed it…though that had carved something out of me but because she had been so precise. So deliberate.

She had known exactly what to say to a man like Damien, who trusted evidence over instinct and control over people. She had handed him a reason to do what part of him already wanted.

Let me go.

I pulled up her photo on my screen. Blonde. Sharp-boned. Beautiful in the way expensive things are beautiful, deliberate and cold.

She'd kept her position close to him for three years.

Which meant she still had something to protect.

Good, I thought. People with something to protect make mistakes.

****

I met Marcus for breakfast at seven, at a café two blocks from the hotel. He was already there when I arrived, rumpled suit, reading glasses pushed up on his forehead, coffee gone cold beside his laptop. He stood when he saw me.

"The number traces to a burner. But the cell tower places it inside Voss Pack territory. Residential." He slid a tablet across the table. "The woman list, after filtering… eleven names with consistent access. But only one with a direct interest in your reappearance."

Celeste Mourne's name was at the top.

"She called me herself," I said, sitting down. "No proxy. That's either confidence or panic."

"Or both."

"What else?"

He set a different file in front of me. Tapped the top page. "This is why I came in person."

I looked down.

"Celeste told Damien, three years ago, that she was pregnant. His child."

I went still.

"There is no child," Marcus said carefully. "No birth record. No medical history of a pregnancy. Nothing. She fabricated it. We think to secure her position after the divorce or to make sure he doesn't look back."

The café noise continued around us. Cups clinking. Someone laughing near the window.

I sat in the middle of it and felt something very old move through my chest.

No child.

I thought about the three weeks after the divorce. The small rented room in Crestfield with paper-thin walls and a radiator that knocked all night.

The way I had found out alone standing at a bathroom sink, reading a test, hands that wouldn't quite stop shaking that I was carrying something Damien would never know about.

I had held that for three weeks with no one to tell. No pack. No family that hadn't already distanced themselves from the embarrassment of my failed marriage. No wolf strong enough yet to help me carry the weight of it.

And then the morning I lost it.

On the floor of that bathroom. In that rented room. With no one coming.

I had never spoken about it out loud. Not to Marcus. Not to anyone. I had buried it the way you bury things you can't afford to grieve properly ,quickly, in the dark, with no ceremony and I had built everything else on top of it.

Some mornings I forgot it was there.

Then something like this reached down and found it anyway.