Chapter 3

The Unwanted Luna.

They put me in a room that was bigger than the whole cabin I grew up in, and I stood in the middle of it for a really long minute just not knowing what to do with myself, hands hanging useless at my sides. Somebody had already laid out water for washing, and a dress that looked like it cost more than everything my family owned put together, and I remember just staring at it, thinking, this isn’t for me, somebody’s made a mistake here somewhere.

Nobody had made a mistake. That was just how things worked here, apparently.

A woman came in not long after older, gray streaked through her hair, kind eyes that didn’t quite know where to land on me and introduced herself as Mira, said she’d be helping me get settled. She was polite about it. Overly polite, in that way people get when they’re not sure whether they’re supposed to be nervous around you or not.

“You’re the Omega,” she said, not unkind, just confirming it out loud like she needed to hear herself say it.

“I’m Elira,” I said. Figured I’d at least start there.

She smiled, small and quick, and got on with helping me out of my traveling clothes without saying much else, and I let her, mostly because I didn’t have the energy left in me to do it myself.

Word travels fast in a house like that one. By midday I couldn’t walk ten feet down a hallway without feeling eyes on me, sliding off quickly whenever I actually looked back. Nobody said anything outright, not at first. Just look. Little pauses in conversation whenever I came near. The kind of quiet that has a shape to it, if you’ve spent enough of your life learning to read rooms the way I had.

It was two of the household staff who finally said it plain, not knowing I was close enough to hear, tucked around a corner with a tray in my hands like the good invisible Omega I’d always been trained to be.

“An Omega,” one of them said, voice low but not low enough. “As Luna. Can you imagine.”

“I heard she worked in a kitchen,” the other one said. “Scrubbing floors, same as us.”

“Won’t last,” the first one said. “A man like that needs a mate who can hold her own in that council chamber. Not some frightened girl he picked up to settle a debt.”

I kept walking before I could hear any more of it. I didn’t need to, honestly. I’d already heard versions of that sentence my whole life, just aimed at different targets. It wasn’t news to me that I didn’t belong somewhere. It just usually took people longer than half a day to say it to my face, or near enough to it.

The nobles were worse, in their own quieter way. There was a dinner that first evening, formal, more silverware on the table than I knew what to do with, and I sat there feeling every single eye in the room doing math on me trying to work out what I was worth, what I might cost their Alpha, whether I’d embarrass the household by picking up the wrong fork.

A woman sat near the head of the table, dark hair pinned up sharp, dressed finer than anybody else in the room including, honestly, Kaelan himself. She had this way of looking at me that felt like being measured for a coffin.

“Isolde,” somebody murmured to me later, when I asked. “Beta’s sister.”
I hadn’t needed the name to know she mattered. You could feel it off her, the way people angled themselves toward her without seeming to notice they were doing it.

She waited till there was a lull in the table talk, then looked right at me, a polite smile fixed in place like it’d been sewn on.

“You must be exhausted,” she said. “Such a long journey. And such a sudden change of circumstance, for you.”

“I’m managing,” I said, which was about the most honest and least revealing thing I could think to say.

“I’m sure you are.” Her smile didn’t move an inch. “It’s a lot to ask of anyone, really. Stepping into a role like this with no preparation at all. No family here to guide you. No understanding of how things work in a territory like ours.” A small pause, timed just right. “Some of us did wonder if the Alpha might choose differently, given time. But debts don’t wait for convenient timing, do they.”

Wasn’t cruel, exactly. Not on the surface. But I understood what she was telling me plainly as anything: you’re here because of an accident of bad math, not because anybody wanted you here, and everyone at this table knows it is the same as you do.

I didn’t have an answer ready. Just nodded, small, and let her have that round, because arguing with a woman like that in a room full of her own people wasn’t a fight I had any chance of winning that first night.

Kaelan, at the head of the table, didn’t say a word through any of it. Didn’t defend me. Didn’t even really look my way, far as I could tell. Just kept eating like the conversation happening two seats down wasn’t worth his attention at all.

I told myself that I shouldn’t have stung. It did anyway.

It was later that night, back in that too-big room with the too-fine dress folded over a chair, that Mira came in one more time to tell me something that nearly knocked me sideways.

“Alpha’s given instruction,” she said. “This room’s yours to arrange as you like. Staff answer to you now, not to the house steward. If you want something moved, changed, different that’s your say, not anybody else’s.”

I just looked at her. “Mine.”

“Yes, my lady.”

Nobody had ever handed me that particular word before. I wasn’t sure what to do with it, honestly, turning it over in my head like a coin I didn’t recognize the face on.

Sat on the edge of that huge bed a long while after she left, staring at the door, trying to work out what it meant. A man buys you to settle somebody else’s debt, tells you flat out to your face that you’re a necessity and nothing more and then hands you your own staff, your own room, your own say over both. Didn’t add up clean, not in any column I knew how to read.

Why would a man who owned me give me choices at all?

I didn’t trust it. Told myself I wouldn’t, not yet, maybe not ever. Kindness with strings on it was still just a leash with better manners, far as I’d learned in this life. But it sat there anyway, that small confusing knot of it, refusing to leave me be.

I was heading back from the washroom down the hall, past midnight by then, quiet enough in the house that my own footsteps sounded loud to me, when I heard voices coming low from behind a half-shut door. Would’ve kept walking, probably, if one word hadn’t snagged me right where I stood.

“can’t keep pretending the border’s secure, not with what we know now”

“Keep your voice down.” Second voice, sharper. “If the Alpha finds out we’ve been talking about this outside council, it’s both our heads.”

“He needs to know someone’s feeding information out. Doesn’t matter how it looks.”

A pause, and when the second voice came back it had gone thin and careful, close to frightened. “And if it’s someone close to him? Someone he trusts? You think he wants to hear that from us?”

I stood there in the dark hallway, water pitcher gone cold and forgotten in my hands, heart going hard enough I was half sure they’d hear it through the door.

Someone inside this house was working against him. And whoever these two were, they were too scared to say so to his face.