1

Elara pov

I found out on a Tuesday, at the little clinic on the east side of the pack lands, the one with dried lavender hanging from the rafters because the healer thinks it calms people down. I wasn't nervous, really. I was just tired of pretending my cycle being two weeks late was stress. Five years of marriage and no pregnancy will do that to you — you stop hoping out loud and start hoping quietly instead, in the part of your brain you don't let anyone see.

The healer had to say it twice before it landed.

I didn't tell anyone. Not the butler, not my own reflection — I actually avoided mirrors for a few days, worried I'd start crying and somehow use up the good news before I got to give it to Ronan.

He and his twin brother had been gone two months, out chasing rogues along the northern border. I spent it the way I spent most of our marriage: waiting, and telling myself waiting counted as loving him. I reread books I already knew by heart. I hung around the kitchens more than a future Luna probably should, because keeping my hands busy kept me from staring at the front gate. I touched my stomach more than I meant to — a little unconscious check, like patting your pocket for your keys, except I was checking that the thing was still there, still mine.

I'd pictured the conversation about forty different ways. Him riding in dusty and starving, me pulling him aside before he even got his boots off, his face cracking open with a kind of joy I hadn't seen on him in years. I'd even, God help me, gotten as far as picturing what we might name a daughter.

None of that prepared me for what actually happened.

The morning he got back, I heard the horses before I saw them, and I was already smoothing my hair and rehearsing my first line when I noticed there were only two riders where there should've been three. And that Ronan's shoulders had the wrong shape. You learn to read that in a pack — grief sits on people a particular way, and you clock it the same as bad weather coming in.

He didn't come to me first.

I'm not going to pretend that was unreasonable. His brother was dead. He owed the pack an explanation before he owed me anything. I stood in the doorway of the hall with my hand pressed flat against my stomach, hidden in my sleeve, and let him have the moment.

"My brother fell three nights ago," he said, and his voice actually cracked on the word *fell*. "I've brought him home to be buried with our own."

The hall went quiet, then immediately stopped being quiet, in the way packs do — grief turning fast into arithmetic. Who inherits. Who holds the line. I watched the elders doing the math before he'd even finished his sentence.

He didn't make them wait long for the answer.

"Seraphine will remain Luna," he said. "She's carrying my brother's children. I'll see to her care, and theirs, as the new Alpha."

I've replayed that sentence more times than I can count. Not *our* Luna. Not one glance toward the doorway, where his actual wife was standing with one hand over a secret she hadn't gotten to share yet.

The pack had opinions immediately.

"Seraphine's bloodline was always the better one," somebody said, not quietly enough. "It was strange he married beneath his rank to begin with."

"She's carrying the heirs," an elder added — one of the same women who used to hand me tinctures with a pitying look. "Of course she stays as Luna. Better her than—" She didn't finish. Didn't need to. I'd heard the word *barren* enough times by then that it filled in the blank on its own.

I don't remember the walk back to our room. I remember arriving, which isn't the same thing. I sat on the edge of the bed we'd shared for five years and looked at my own hands like they belonged to somebody else.

The mourning ran late into the evening, and somewhere in there it curdled into something closer to celebration — a new Alpha rising isn't small, and pack instinct doesn't leave much room for extended grief once there's a hierarchy to reinforce. I sat through all of it alone. Nobody checked on me. I told myself that was just grief landing unevenly, and not anything crueler than that.

It was full dark when Ronan finally found me. He smelled like woodsmoke and cold border air, and under that, faintly, like her — jasmine, something bitter beneath it, a scent Seraphine had worn since before either of us married anyone.

"She's your Luna now," I said before he'd even shut the door. "So what does that make me?"

He crossed the room and pulled me in like the hug alone could answer the question. "You'll always be my mate," he said into my hair. "The Goddess bound us. Nothing changes that." A breath, his chin on my head. "I missed you. Two months is too long."

I let myself lean into him for maybe three seconds before I remembered I was furious, and pushed him back.

"Am I your mate," I said, "or your mistress?"

Something flickered across his face — not guilt, I think now, more like the mild irritation of a man being accused of something he hadn't technically done yet. He took my face in both hands, the way he always did when he wanted me to stop asking questions.

"It's temporary. Just until she's given birth. The elders need to see stability, and she needs to feel secure after everything. Once the children come I'll set it straight in front of everyone. There's no pressure on you — the bloodline already has its heirs coming."

I heard it land, and understood, even then, that the sentence had been built for someone who needed comforting, not someone who needed the truth. Something in my chest went quiet the way ice gives out on a lake — no sound, just suddenly you're through it. I wanted him to ask *what's wrong, tell me*, the way he used to whenever I went quiet. He didn't. He was already half-turned toward the window, already somewhere else.

"What if I'm pregnant too?" I said.

He smiled — not cruelly, that's the annoying part, it would be easier if it had been cruel — the way you smile at someone who's said something sad and a little impossible.

"We both know your condition, baby. Don't put that on yourself. Her staying Luna doesn't change us. It's only a title."

I turned toward the drawer where I'd hidden the clinic paperwork three days earlier, already picturing his face when the word *only* stopped being something he could say so easily.

That's when she knocked. Fast, three raps, and her voice through the wood — calling his dead brother's name, asking if he was okay, like the door might answer for him.

Ronan's whole face rearranged itself in half a second.

"She's not herself," he said, already moving. "Grief's confused her — she forgets sometimes. Since we're twins, I — I have to go to her. It calms her faster than anything."

I didn't get an answer in edgewise. He opened the door and she threw herself at him, hands on his jaw, calling him by a dead man's name, her whole body folding into his.

He didn't correct her. Didn't step back. One hand went to her waist, the other cradled the back of her head — the exact gesture he used on me when I couldn't sleep.

She never once looked at me. Not out of confusion. Looking at me would have meant admitting I was there, and she'd apparently already decided I wasn't, not in any way that mattered.

He led her off, murmuring something too low to catch, and only turned his head at the last second to reach me through the mind link.

*I'll come back later. Wait for me.*

I stood in the doorway of a room that no longer felt entirely mine and told myself that meant something. He wasn't spending the night with her. He wouldn't do that. Maybe everything he'd said ten minutes ago really was as temporary as he claimed, and I was building a tragedy out of one bad day.

I believed that for about six more hours. Longer than I'm proud of.