My head snapped up. A woman was standing at the entrance to the reading nook. Dark hair with gray streaks, sharp face, elegant clothes, posture so perfect it looked painful. Mid-fifties, thin, watching me with an expression you’d use on something stuck to your shoe.
I’d never met Margaret Kingsley. Never seen her face. But the resemblance to Finneas was immediate, the same sharp bone structure, the same dark hair, the same commanding presence that filled a doorway. Except where his presence made me feel safe, hers made the hair on my arms stand up.
This was an Alpha shifter. A former Luna. A woman who faked a terminal illness to control her own son. She was standing ten feet from me with no security between us, Finneas in the council chamber on the other side of the estate, and I was thirty weeks pregnant in a window seat with a dog as my only backup.
My heart was going fast but I kept my voice flat. “How did you get in here?”
She didn’t answer. She walked into the reading nook like she owned it, her eyes moving across the bookshelves, the window seat, the dog at my feet. Her lip curled.
“He built all this for you. A shelter. In my son’s home.”
“Your son’s home. Not yours. But I’m guessing boundaries aren’t really your thing.”
Her eyes sharpened. Good. I wanted her to know I wasn’t going to sit here and let her monologue at me like a villain in a bad movie.
“It was mine before it was his. I was Luna of this estate for twenty years. I know every room, every hallway, every entrance.” Her eyes found mine. “Including the ones my son doesn’t know about.”
Shit. She’d broken in through a passage Finneas didn’t know existed. I was alone with a woman who could shift into a wolf in the time it took me to stand up. My hands were clammy and my pulse was hammering in my ears but I’d be damned before I let her see it. Buddy pressed against my leg, sensing the tension, and I put my hand on his head as much for my own comfort as his.
“What do you want, Margaret? Because if you broke in just to give me a tour history, I’m going to be really disappointed.”
“I want you to understand what you’re doing.” She clasped her hands in front of her, composed, controlled, delivering this like a rehearsed speech. “You’re a human carrying a child that may or may not be a shifter, living in a pack estate, playing at being Luna. You don’t belong here. You don’t understand our world,our traditions, our history. My son is too blinded by this bond to see what everyone else can.”
“And what can everyone else see?”
“That you’re weakening him. A human Luna is a liability. The pack needs strength at its center, not sentiment.”
“Strength.” I put my book down. “You want to talk to me about strength. That’s rich, coming from you.”
Her jaw tightened. I could feel the fear, the animal awareness of being in a room with a predator who could snap me in half. But the anger was louder. This woman destroyed my relationship from a fake deathbed. She broke her son’s heart and then mine and now she was standing in my reading nook telling me I didn’t belong.
And I was about to be a mother. In two months I was going to hold a baby, my baby, and the thought of ever doing to him what this woman did to Finneas made me physically sick. I had my hand on my belly and I could feel Alex kicking against my palm, alive, mine, and the fury that rose in me wasn’t just for myself. It was for the little boy Finneas used to be, eating dinner alone, raised by tutors and expectations, carrying a dead father’s legacy on shoulders that were never given a choice.
Getting out of a window seat at thirty weeks pregnant was a production that involved bracing both hands on the cushion, rocking forward twice, and accepting that grace was no longer part of my vocabulary. But I did it, and I stood, and I faced her even though my legs were shaking.
“Your son built a company from the ground up. He runs a pack of hundreds. He sat in my grandmother’s driveway for twelve hours in the rain because I told him to leave and he refused. He gave up a wedding, cut off his own mother, moved to a town where the biggest excitement is a fence repair, and waited months for a woman who kept saying no.” I held her gaze. “None of that is weakness. That’s the strongest man I’ve ever met. He did all of it despite you, not because of you.”
“A strong man wouldn’t choose a human over his own kind.”
“A strong man chooses for himself. You never let him do that. You chose his friends, his future wife, his career. You controlled every piece of his life and when he finally picked something on his own, you faked a goddamn terminal illness to take it away.”
Her composure cracked. The polished mask slipped, raw fury underneath.
“You lied to him from a hospital bed.” My voice was shaking now, not from fear. “You used his dead father as a weapon. You looked at your own son, your child, and you decided his grief was a tool you could use.” I took a breath. “I’m about to have a son, Margaret. And I can’t wrap my head around it. I can’t understand how you could do that to your own kid. How you could watch him break and call it duty.”
“You don’t understand our world.”
“I don’t need to understand your world to know that a mother who poisons her son’s happiness because it doesn’t fit her plan is not a mother worth the title.”
That landed. I saw it hit her, the flinch she tried to hide, the flash of something in her eyes that might have been hurt if I believed she was capable of it.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said, but her voice had lost some of its polish.
“I know exactly what I’m talking about. I also know you’re standing in a room you broke into, in a home you were told to stay the hell away from, threatening a pregnant woman.” I kept my chin up. “So either say what you came to say or get out before I call security. Or before Buddy here decides he’s done being polite.”
She stepped closer. Her voice dropped, low, controlled, dangerous. “This isn’t over. You can play house with my son, build your little shelter, pretend you belong. But you don’t. When this falls apart, I’ll be there.”
“I’ll make sure to send you a Christmas card so you’re not too lonely while you wait.”
