“Did you lie to me about being sick?”
“Sweetheart, you don’t understand what I was dealing with. Lorraine came to me. She told me she could smell that girl on you, on your floor, everywhere. Your secretary,” she said the word like it tasted sour. “I couldn’t sit by and watch you ruin everything your father built for some human who doesn’t belong in our world.”
My stomach dropped. “You knew about Andrea?”
Margaret’s expression didn’t change. No guilt, no hesitation. “Of course I knew. Did you think I wouldn’t find out?”
The hospital bed. The tears. The dying wish. She knew about Andrea before any of it. She chose to do this.
“So you faked a terminal illness.”
“I did what I had to do.”
The pieces clicked into place before she finished speaking. Dr. Harlow. The family physician who’d been on my parents’ payroll since before I was born, who owed his entire practice to my father’s patronage. The pack healers who’d trained underMargaret’s reign during her twenty years as Luna, who still called her ma’am out of habit, who would have done whatever she asked without questioning it because loyalty to the former Luna ran deeper than protocol. The gray skin, the trembling hands, the way she’d looked half-dead under those fluorescent lights. Makeup. All of it was makeup and performance. She’d sat in that bed with her face painted to look like a corpse and her voice pitched to crack at exactly the right moments and I’d held her hand and believed every second of it. It never occurred to me that my own mother would rehearse her own death to manipulate me.
“The scans,” I said. “The tumor on the scans.”
“Dr. Harlow is a resourceful man.”
Falsified imaging. Presented to the pack healers as confirmed results from a trusted physician, and none of them thought to question it because why would they? Margaret Kingsley didn’t lie. Margaret Kingsley was the grieving widow, the devoted mother, the former Luna who held the pack together after Paul died. Nobody checked because nobody believed she was capable of this.
I did. I believed it now. Standing in her garden looking at the color in her cheeks that no amount of foundation could fake, I believed every ugly piece of it.
She said it like she was reciting a business decision. Chin up, shoulders square, the same posture she held in every council meeting I’d ever seen her attend. She wasn’t sorry. Not even close.
Something snapped in me.
“You did what you had to do.” I could hear my own voice and it didn’t sound like me. Low, shaking, scraped raw. “You hooked yourself up to fucking IVs, Mother. You laid in a bed with monitors beeping, gray in the face, holding my hand, crying, telling me you had months to live. You looked me in my goddamn eyes and told me you were dying.”
“Your father would have...”
“Don’t you fucking dare.” The words came out so sharp she took a step back. “Don’t you bring him into this. He’s dead. He’s been dead for eight years and you’ve been dragging his corpse into every argument since the funeral to guilt me into doing what you want.”
Her jaw tightened. The tears started, eyes filling, chin trembling, and I watched it happen. Two weeks ago that face would have gutted me. I’d have caved, apologized, taken her hand. Now I watched her arrange her features into grief and for the first time in my life I saw it for what it was. Performance. The quiver, the slow blink, the hand floating to her chest. Same gestures, same sequence, every time.
“Stop.” My voice was barely controlled. “Stop crying. I have watched you cry to get what you want my entire goddamn life and I’m done. I’m done, Mother. Turn it off.”
The tears dried up so fast it was like a switch flipping. Her expression went hard underneath, sharp, cold. The real Margaret. The one who orchestrated a fake illness down to the IV drip.
“Fine,” she said, her voice clipped. “You want the truth? That girl was never going to be enough. She’s human, Finneas.Human. She can’t lead a pack, she can’t produce an heir worth a damn thing to the bloodline, she would have embarrassed you, embarrassed this family, embarrassed your father’s memory. I did you a favor.”
The rage hit me so hard my vision went white at the edges. A favor. She called it a fucking favor.
“She was my fated mate.” My voice was shaking. “My fated. And you made me reject her. You made me stand in front of her and say the words and I felt the bond tear apart and I watched her double over in pain three feet from me and I couldn’t do a goddamn thing because I was too busy being your good son. Your obedient fucking puppet.”
“Fated mates are fairy tales. Your father and I weren’t fated and we built an empire.”
“You built a cage. And you’ve been trying to lock me in it since the day he died.”
Her mouth opened, then closed. No ready response. No angle to play. The silence that followed was the most honest thing she’d given me in months.
“The wedding is off.” I was breathing hard, my hands in fists at my sides, every muscle in my body coiled. “You are done. No more visits, no more calls, no more showing up at pack events playing the grieving Luna. If you contact Lorraine, or anyone in the pack, I will have you formally banished. Not as your son. As your King.”
“You can’t do this to me. I am your mother.”
“You stopped being my mother the second you decided your bullshit agenda was more important than my life.” I was screaming now. I couldn’t stop it, couldn’t dial it back, weeks of swallowed rage pouring out of me. “You made me destroy the woman I love. You made me break her heart and reject our bond and watch her walk out of my life so you could have your perfect fucking wedding with your perfect fucking bloodline bride and I will never forgive you for that. Do you hear me? Never.”
I turned and walked away. She screamed my name behind me, not the tearful plea from earlier but a furious shriek, a sound I’d never heard from her, the composure finally cracking, the woman underneath all the performance revealed as someone who couldn’t stand losing control. Her voice chased me down the gravel path, through the garden gate, through the house where the staff flattened themselves against the walls.
