The Barren Luna

1 – Ginny

I was sitting in front of my vanity, looking at myself in the mirror while sucking in my cheeks theatrically and then blowing raspberries with my lips, reminding myself of a particularly foolish horse. I urgently needed to relax my jaw, especially today. Both my mate and his mother had repeatedly pointed out that I tended to clench my jaw in a very obvious way in stressful and tense situations. And today was going to be both.

The pack had been blessed by another pup, and as the Alpha and Luna, Henry and I needed to go to the hospital to visit the new mother and bless the newest member of our pack. It used to be my favorite Luna duty, but now, four years into our pupless union, it had become a painful and uncomfortable experience for everyone involved.

My mate would be standing there looking frustrated and angry, I would be clenching my jaw, trying not to sob while smelling the pup, and the new parents would alternate between fear, pity, and saying mindless, empty phrases such as: “May you be blessed next!” or “May you also experience joy like this soon!”

The pity was the worst. The condescending well-wishing was a close second. I felt my whole face tense up again and reminded myself to relax my damn jaw if I wanted to keep my original teeth in old age; shifter or not, they wouldn’t last me if I continued grinding them like this. Unfortunately, there were so many things to grit your teeth about: my infertility, my deteriorating relationship with my mate, his awful mother, the future of our pack, the Council of Elders constantly pressuring Henry to find a she-wolf to breed – and yet they all boiled down to one singular thing – my inability to give my mate (and our pack) an heir.

And it was universally agreed upon that it was my inability – it couldn't have been their Alpha’s fault! Besides, he'd had a pregnancy scare with an old lover once – an anecdote that never failed to make my old nursemaid scoff. She and Lucy were the only ones on my side. Even my own mother threw subtle jabs at me during the rare times I saw her, which made me see her even less. The distance helped – my old pack, Allegheny, was in Pennsylvania, and I was the Luna of the Spruce Mountain pack in West Virginia.

I’d met Henry when I was 20 years old when he came to our pack with his father on official business; I’d come to the Alpha’s office to bring some files that my dad, the gamma of the pack, had left at home, and it was instant fireworks for the two of us. Our wolves went crazy over each other, and we both followed very soon. I packed my things and I was in Spruce Mountain with him not even a week later, marked and mated. He was the only male I’d ever been with, and it still stung a bit that he hadn’t waited for me, although everyone explained it away by saying that he was an Alpha and thus had appetites larger than regular wolves.

I sighed and started getting dressed. I chose a dark blue conservative dress that I often wore for official visits and pack functions. It was one step away from black, so I could still express my mood without disrespecting the happy new parents.

I honestly wouldn’t have minded not having pups if I'd been mated to a lower-ranked wolf – I could see myself accepting my destiny, overcoming that hardship with my mate, and living our life within the limitations our bodies had. But not in this instance; now, this one thing was infesting and eating away at everything else.

Henry and I barely talked anymore. All we did was try to breed. And that was truly what it was – forced breeding. The pack doctors and healers kept feeding me a mixture of herbs that would increase my fertility, which resulted in me having heats every two months for the last year and a half. It was exhausting, humiliating, and fruitless.

I bit my cheek from the inside to unclench my jaw again. I was surprised at how much I was noticing it now. Perhaps Catherine had been right to criticize me, for once. Clench. Oh. So thoughts of my mother-in-law were detrimental to my teeth, who’d have thought, I scoffed to myself.

A bit of mascara and some lip balm, and I was ready to go. Punctual as always, the car picked me up in front of our house for the short drive to the hospital, during which Henry and I exchanged exactly zero words. The silence between us would probably have bothered me a year ago, but now I pretended to look out the window while he caught up on paperwork.

Even though Henry kept wounding my feelings with his militant insistence on breeding, I understood his position in a weird way – he was under pressure as the leader of the pack, and he probably also felt like less of a male at times, although he'd never admit to it. I just hated how everyone else had a say in our mating and future, but I guess that was a part of being pack leadership.

I had made a deal with myself: I would see these fertility procedures through for the sake of my mate and our pack, and once they all realized that it was all for nothing, they would leave us in peace and we could start repairing our relationship to get it back to the point we were at two years ago when we were happy and enough for each other. It would be fine, I just needed to hold on a little bit longer.

We exited the car at the same time, and then my mate came over and held my hand. Despite the fact that I knew it was only for show, I let myself enjoy the warmth and tiny sparks that accompanied his touch.

My wolf basked in his closeness, the animal not understanding the intricacies of politics and mating strife. For her, things were clearer than for me – Catherine was disrespecting us? Attack. My wolf was a fighter through and through. Our mate was close to us? Good. No pups? Sad. Need mate for comfort. The pack had a new pup? Protect. And that was that. At least one of us would enjoy today’s visit.

The hospital room was filled with flowers, balloons, and various pink items. The tiny bundle in the new mother’s arms released some of the loudest wails I’d ever heard, and I couldn’t help but smile at her, which was immediately wiped off my face when I saw how the mother’s shoulders relaxed. Did wolves think I hated them for having pups? My mate certainly looked like he hated them. I squeezed his hand in warning and he ironed out his frown.

“What a blessed occasion this is,” he said in his deep baritone to the beaming parents.

“Welcome Alpha, Luna, it's an honor,” the father responded, baring his neck slightly in submission.

“And who is this wonderful little female?” I asked in the gentlest tone I could muster, not approaching the new mother just yet. I waited for her signal instead, recognizing how charged this situation might be for her wolf.

“This is Ileana,” the proud mother said, holding the pup out slightly to indicate it was fine to touch her. I approached and took in her scent – it was lovely, a mixture of new life and wolf, smelling faintly of blueberries like her mother. Pups smelled like a mixture of their parents until they got their wolf during their first shift at eighteen.

“May she live a long and happy and blessed life with her family,” I said while putting my hand on her head, feeling just a tiny pang of envy, not at the pup they were blessed with, but at the adoring gaze the male was directing at his mate as if she had hung the stars and the moon; as if she was all that mattered in their universe. When was the last time Henry had looked at me like that? Clench. Stop it! I ran my tongue over my teeth.

“Isn’t she adorable, Henry?”

“She is, indeed, my Luna. May she be blessed and long-lived.”

He also touched the pup briefly.

“Well, we’ll let you all rest, I’m sure you need it,” I smiled my best smile at them, the one I put on in all the official photos, and in a matter of seconds, we were out of there.

“That went well, don’t you think?” I didn’t know why I even attempted to make conversation with him, but I needed some sort of reassurance after the visit.

“Mhm,” he hummed absentmindedly.

“Are you going back to the office or are you coming home for lunch?”

“Office. I’ll be home for dinner. I have a meeting with the Elders immediately after lunch.”

“Oh. I’ll drop by to see Lucy then. See you at dinner.”

He gave me a peck on the cheek and left.

I walked over to Lucy and Calum’s house feeling dejected. I found myself coveting what that couple had, their closeness, their love, and it did not sit right with my wolf. She knew she was hierarchically above them, so she resented the fact that I was feeling inferior to them. As I said, things were much more straightforward for her. She actually wanted to go back to the hospital and make them submit to us to make me feel better, and I found it endearing. Although I had to hold her back a lot of the time in order to keep peace as the Luna, she was the better part of me. She never let me doubt myself or talk down to myself, which helped keep my sanity during this ordeal.

“Ginny! What are you doing here?” Lucy hugged me after opening the door.

“The Tomlinsons had their pup, so we went to visit them,” I explained, and she grimaced slightly.

“How was it?”

“Eh, not great, not awful. Please, let’s talk about something else. How are you?” I smiled at her and she gave me a wide grin back.

She was my best friend in this pack and our Beta’s mate. We initially bonded over both being transplants to the pack, but over time we forged a genuine sisterhood since we were very similar. She and Calum had one female and another pup on the way, and she was the only one aside from my nursemaid who truly understood that I didn't resent her for it, so she never tiptoed around my feelings.

“I’m ready for this stage of pregnancy to be over, to be honest. I’m tired of eating mashed potatoes only,” she sighed and I fake gagged.

“Ugh, it sounds so exhausting. I hope you feel better soon. Did you tell Nora she’s going to be a big sister yet?”

“I’m waiting for my belly to grow a bit, and I’ve asked the daycare workers to focus on some books about siblings in the coming weeks, so I think that combination will be a winning one when we do tell her.”

“Oh, that’s smart!”

“Thank you, I’m a fountain of wisdom,” Lucy laughed and I couldn’t help but join in. I stayed at her place for an hour, drinking tea and just chatting about ourselves, the pack, and different things on our to-do lists. The stress of the morning gradually melted away.

“Is Calum staying for the meeting with the Elders?”

“I honestly have no idea. I didn’t even know they had one today. I thought it was scheduled for the end of the month?”

I frowned and thought back on Henry’s monthly agenda. She was right.

“Well, it must have been moved because Henry told me about it right before I walked over here. Oh well. I have to go soon since I still have to go to the market before I get dinner started.”

“What are you making? I’m all out of ideas, help me out.”

“Nothing crazy, I’ll make a batch of ragù to freeze and serve some with pasta tonight. I also need to make bone broth.”

“Nah, all too time-consuming for me. Mashed potatoes and chicken tenders it is for the Phillips household. Not all of us have professional chef ambitions like you, Ms. Regina.”

“God, please don’t. You remind me of my mother when you call me that.”

She made a displeased face, pursed her lips, and blinked really quickly at me, looking exactly like my mother whenever she was about to deliver a scathing comment.

“And why would that be a bad thing, Regina, dear?” she said in an uncanny impression of her.

I groaned, “Okay, Lucy, time for me to go home.”

At the market, all the vendors knew me, not only as their Luna but also as a very particular customer. I made my way around the stalls, knowing who had the crunchiest fennel, whose onions were good for eating raw and whose for stews, who sold tomatoes ripened in greenhouses and who let them ripen in the sun.

The process of cooking was my preferred form of meditation: from choosing the recipe to selecting every ingredient by hand, over chopping, dicing, slicing, sautéing, braising, glazing, and then, in the end, eating – it was a dance I was very well versed in, one that allowed me to lose myself completely and forget everything outside it while it lasted. If my mate weren’t an Alpha, I’d probably pursue a culinary career. Even so, I often hosted dinners for friends, political visitors, and pack allies, and it was my favorite thing in the world.

It was my nursemaid Dorothy who'd taught me how to cook. She was the one who raised me for the most part since that was how things were done in my mother’s Welsh pack. My father met her during an annual summer training program for high-ranked wolves held in England, and she quickly joined him on our side of the pond without ever fully letting go of her old ways. She was a Beta’s daughter and basically grew up like nobility in her pack, which prompted her to hire a widowed former packmate to care for her pups while she attended to the Gamma female duties.

When I moved to be with Henry, I brought Dorothy with me, partly to ease the transition for me and partly because my mother insisted I would need her help with my own pups soon. And she was partially right: I did rely on Dorothy’s help a lot, only it was me who needed the mothering and the comfort. Dorothy now lived next door with her widowed beau Jonathan, and still came over to spend time with me almost daily. Aside from Lucy, she was the most cherished female presence in my life.

I took the batch of bones from the freezer and put them into the oven. I took out the defrosted ground venison from the fridge. Henry and I killed this deer together, I realized fondly. Our wolves were still very much in love and playful with each other. Chopping the onions gave me an excuse to cry for a little bit over that fact, and then I recovered as I diced the carrots and the celery. I sautéed the veggies in olive oil and the smell of the soffritto had me hungry in seconds. I added the venison and took my time carefully breaking it up with a wooden spoon, then browning it until all the liquid evaporated and bits of the meat started sticking to the pan. Some salt and diced tomatoes helped deglaze the bottom of the pan, and then I added a bay leaf and some water and let it all simmer while I prepared the broth.

I got so absorbed in the process that I lost track of time and before I knew it, I heard Henry coming home. I quickly put a pot of water on the stove for the pasta before washing my hands and going to the hall to greet him.

“You smell like onions,” he remarked when I approached.

“I made ragù for dinner,” I said, choosing to ignore whatever that was.

“I’ll change and be downstairs in ten.”

“Okay.”

The fettucine only needed five minutes anyway, so I set the table and plated our food just as he arrived in the kitchen. We had a big dining room that we only used when we had guests over, but the two of us always ate in the kitchen. Henry sat down and stared at his plate, deep in thought. The stress he was feeling was almost unbearable. Before I could ask what was wrong, he sighed and finally looked directly at me.

“I had a meeting with the Elders today and we agreed that I'll take a concubine to breed.”

Of all the possible sentences that I thought my mate would utter at this moment, this one never would have occurred to me. I must have looked completely gobsmacked because he continued clarifying.

“It’s been four years, Ginny. We tried all of the treatments, and you know as well as I do nothing is working. The pack needs an heir. Without one, we’re vulnerable to outside attacks and hostile takeovers. You know this is our duty.”

I still said nothing. I was still processing the first part of his speech. They had agreed. A concubine. Breeding.

“We'll choose an unmated female this week and then they will medically induce her heat. This will be repeated as many times as necessary. It is a political arrangement, nothing more. It is my duty.”

I swallowed.

“Henry... You are aware that this arrangement will be painful for me? Physically? We are marked and mated, for heaven’s sake!”

He looked at me in annoyance, as if my behavior frustrated him.

“The Elders agreed it would be best if the pack doctors sedated you – you’ll have the choice between taking wolfsbane to temporarily disable your wolf or poppy seeds to put you to sleep. I will also be given a drop of wolfsbane to get my wolf to cooperate. I'm not happy about this either, make no mistake.”

“I’m glad the Elders thought of everything,” I spat bitterly and he shot me a warning glare.

“Don’t be difficult, Regina. Do your part and I’ll do mine. For the pack. Don’t make this more difficult than it is.”

I just looked at him for a moment, stunned.

“Very well, Alpha,” I said because I knew there would be no further discussion on the matter. They had decided and I was to comply. Henry nodded at me and left the dinner table. I stayed sitting there until the room went completely dark before getting up, turning on the light, and washing the congealed fat off the dishes, all the while thinking how I’d probably never be able to stomach ragù again.