Alpha Killian's True Luna

6

When I finally pushed open the large door to the office, Nicholas had already made himself comfortable in his seat. He sat behind the massive desk, leaning back against the leather with an air of absolute ownership that made the entire room feel like it belonged to him, and him alone. I walked up to the edge of the desk, my steps quiet, and stood there.

I didn't sit down. No one had invited me to, and besides, the space between us felt too heavily defined for me to dare take any liberties. I just stood by, waiting, feeling exactly like the servant I had been subjected to over these past years. Every muscle in my back was tense, holding me upright when all I wanted to do was sink into the floor and disappear from his sight completely.

He didn't look up immediately, letting the silence stretch out between us like a physical pressure. When he finally did raise his eyes, they were cold, calculating, and entirely stripped of any warmth that might have once existed between us in a different lifetime.

"You heard my announcement back there," he stated, his voice flat and devoid of any real emotion, though the authority behind it was unmistakable. It wasn't a question; it was a directive, a reminder of where we both stood in the hierarchy of things now.

I felt a familiar tightness catch in my throat, a suffocating sensation that always seemed to hurt me whenever he spoke to me in that tone. I couldn't bring myself to look him in the eye. The memory of his words in front of the rest of the people was still fresh,

burning like an open wound, so I merely nodded without meeting his gaze directly. I kept my eyes fixed on the dark wood of his desk, focusing on the small imperfections in the grain just to give my mind something else to latch onto.

"Good," he said, and the sheer casualness of his tone felt like a slap to my face. "We must do whatever it takes for the benefits of this pack. It is a great thing that you understand that."

He waved his hand slightly, a dismissive gesture that told me everything I needed to know about my current value in his world. It was the kind of movement someone made to shoo away an annoying insect.

Inside my chest, something violent and wild flared to life. I wanted to scream at him. I wanted to lung forward, to spit right on his face and tell him to hell with him, to hell with his grand ambitions, and to hell with the pack he cared about so much more than human decency. The urge was so strong it made my fingers twitch at my sides, my nails digging hard into the palms of my hands. But as quickly as the anger came, the cold reality of my situation rushed back in to smother it. I feared him. I feared what he could do, what he had already done, and I knew deep down that I didn't have the guts to try anything like that. Not now. Not when I was already broken down to almost nothing.

Instead of fighting, I forced myself to swallow the tears that were threatening to fall, choking them back down until my throat burned with the effort. I refused to let him see me cry again. I had given him enough of my tears, and they had never changed a single thing anyway. I took a slow, deep breath, bracing myself, and looked directly at him this time. If I was going to be ruined, I wanted him to look at the damage he was causing.

"If you hate me this much, why not let me go?" I asked, the words tumbling out before I could stop them. Once I started, the dam broke, and everything I had been keeping locked away inside my mind came rushing to the surface. "Nicholas, I used to be your wife. Do you really think this is the fairest treatment I deserve?"

As I spoke, my voice broke, fracturing on his name, but I forced the words out anyway, refusing to let the sentence trail off into nothing. I needed him to hear it. I needed to remind him, even if it changed nothing, that I was a human being who had once shared his bed, his life, and his secrets.

Nicholas froze. He looked at me with something I couldn't quite name in his eyes, an expression that defied any quick description. It wasn't the anger I had expected, nor was it the deep disdain I had already grown so used to over these years. It was the kind of look that still managed to get to me all the time, no matter how thick I tried to build my walls. This was different. For a split second, the cold mask he wore so effortlessly seemed to slip, revealing a strange, unreadable shadow beneath it.

For a long, agonizing moment, he looked like he was actually about to say something. His jaw tightened, and his lips gasped slightly, as if the answers to my questions were right on the tip of his tongue. I held my breath, my heart hammering against my ribs, wondering if there was still a shred of the man I used to know buried somewhere deep inside him.

But then, the moment vanished as quickly as it had arrived. He closed his mouth, his expression hardening back into stone, and looked away from me, staring out toward the corner of the room as if he couldn't bear to face what I had just said.

Just then, a loud knock at the door shattered the heavy silence between us. The sound seemed to pull him instantly back to reality. He looked at the door, the brief vulnerability completely gone from his features, and then he looked back at me. Without a single word, he raised his hand and gestured toward the exit, a clear signal for me to leave his sight.