Chapter 21
Chapter Twenty-One
Sienna
Lucas’s hand sits at the small of my back as we walk, warm through the silk of my blouse. My pulse takes too much notice of it.
I pretend it doesn’t.
The corridor ends at the door to the breakfast room, and the chatter inside dies down the moment we cross the threshold.
Heads swivel to look at us. A pack council member I recognize from the welcome party sets his cup down.
Monroe is standing by the sideboard. Two of the pack elders, who I gather rarely turn up to anything before noon, are present and looking expectant.
Lydia is seated at the far end of the long table, her hands folded around a coffee cup, her face composed in the warm, professional expression I have watched her wear for just about a month now.
“A quick meeting,” Lucas murmured to me outside the door. Half the senior people in this house are here. He needs to do this now.
I want to be anywhere else.
The black mark on my collarbone hums against the fabric of my blouse. Lucas’s mating bite at the side of my throat is covered by the high collar I chose this morning with shaking fingers. The bond between us is so loud in my chest, I can barely hear my own thoughts.
Lucas pulls a chair out for me. I sit. He does not.
He stands behind me with one hand on the high back of the chair and waits until every face in the room has turned toward him. Then, he speaks without preamble.
“I’ll keep this short. You are entitled to hear it from me first, before the rest of the household finds out.” A pause. His thumb moves once on the wood beside my shoulder. “Sienna is my fated mate. We are mated, as of a couple nights ago. I am announcing it now.”
The silence that drops is not the silence I expected.
I had braced for a flinch. A gasp. Some tiny yet audible breaking of the assumption everyone in this room has been working under since the day I arrived.
None of that happens. There is a beat in which people simply rearrange their faces, and then, someone at the far end of the table breathes out quietly.
Lucas keeps going. “I want to address Lydia directly, not only because she is in the room but also because she deserves better than rumors. Lydia and I have been friends since we were children. When my father died, I leaned on her. Recently, when I felt the responsibilities of my position pressing harder than they should, I went to her and asked her to be my luna.” His voice does not waver.
“I asked her because I believed that was what the pack expected of me. But it was the wrong thing to do. Lydia and I discussed it together, and we agreed that we are better as we have always been: friends. The choice I’m making now is the one I should have made from the start. ”
His hand lifts off the chair and settles on my shoulder. “I choose my own happiness. I’m not going to apologize for it.”
The silence that follows does not break for several seconds.
Cups stay where they are. A spoon finishes its slow turn against the inside of someone’s cup and is set down.
I feel every face in the room recalibrating around what was just said, and I have no idea which way the recalibration is going to go.
Lydia is the one who speaks first. She sets her coffee down without sound, and then she rises, a warm smile on her lips. “Welcome to Silvercrest Pack, Sienna.”
It feels like the entire breakfast room exhales at once.
The pack elder closest to me, a woman with iron-colored hair, lifts her cup in my direction and follows Lydia’s lead. “Welcome, Luna.”
Monroe beams at me. The council member who set his cup down earlier picks it back up and salutes me with it. A younger member of the household I do not know by name says “congratulations” to Lucas in a voice that sounds genuinely pleased.
There is an awkwardness running underneath all of it, though. The pack is rearranging twenty years of assumption in real time. But it is not the cold reception I had braced for in the corridor outside the door. Lydia gave them permission to approve of me with one sentence, and they are taking it.
I don’t quite know what to do with that.
I focus on my plate. A piece of toast I do not remember asking for appears on it. Lucas’s palm stays on my shoulder until he sits down beside me, and then he finds my knee under the table and rests his hand there. He does not move it for the rest of the meal.
The conversation finds new rails. Plans for an announcement to the wider pack. A celebration to be arranged. Someone teases Lucas about the color of his shirt today, dark blue, and he answers without looking up from his eggs.
The breakfast lasts twenty minutes. By the end of it, I have eaten nothing, and Lucas has noticed.
People drift out in pairs. I push my chair back and start to follow the slow current toward the door, and that’s when Lydia’s voice finds me again.
“Sienna. A moment.”
I turn.
She has stopped near my chair, her tablet pressed against her chest, the morning light from the window behind her. Her smile is still warm, but there is pain in her eyes that she is not quite managing to conceal.
I cross back to her. The other guests filter past us. Lucas is still in the room, behind me, talking to Monroe about some logistics. I feel his attention shift toward me without him turning his head.
“I wanted to say it properly,” Lydia begins, quieter now. “Congratulations.”
“Thank you.”
She studies my face. There are twenty years of this woman beside Lucas that I cannot match, and we both know it. I try at least to match the steadiness she’s showing me.
“He is a different person this morning,” she continues, her voice low so that only I can hear her. “I have known Lucas a long time. I have never seen him look at anyone the way he looks at you.”
I feel my throat constrict. “Lydia…”
“I was just trying to help when I offered to be his mate. That’s all. I hope things work out for you two.”
She’s hurting. I can see it under her composure.
“You are his oldest friend,” I offer carefully. “I’m his mate. Those are two different things, and neither of them needs to crowd the other out. I would like for us to remain friends, if you would.”
Her eyes shimmer for half a second before she blinks the tears away. “I would like nothing more,” she answers with another smile.
She lifts her tablet in a small gesture I read as a goodbye, and then, she steps past me and is gone.
I stand there for longer than I mean to, breathing in and out.
Lucas appears at my elbow. “What was that about?”
I look up at him. The sun is coming through the tall windows and catching the line of his jaw and the dark blue of his shirt, and I think, not for the first time this morning, that I have never seen Lucas properly in daylight before. Not like this. Not standing close to me without the walls up.
“Nothing,” I murmur.
Ever since our talk yesterday, my chest feels lighter, a lot of my anger having faded. But I’m still not ready to deal with him.
“Let’s go,” I say. “I have a lot of work to deal with.”
He nods and falls into step beside me. We move out of the breakfast room and into the corridor, where the household around us has already started moving differently. Eyes flick toward and away from me with a new kind of attention I’ll have to get used to.
“Would you like to work from my office today?” Lucas offers after a moment.
“No.”
He waits.
“I have my own office,” I remind him.
He ponders this as we turn the corner. “You could at least consider getting female assistants now,” he grumbles.
I roll my eyes. “I like Jason and Eric.”
He mutters something under his breath, and I glance up at him.
“Care to say that out loud?”
“No.”
My lips twitch lightly.
We walk past the long window that overlooks the gardens. The oak tree is visible in the middle distance, the early sun cutting through its branches in the same green-gold color it does every clear morning.
“Will you be sitting under it during your break?” Lucas asks suddenly.
I slow down and don’t say anything for a few seconds. “If you’ll join me,” I finally murmur.
Beside me, I feel him go still. It’s the first step toward him I’ve taken. I can feel his love through the bond that connects us.
“I will.” He’s smiling down at me.
“It’s a date, then,” I say softly, and his hand finds mine.
A week.
That’s how long it takes me to realize my mate has decided we are roommates.
Not that anyone watching us would say that.
He pulls my chair out at dinner. He keeps a hand on my back when we walk into rooms together.
He has called me “Luna” in front of his pack twice without hesitation.
The bond between us pulses warmly and steadily all day long, his attention in my chest like a low hum I have learned to exist with.
Then, he turns off the lamp. He kisses my forehead. He turns his back to me. He sleeps.
The first night, I told myself the mark was fresh, and he was being respectful. The second night, I told myself the same thing. By the third, I started paying attention to the tiny details.
So, I have a mate who takes cold showers at five in the morning and kisses my forehead at eleven at night. Excellent.
I would understand it if he didn’t want me.
But I can read a room. He wants me. I felt it through the bond when I bent over his desk to point at a clause this afternoon; he stood up so fast that his chair hit the wall.
I felt it when his palm landed at my hip on the front steps yesterday.
I felt it just now when I came out of the bathroom with my hair wet, and his eyes did a slow, careful track up the line of my body before he caught himself and looked away.
He wants me. He just isn’t going to do anything about it. And he has not told me why.
I pride myself on being good at interpreting situations, but this one is wearing me down.