As Luna, I Expect You To Be Gracious About This (Chloe's POV)

"The Alpha has returned!"

The roar that tore through the Blood Moon Pack's courtyard was deafening. I stood at the top of the great hall steps, my gaze fixed on the entrance to the territory.

Warhorses shrieked and stamped as a long column of dust-caked riders swept into the square in full force.

At the head of the procession, Caleb swung down from his towering warhorse in a single fluid motion. Six years of blood and fire had burned every trace of youth from him. His shoulders were broad and set with the kind of permanence that only hard-won authority could carve. A sharp scar cut across one side of his face. Those gray-blue eyes were as keen as a blade, and the Alpha aura radiating off him was so dense that the wolves around him dropped their heads on instinct, their bodies bowing before their minds could catch up.

I watched him from the steps. Even if he had only agreed to the marriage for my money, we were still fated mates — the bond didn't care about the terms of the contract. That instinctive pull tugged at my blood, warming it, and I felt the tremor work its way all the way down to my fingertips.

He stopped in the middle of the crowd and tilted his head slightly upward. For one moment, I thought he was looking at me. I thought that six years of pouring my fortune into this pack, six years of thankless, invisible devotion, had finally reached him. I could almost feel it — the warmth of him climbing these steps, his arms pulling me close.

I drew a slow breath. My heart was hammering. I smoothed a crease from my skirt, let the composed Luna's mask fall away, and let a real smile rise to take its place — the kind I hadn't worn in years, something almost girlish, lit from within. I lifted my foot to go to him.

The smile hadn't finished forming before my feet locked to the stone.

From the horse directly behind Caleb's, a woman dropped to the ground. She was strikingly beautiful in the way of something dangerous — a high ponytail, silver-tipped daggers at her hip, and an aura of raw, coiled aggression that marked her immediately as a high-ranking Gamma warrior.

She walked straight to Caleb's side without hesitation, without a flicker of self-consciousness, and stood close enough that their shoulders nearly touched. The intimacy between them wasn't performed. It was bone-deep, the kind that accumulates over years and can't be faked.

The thundering cheers across the square faltered and went strange. I felt every pair of eyes in the crowd begin moving back and forth between her and me.

I had gone completely still. A werewolf's sense of smell doesn't lie. Even from a dozen paces away, I could detect it clearly — Caleb's cedar scent, threaded all the way through her.

Not surface contact. Not a brush of fabric. A deep, total mingling that only comes from countless nights tangled together, from heat after heat spent in each other's arms.

Before I could fully process the nausea rising in my chest, the curtain of one of the carriages was shoved aside.

A boy of five or six climbed out, followed by a girl who couldn't have been older than three or four.

The moment I saw the boy's face, my mind went blank.

Those brows. That bone structure. He was Caleb's face on a smaller body, copied with uncanny precision.

"Selena, keep hold of the pups," Caleb said, his voice low. He didn't glance in my direction. His eyes were on the woman, and the tenderness in his tone was something I had never once heard him use in six years of marriage.

Selena smiled and nodded, taking each child by the hand.

They stood together in the sunlight — the four of them — and the picture was so complete, so effortlessly whole, that looking at it hurt somewhere behind my eyes.

The entire square had gone silent. I could feel the stares pressing into my back like needles, dozens of them, hundreds.

"Daddy!"

The boy wrenched free of Selena's hand and ran forward, grabbing the hem of Caleb's riding cloak. He craned his neck up, one chubby hand pointing toward the packhouse, his voice ringing out clear and bright across the silent square.

"Daddy, is this our new home?"

The word hit me like a slap delivered in front of the entire pack.

My breath stopped. My stomach cramped, violent and sudden. A high-pitched ringing drove through my skull, and my knees went soft beneath me. I pressed my fingernails into my palm — hard, deliberate — and used the sharp pain to keep myself upright.

Cold sweat soaked through the back of my dress. The warmth that had been rising in my blood minutes ago was gone, replaced by something that felt like ice water poured from the crown of my head straight down.

Six years ago, the Blood Moon Pack had been drowning in debt, hemorrhaging resources, on the edge of collapse. Caleb had inherited a wreck when he took the Alpha title — no winter supplies, no weapons, no capital. As the sole heir to the Silver Pack, the wealthiest pack in the region, I had married him and brought with me a fortune large enough to buy half the territory.

In a world that worshipped strength, Omegas were considered liabilities. Even though we were fated mates, the nobility across the region had whispered behind their hands — that Caleb had only accepted a weak, powerless Omega as his Luna because he needed her money.

What they hadn't seen was this: every piece of armor, every weapon, every supply shipment that kept thousands of warriors alive on the front lines for six years had been paid for by me. The Blood Moon Pack's prosperity hadn't been built on Caleb's victories alone. It had been built on my gold.

And this was the return on that investment. I had stayed behind alone, funded his war, protected his pack's future — while he spent those years in another woman's bed. Their children were old enough to run.

This was the Alpha I had bankrolled for six years.

Caleb crouched and lifted the boy into one arm. Only then did his gaze finally cross the crowd and settle on me.

There was no guilt in it. No trace of being caught. Nothing.

He carried his son, held Selena's hand, and walked across the stone courtyard I had paid to have laid, stopping in front of me as though he owned every inch of the ground between us.

"Chloe." He looked down at me, his voice even. "This is Selena. During the battle against the Shadow Pack, I took a wolfsbane wound. She drew the poison out with her own mouth and saved my life."

Selena lifted her chin and looked me over at her leisure. There was no deference in it — none of the acknowledgment a Gamma owed a Luna. Only the slow, measuring contempt of someone who had already decided what she was looking at.

"Chloe." She let a smile curl at the corner of her mouth. "Lovely to meet you. Thanks to you keeping the packhouse in such good order back here, we never had anything to worry about on the front lines."

She leaned into the word keeping just enough to make the meaning land. She wasn't complimenting me. She was telling me exactly what she thought I was — a caretaker, a housekeeper, while she was the one who had stood beside him in the fire.

I looked at the ring on her finger and said nothing.

When my silence stretched, Caleb's brow tightened. He brought his Alpha authority into his voice with the ease of someone who had never had to justify it. "Selena is an exceptional Gamma warrior. Her service to this pack over the past six years has been extraordinary. These children carry my bloodline. As of today, they will live in the packhouse." He held my gaze. "They are your children too. As Luna, I expect you to be gracious about this."

The laugh that came out of me had no warmth in it.

I opened my mouth — and Caleb took my silence as agreement. He turned away, took Selena's hand, and walked toward the great hall, leaving me standing on the steps behind him.

At the entrance, several of the Pack Council elders were already waiting with wide, welcoming smiles, greeting the four of them like an arrival they had been expecting.

They had all known. Every one of them. The entire Pack Council had known about Selena and the children, and not one of them had thought to tell me.

I had been the only fool in this entire pack, kept in the dark while I emptied my accounts and called it loyalty.

Caleb turned to face the assembled pack, and when he raised his voice, it carried across every corner of the square.

"I am calling an immediate session of the Pack Council — highest order."

"Selena has served this pack with distinction. She saved my life. She has given us strong, healthy heirs."

"I am moving to overturn precedent. I intend to grant Selena the title of Co-Luna. Effective immediately, she will stand as an equal to Chloe in every respect."

The silence that followed was absolute.

A pack could only ever have one Luna. That wasn't tradition — it was the foundation of pack law, unchanged across thousands of years of werewolf history. Co-Luna. The word didn't exist because the thing it described was not supposed to exist.

He had just torn my standing apart and ground it into the courtyard stones in front of everyone I had ever governed.

Behind me, my handmaid Tara was shaking, her voice a furious, wet whisper pressed through clenched teeth. "My Lady — they planned this. They planned all of it. How could he — how dare he—"

I stood where I was. I closed my eyes and took one slow, measured breath, and I let the last of it go — the last thread of whatever I had been holding onto when I smoothed my skirt and started down those steps.

"Tara," I said quietly. "Go inside."

If Caleb wanted two Lunas — if he wanted to stand in the sun with his other family and call it justice — then we were going to have a very different kind of conversation.

I wanted to see exactly how long the Blood Moon Pack's treasury, which was currently about as full as his conscience, could sustain a Co-Luna once I stopped filling it.