My heart stopped.
She was walking toward the center. With her hand on her belly, walking into the space between two hundred wolves with no protection, no weapon, no fangs or claws. Just herself.
My wolf surged forward so hard my vision blurred. Luca’s hand tightened on my arm. “Let her,” he said quietly.
I wanted to go to her. My wolf was screaming at me to get between her and Margaret, to carry her out of the clearing the way I’d carried her to the hospital. But Andrea wasn’t walking toward danger. She was walking toward something she’d chosen. I could see it in her spine, in the set of her jaw, in the way her hand rested on her belly.
She stopped a few feet from Margaret. Two women in the center of a wolf clearing, one in black who used to be Luna and one in blue who was becoming one. Margaret’s face tightened. Andrea’s was calm.
“You talk about tradition,” Andrea said, her voice clear across the clearing. “About Paul. About what he would have wanted.”She looked at Margaret. “Should we tell the pack what you did to honor his memory?”
Margaret’s composure cracked. Just a flash, a flicker of panic behind the mask, gone so fast most wolves wouldn’t have caught it. I caught it.
“You faked a terminal illness,” Andrea said. “You told your son you were dying. You checked into a hospital, hooked yourself to machines, and used his grief to pressure him into a marriage he didn’t want. And when he found you walking around your garden in full health, you told him it was for his own good.”
The crowd shifted. The murmurs changed pitch, curiosity sharpening into something harder. I could feel it, the mood turning, wolves looking at Margaret with new eyes.
“That’s a lie,” Margaret said, but her voice had lost its carry. Thin now, defensive, nothing like the woman who’d commanded the clearing thirty seconds ago.
“It’s not,” Andrea said. “Your son confronted you. You admitted it under his Alpha command. Every word of it.”
Margaret looked at me. For one second her mask was completely gone and I saw my mother, just my mother, caught, exposed, looking at her son for help she knew wouldn’t come. My stomach turned.
I didn’t speak. I didn’t nod. I didn’t have to. My silence was the confirmation and every wolf in the clearing knew it.
Andrea turned back to the crowd.
“I know I’m human,” she said.
Her voice was clear and it carried across the clearing. She hadn’t been trained to project the way Margaret had. The wolves were just that quiet.
“I can’t shift. I can’t fight beside your King in wolf form. I don’t have centuries of tradition backing my name.” She paused. “But I want you to know who I am.”
The clearing was silent. My throat was tight. She was doing this. She was actually doing this, standing in front of my entire pack, nearing the end of her pregnancy, claiming them.
“I’m the person who tells your King when he’s wrong. Not because I’m brave, but because somebody has to, and the people who were supposed to do it spent thirty years telling him what he wanted to hear instead.”
She glanced at Margaret. Margaret’s jaw went rigid. She was right. She was the only person who’d ever told me the truth without calculating what she’d get for it.
“I’m his partner. Not because of a title, or a bloodline, or because someone decided it for us. Because he chose me and I chose him back. Every day. Including today.”
She turned back to the crowd. I couldn’t breathe. My eyes were burning and I didn’t care who saw.
“I don’t have claws or fangs or any of the things you were raised to respect in a Luna. What I have is this.” She put both hands on her belly. “Your King’s son. Growing right here. And I’m standing right here. And I’m not going anywhere.”
The clearing went so quiet I could hear the trees breathing.
Then Brennan stepped forward from the front row, the oldest elder, the wolf who’d called her Luna three days ago, whose word carried more weight than anyone’s in this clearing. He looked at Andrea. Held her gaze. Then he dipped his head. Slowly. Deliberately.
Another wolf followed, then another. Heads dipping across the front row, spreading backward through the crowd like a ripple through water.
I watched it happen with my throat so tight I couldn’t swallow. My mate. My human mate, standing in the center of a wolf clearing, telling a pack that wasn’t born to be hers that she wasn’t leaving. And they were bowing.
I loved her. I’d never loved anyone the way I loved her right then, watching her do what no Luna in the history of this pack had ever had to do.
Margaret stood perfectly still while the crowd turned away from her, head by head, wolf by wolf. Andrea looked at her, didn’t flinch, didn’t gloat, just held her gaze until Margaret took a step back, then another, and security closed around her and escorted her off the grounds.
She went without screaming this time. Without fighting. The crowd wasn’t looking at her anymore and for Margaret, that was worse than anything I could have done to her.
