LAST LUNA: Return of The Rejected Mate

4

Sera's POV

"We need to discuss your situation," he said, after sighting me on the corridor not long after I left my room.

"I thought we already had that sorted out.. yesterday"

"Are you questioning me?"

"No...Alpha" I said, bowing my head a little and not wanting to cause any trouble, not especially to someone who chose to accommodate my sorry self in the whole of this mess.

He held my gaze for a while before my head dropped and I couldn't meet his eyes any longer. He moved to one of the large chairs in this...room, I don't know if it's the same as yesterday because everywhere looks alike, and there's this similarity in the architecture of the Keep. He crossed one leg over the other, completely at ease in a way that had nothing to do with comfort and everything to do with ownership. This was his room. His Keep. His territory. Every surface in this building confirmed it. "I contacted the Ashwood Pack this morning."

Something tightened in my chest. "Already?"

"At first light. It was necessary." He held my gaze steadily. "Caden Voss has declined to request your return."

The tightening spread outward and then went very still, the way pain sometimes went still when it exceeded a certain threshold and the body simply stopped registering it as new information.

"He declined," I repeated.

"Formally. In writing." Nikolai's voice didn't change. He wasn't softening it and he wasn't hardening it. He was simply delivering fact. "Which means you have no pack claiming you. No formal mate bond. No affiliated territory." A pause. "You're unaffiliated. Do you understand what that means under pack law?"

I understood exactly what it meant.

An unaffiliated female with a dormant wolf and no pack protection was, in legal terms, nobody's responsibility and everybody's opportunity. She could be claimed, absorbed, bartered, ignored. She existed in the gap between pack structures with nothing to anchor her to any of them.

"I understand," I said.

"Then you'll understand why I can't simply release you into neutral territory." He said it without apology but also without false warmth. "It would create a liability I'm not willing to generate."

"A liability," I repeated.

He looked up at me with a very straight face, void of any expression or emotion, like I had just interrupted something very important, before clearing his throat and resuming delivering his announcement to me.

"If something happened to an Ashwood female after leaving Blackridge land, regardless of circumstance, it becomes a political problem for this territory. I don't invite political problems."

I looked at him. "So what exactly are you proposing?"

He was quiet for a moment. Not hesitating; thinking. Working through the precise phrasing of something he had already decided.

"You'll stay in the Keep," he said. "Not as a guest. I know I made mention of your being a guest but I can't have it that way. You'll earn your accommodation. There's administrative work that needs doing — correspondence sorting, record organisation, tasks that require someone literate and detail-oriented. My head of house will direct you." He met my eyes directly. "You're not a prisoner. You can move through the common areas of the Keep without escort. But you don't leave the outer walls without permission and you don't contact outside parties without my knowledge. I'm sure some of these I just said are not news to you, just an updated version.

I let the silence sit for a moment.

"A servant," I said.

"Staff," he said. "There's a difference."

"Is there?"

"Staff are paid." He stood, retrieving his correspondence from the table by the door. "You'll receive a small wage, room, and meals. When your situation changes — if your situation changes — we'll revisit the arrangement."

He said if and when in the same breath without seeming to notice, and I noticed, and I filed it away.

"And if I refuse?" I asked. For the second or maybe third time in less than twenty four hours.

He paused at the door and looked back at me over his shoulder. "Then I arrange a formal escort to the nearest neutral settlement and whatever happens after that is beyond my jurisdiction." His eyes were very calm. "I'm offering you something functional, Sera. I'd take it."

He left. No further explanations.

I stood in the middle of the room looking over the table and listened to his footsteps move down the corridor and thought about the word functional and how it was possibly the least comforting word anyone had ever used to describe an offer of shelter.

*

An hour later I was sitting across a wide oak desk from a woman named Edda, who was the Keep's head of house and who had the particular energy of someone who had managed large complicated households for so long that almost nothing surprised her anymore. She was somewhere past sixty, iron-haired, with quick dark eyes that took my measure in approximately four seconds and apparently found it acceptable enough to proceed.

She slid a ledger across the desk toward me.

"Correspondence comes in daily from twelve affiliated packs," she said. "It gets sorted by territory, urgency, and type: diplomatic, administrative, personal. Personal goes directly to the Alpha's desk unopened. Diplomatic gets flagged for his secretary. Administrative comes to me." She folded her hands. "Previous girl who did this left three months ago. Married into the Westfield Pack. Good for her, inconvenient for us."

I pulled the ledger toward me. The system inside was straightforward; cleaner than the Ashwood administrative records, which had always been organised with the enthusiasm of people who hated organisation. "I think I can manage this."

Edda looked at me with the expression of someone reserving judgment. "You're Omega-ranked or so I heard..."

"Yes."

"Ashwood Pack."

"Previously," I said.

Something shifted in her expression. Not pity, something more considered than that. She picked up a smaller folder from the corner of her desk and held it out. "This morning's intake. Consider it your first task."

I took it.

"Meals are at seven, twelve, and six," she said, already returning to her own work. "You missed seven. Kitchen will have something left if you go now. Common areas are yours to use. The eastern corridor on the third floor is the Alpha's private wing, you don't go there. The training grounds to the west are active from five until nine in the morning and again at four in the afternoon, you stay clear during those hours unless you're summoned." She looked up briefly. "Questions?"

"Just one," I said. "How many people in this Keep know why I'm here?"

Edda considered this with the honesty of someone who didn't see the point in softening things. "Everyone," she said. "News moves fast in stone buildings. But they're Blackridge wolves. They don't gossip where it causes problems." A pause. "Neither should you."

I nodded and stood and tucked the folder under my arm.

"One more thing," Edda said, without looking up from her desk. "The chamber you were given. The one at the end of the east wing second floor."

I stopped.

"The Alpha chose that room specifically." She said it without inflection, without implication, in the same tone she'd used to tell me about mealtimes. "It was his mother's chamber. Before she passed. Nobody's been put in it in eleven years."

I stood very still.

"I thought you should know," she said. "Since you're detail-oriented."

She went back to her work.

I walked out into the corridor with the morning folder under my arm and my mother's necklace at my collarbone and a fact I had no idea what to do with sitting squarely in the centre of my chest.

Eleven years. Nobody. And then me.

I didn't know what it meant. I wasn't sure Nikolai knew what it meant either, or whether he had done it consciously or whether something in him had simply moved toward a decision before his mind could fully examine it.

What I knew was that a man who called me a liability and offered me work for wages and felt absolutely nothing had not put me in his dead mother's room, not just like that. So what may be happening?

Those two things did not belong to the same person.

I filed it away with everything else and went to find the kitchen.